Introduction
This is a summary of one of the breakout session I ran at the Cisco Public Services Summit, Oslo 9-11 December 2011. It describes the role of Communities of Practice in supporting more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing between organisations working in the public sector. It notes the key lessons learnt from a 6-year journey, starting from the launch of the UK local government CoP platform in 2006 and how this led to an ambitious attempt to create a new kind of platform for online collaboration and data sharing – the Knowledge Hub. The slides are embedded at the foot of this post, and also available at Slideshare.
Project Purpose
The main purpose of the project was to break down some of the silo’d work practices both within councils and across the public sector. Local councils were delivering the same set of services, but were not learning from each other about good/best practice. This was also the first time that communities of practice had been used within the public sector environment as a process and methodology for encouraging knowledge sharing and personal development.
I’ve made clear in the slides the difference between “Communities of Practice” (CoPs) and “Social Networks”. Put simply, CoPs operate from a sense of shared values and objectives. Social Networks support a far more personalised agenda, or in other words, its “we” as opposed to “me”.
The following points correspond to the slide presentation, and as noted previously, represent the lessons learnt from a 6-year journey.
Communities of Practice – Lessons Learnt
1. Don’t expect everyone to join in.
Command and control structures are alive and well, particularly in public sector organisations. Joining a CoP where status and rank mean nothing, and where the free-flow of knowledge is encouraged can be a bit of a culture shock for some people. By all means encourage colleagues and managers to join, but accept that collaboration and knowledge sharing doesn’t come easy to some people. Concentrate efforts instead on building trust between those who want to be there and create a safe haven for knowledge.
2. Community Facilitation is essential.
You need a community facilitator or moderator to provide cohesion and maintain direction for the CoP. Almost without exception, the most successful CoPs had a good and effective facilitator. Some of the roles and duties of a facilitator include:
- Supporting sociability, relationship and trust building
- Seeding and feeding discussion topics
- Maintaining and sustaining the community ‘rhythm’.
- Curating and signposting knowledge artefacts for capture and reuse
- Helping to connect community members
- Providing help with the CoP tools and facilities
- Ensuring the community space is kept “tidy” and navigable
- Reporting CoP activity – metrics, evaluations, newsletters
- Monitoring success criteria and impact.
3. Establish your KPIs.
Be clear about what your CoP is trying to achieve. Remember this is a “community” so engage with the members to agree purpose and intended outcomes. Once the purpose and outcomes are agreed you can identify the metrics that will measure progress. Try to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data for the metrics you measure.
When monitoring the metrics, remember that each CoP will have a particular rhythm or cycle. Some will be light on discussion and strong on shared document building and vice versa. Others will be ‘one-shot’ supporting a single challenge. Not all communities will be a hive of activity; some will support its participants at a low level of interaction over a long period, others for short bursts around face-to-face-meetings or events.
Key lesson: Don’t rely on metrics to claim your community is successful; use metrics and indicators to understand your community better.
4. ROI can be measured.
You can guarantee that someone, sometime, somewhere is going to ask about return on investment. I’d much prefer to consider the “I” in ROI as meaning “Impact”, but we live in a world where – for some – value can only be measured in terms of cash saved. Be prepared for this and consider how ROI can be quantified. In the example for local government CoPs we identified cash savings for online (virtual) conferences compared to physical (face to face) conferences and found that on average £8000 can be saved for each on-line conference. Online conferences have now become a fairly regular feature, so the potential savings continue to accrue.
5. Hotseats generate heat!
Hotseats are where you invite a recognised expert or illuminory to spend some time answering questions from the community. The event should be promoted and advertised in advance to generate interest, and the person invited into the hotseat can seed the discussions by issuing a statement or question (possibly controversial) prior to the hotseat starting. Questions and answers are posted in the forum. The event can generate a lot of interest and discussions within the community usually continue long after the hotseat has finished.
6. Use stories to promote the benefits
Don’t just rely on newsletters, statistics or case studies to promote the benefits of the CoP. Bring it alive through stories and anecdotes from the community members. Publish, promote and reward these stories. There is no better endorsement for the success of a CoP than from the CoP members themselves.
Knowledge Hub
The final part of the session was devoted to the thinking behind the development of a “next generation” community of practice platform – the “Knowledge Hub”. What problems were we trying to fix with this new platform? Briefly stated these were:
- Over 80% of the CoPs had been set up as private spaces (gated access via the Facilitator as opposed to just being able to join). In effect these were silo’d knowledge repositories. We wanted a system that would encourage more interaction between CoPs.
- There was lack of permeability with external (outside the firewall) conversations. We wanted a system that could easily integrate with external web services.
- We wanted to address the perennial issue of information overload, perhaps more accurately described as “filter failure”. Using explicit data provided by the user in their on-line profile, e.g. where they work, their area of expertise, what groups they join, etc., filters could be established to improve the relevance of information received.
- In a similar way to the way that Amazon works, we wanted to track user behaviour (their digital footprint) in order to “push” relevant information – e.g. conversations, events, and documents to the users.
- We wanted active and guided navigation to help users find and access relevant knowledge.
- We wanted to tap into the emerging market for mashups and apps; providing users with the tools to combine and link data to create value-added apps for improving council services.
- We wanted to reduce development costs and open up the architecture to enable developers and entrepreneurs to create additional value. We would use open source software and adopt open standards (e.g. OAuth, OpenSocial, OpenGraph etc.).
However, as with all things public sector, the budget was radically scaled back early in 2011 and consequently not all of these features will be implemented. The cut-down version of the local government platform was launched 27 October 2011. (http://knowledgehub.local.gov.uk).
But the dream lives on. With support from PFI Knowledge Solutions (Knowledge Hub developers) a roadmap of future enhancements for their innovative Intelligus platform may eventually deliver all of the original requirements. More on this later; a matter of “watch this space”!
I’ll be happy to answer any questions about the Community of Practice project mentioned above, or the Intelligus platform that may realise the original vision for the Knowledge Hub.
Some Background
The last few years can be described as the age of social business and collaboration. The demands and expectations of today’s knowledge workers have been shaped by the plethora of social networks and social media tools. Communicating and sharing information has never been easier. Staying connected with news and status updates from friends, family, or at work is real-time and no longer constrained to an office PC. This has coincided with the business realisation that a greater degree of interaction with customers, whether consumers or businesses, makes for a higher degree of customer retention.
Ironically, in many cases, workplace policy and technology constraints have meant that staff resorts to using the technology they have brought with them in their pockets or handbags in order to remain connected with their networks. The ubiquity of mobile devices and ease of use of many web services means that almost anyone can originate or contribute to digital content, and information is increasingly consumed on the move. Recent analysis from Nielson shows that we spend 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites per month, or 22 per cent of all time is spent on-line. And the expectation now is that the tools that people use at work should be as easy and fun to use as the ones they use in their personal life.
But is this tsunami of data and information making us all better informed? How do we overcome information overload and ensure the relevance and utility of the information we consume? Can we provide environments that tap into the collective intelligence of groups or knowledge domains that match our specific needs?
And so the scene was set for the “Business of Collaboration” event hosted by PFI Knowledge Solutions (PFIKS) on 8th November 2011. PFIKS are one of the leading vendors of “Enterprise Social Software” systems with their open sources, open standards Intelligus platform.
What is Enterprise Social Software?
Enterprise Social Software (ESS) is the next generation of platforms that are built to manage high volumes of collaborative engagement and conversations among distributed teams, project groups or communities of practice. They build on the conceptual ideas of popular social networking platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, but with a host of enterprise-ready features to make them secure, private, collaborative and business integration-friendly.
As many organisations have discovered, implementing a technology solution by itself rarely results in more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing. Sustainable implementation of ESS requires:
1. Understanding of how and why successful knowledge-sharing communities and networks perform.
2. A system that implicitly acknowledges the constraints (time, process) and motivations (reciprocity, reward) that individuals experience within such networks.
3. A blended approach where technology seamlessly supports the behavioural characteristics that will encourage users to self-organize, collaborate and co-create.
But what about the investment in ICT systems that organisations have made over the past decade?
The good news is that it’s not a matter of ripping out legacy systems, but extending what you have, adding new capabilities and integrating new applications and services.
Delegates at the event included representatives from private and public sectors, large organisations and SME’s, all with a common purpose: to get a better understanding of this “social business ecosystem” and how the blend of technology, people and processes can be effectively combined to support more fluid knowledge flows, drive collaboration initiatives and open up opportunities for innovation.
One of the delegates, David Wilcox, Social Reporter working with the Big Lottery Fund posted this excellent blog about the event.
All of the slide presentations from the event are available from the Intelligus website, including my own. However, I wanted to elaborate on some of the points I made in my presentation. Hopefully you can follow these points with reference to the embedded slide presentation below, or from Slideshare.
The Presentation
Slides 1-4
What is the question that connects the images?
Collaboration pre-supposes that we have someone to collaborate with – in this example the person on the other side of the seesaw. The seesaw will only work with the collaboration of the people involved, in this instance, the child at each end of the seesaw.
Knowledge sharing makes no assumptions about collaboration; it’s possible to share knowledge with people we don’t know, e.g. by posting something to an on-line forum, or writing a blog about something we have seen or read or experienced. We may not know who is going to read our missive, or what value they may place on it. The posting might lead to some form of collaboration with the readers/consumers, but that is not necessarily the primary purpose for knowledge sharing.
Most of us are happy to collaborate and share ideas with the people we know (i.e. the definition of “collaboration”).
Slides 5-7
But what about the huge untapped resources and expertise that we don’t know about? We may get to hear about people in this “unknown world” via recommendations or word of mouth, but how do we connect and engage with them? How can we know what we don’t know? How do we find the answers to our questions in this “unknown world”?
If nothing else, this is where the power of social networks comes to the fore. We have the tools and technology to be able to “crowd-source” our questions. Social media tools such as Twitter or Quora make it easy to post queries to a largely anonymous network of people in the hope that someone will have the answer or the appropriate knowledge and experience we are seeking. By engaging and connecting with the people that respond we can grow our personal network, often referred to as our “Social Graph”.
Better still if the system or network we have joined can suggest contacts for us, based on what it knows about us, either explicitly (our digital identity and personal profile), or implicitly (our digital footprint, i.e. our ‘likes’, the people we have connected with and the on-line places we have visited).
Slides 8 – 10
Social networks have proliferated over the past 4 or 5 years. Some have been more successful than others. Remember that even a blog can be a form of social network, and we now have over 200 billion of these (yes, more than the population of the planet!)
New users can be intimidated by large/mature social networks which have lots of users and content, and where engagement and conversations protocols have been established.
Slides 12-13
But are we beginning to see the onset of “social network fatigue”? Each new social network adds to the internet background noise. Search engines have never really delivered on the promise of relevant information, and many of us resort to serendipitous discovery of key information and conversations – it’s a bit ad hoc, where knowledge discovery is more by accident than design.
Slide 14
So, the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor at the moment and the ever-increasing volume of information hitting the Internet is likely to make it even worse.
Slides 15-16
It’s a strange paradox that now we have the capability of easily creating new websites and blogs without the need for any programing skills, what we really want now is one place to view and interact with all of this information. A recent (September 2011) audit of LinkedIn illustrates the problem:
- 26 Alumni groups
- 32 Corporate groups
- 20 Conference groups
- 132 Networking groups
- 16 Nonprofit groups
- 196 Professional groups
A total of 422 groups. How do you know which group(s) to join to be sure of getting the best answer to your questions? Maybe ‘all of them’ is the answer!
(Information sourced from blogs by Nick Milton and Ian Wooler)
Slide 18
If we want relevant information to come to us, we have to
- tell the system something about ourselves (our digital identity and profile),
- enable access to the sources of information that might be useful and
- spend some time identifying and validating the sources we like and trust. We can’t leave everything to technology – what you get out is proportional to what you put in!
This is clearly where the likes of Facebook (groups, Timeline) and Google+ (Circles, Sparks) are heading, but neither has yet achieved a ‘simple’ way of doing it.
Slides 19-21
Most of us will be more concerned with what the information is and whether we can trust it rather than where it is. So, do we have to worry about the “where” if we can develop some form of interoperability between systems and networks? RSS/Atom feeds and tagging are only part of the answer. We need a system that can extract meaning from the data (e.g. entity extraction) that will enable ontologies to be created and terms to be categorised for faceted search and discovery.
Slides 22-24
Entity abstraction, aggregation and categorisation. If our profile is up to date, the Enterprise Social Software system should be able to locate, aggregate and categorise the information that we would find relevant and useful by matching terms against our profile data (who we are, where we work, what we’re interested in, etc.). Precision can be further improved by monitoring our ‘digital footprint’, i.e. the knowledge/information assets that we have ‘liked’, recommended or downloaded. If we layer on top of this the aggregated behaviour patterns of all the users, we can leverage the opportunities provided by “collective intelligence” to identify “good’ content.
Products/vendors such as Amazon do this all of the time, using explicit data (the user bought an item) and implicit (users who bought this items also looked at these items). Tracking of a user’s progress through a website is not rocket science and is a fundamental part of any web analytics software. Inject a bit of entity extraction and you start to establish the foundations of a system that can begin to ‘intelligently’ connect information with people and people with people.
Slides 25-26
‘Liking’, ‘+1’ or ‘tweeting’ not only enables sharing of information, it can be fed into ‘trending engines’ that will aggregate and categorise the crowd-sourced data to show hot topics and trends. Again, the technology is well established, but little use is made of it in many Enterprise 2.0 systems. How nice it would be if, for example, your job entailed commissioning adult social care services and you could see the trending conversations on adult social care on your Enterprise 2.0 dashboard. This feature is built into the Intelligus platform using a combination of the open source application Carrot2 and the proprietary PFIKS matching engine.
Slide 27
All of the prior discussion refers to an environment (social media, social networks) that are already in place, and for technologies, systems and applications that are currently being delivered in Intelligus and some of the other leading Enterprise Social Software systems. But what of the future? Where is all of this taking us?
Slides 29-32
I will conclude with a few words about the growing importance of ‘Apps’. With apologies to those who don’t know who Peter Kaye is and his oft-repeated reference to Garlic Bread being the future! Maybe do a quick search on YouTube and all will be revealed!
Slide 33
As usual, Dilbert is pretty much attuned to what is happening in the business world. I would argue that most organisations haven’t yet grasped the full impact of the App market, and may view this as being the exclusive domain of the on-line gamers. In fact, (IMHO) it is shaping up to be one of the most disruptive technologies to appear since the start of the social media wave.
Slide 34
The trends reinforce the view that apps are becoming ubiquitous in how we work and play. Note that all of these apps are developed for mobile devices.
Slides 35-40
As I have noted on the slide, the key attributes of an Enterprise App Store are:
- Empowers the user for self-service
- Easy to use conduit of software, services and data
- Model widely understood by developers and consumers of software
- Recognition that one size doesn’t fit all (e.g. the lobotomised corporate PC)
- Life-cycles for apps potentially short: discarded when no longer useful/relevant
- Enterprise App Stores will provide a trusted source of business-ready apps that can be delivered to a rapidly changing work environment.
- The end device is less important than the application. The mantra is now “develop for mobile, but consider the PC”, and not the other way around.
Slides 41-46
Finally, and in summary, the key ‘take-aways’ from this presentation:
- More people suffering “Social Network Fatigue” – desire for one place to do business,
- Enterprise Social Software (ESS) solutions must integrate with legacy systems and business processes.
- ESS must add value – more fluid knowledge flows, decision support etc.
- Mashups and Enterprise App Stores will become increasingly important for business agility
- Develop for mobile, think PC, not other way around!
Of course these are just my opinions. I’m happy to receive critical comment and corrections to any incorrect assumptions or poorly constructed arguments I may have made!
I was pleased to attend a presentation on linked data at the BCS Data Management Specialist Group on Tuesday (26th July), given by Dave Reynolds, co-founder of Epimorphics Ltd, and one of the data experts I have frequently turned to for advice when scoping the requirements for the Knowledge Hub project. (Dave is a members of the Data & Apps Advisory Group for the Knowledge Hub).
The presentation included metadata management, e-Commerce uses, inference and information extraction, text mining, syntax (various flavours – RDF/XML, Turtle, RDfa), and knowledge representation through Ontologies (e.g. Web Ontology Language, OWL).
Dave explained a fairly complex topic (well, complex for those not yet fully immersed in modelling information solutions using linked data) in a simple but engaging style, using his slides to show examples of linked data constructs. Well worth a look for anyone who wants to get a deeper understanding of the topic (if nothing else, check out the strengths/weaknesses towards the end of the presentation).
The slides are available from SlideShare: Introduction to linked data, and a copy embedded below.
The Management Innovation Exchange(MIX) is “an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century. The premise: while “modern” management is one of humankind’s most important inventions, it is now a mature technology that must be reinvented for a new age.”
One of the MIX initiatives is the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation. There are two types of entries: an instructive case study (a Story) or an experimental design (a Hack). The goals is to show how Web 2.0 values (including transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, openness, community and self-determination) can help overcome the design limits of Management 1.0—and help to create Management 2.0.
I have submitted a case study (story) about the Knowledge Hub, a project I initiated over 2 years ago but only now being rolled out for UK Local Government. The concept was part of a 3-year Knowledge Management Strategy I was commissioned to deliver for the Improvement and Development Agency – an organisation that has since been integrated into the Local Government Group. The underlying idea was to provide a central ‘Hub’ that would collect and aggregate data and information from many sources (including blog and Twitter feeds) and use semantic technology to link and categorise the content. The system would then match and push relevant content to users according their interest graph and their social graph.
Although the project was spec’d over 2 years ago, I’ve noticed that many of the features being rolled out in Google+ are very similar to features being delivered in the Knowledge Hub, e.g. Circles (social graph) and Sparks (interest graph). It’s just a pity I didn’t have their resources available to me when I started this project!
I hope you will take a a moment to look at the article and let me know what you think. You can comment on it and/or rate it. Your views would be appreciated.
NB: For anyone interested in the technology, the Knowledge Hub is an open system, using open standards and open source software. It is hosted on the PFIKS Intelligus platform.
Continuing my sequence of blog posts about the Knowledge Hub, the new and innovative community and collaboration platform for the UK public sector. I am devoting this post to the Knowledge Hub’s “App Store” facilities that will get delivered in the next development phase (no dates yet, but potentially around Sept/Oct 2011).
I think maybe a pause here for a definition as to what an “app” is and how this might differ from a ‘widget’ or a ‘plug-in’.
“App” is an abbreviation for application. An app is a piece of software. It can run on the Internet, on your computer, or on a mobile platform, such as a smart phone or tablet device (e.g. iPad). Apps have become synonymous with Apple’s iTunes App Store, where proprietary apps can be downloaded for use on any Apple product. Platform/device independent apps can be accessed from the Android Market.
Web-based apps (device and software independent apps that are accessed and run from the ‘Cloud’) include Google Apps,. Common applications include calendars, webmail and on-line documents. Web applications are popular due to the ubiquity of web browsers. The ability to update and maintain web applications without distributing and installing software on potentially thousands of client computers is a key reason for their popularity, as is the inherent support for cross-platform compatibility
A “widget’ is software that can be embedded into an app, or in the case of a Web Widget it can be installed and executed within a web page. A widget is usually tied to a platform, such as an iPhone widget.
A plug-in is a set of software components that adds specific abilities to a larger software application. Plug-ins are commonly used in web browsers to play video, scan for viruses, and display new file types. Well-known plug-ins examples include Adobe Flash Player and QuickTime.
Knowledge Hub will support apps, widgets and plug-ins, but for the purpose of this post, I will use the generic label ‘apps’ to include all of these varieties.
All apps on Knowledge Hub will conform to the OpenSocial standard, which has been supported by a number of vendors, such as Google, MySpace, Yahoo!, IBM, Oracle, Saleforce.com, Ning, Plaxo, XING, Six Apart, LinkedIn, to name a few. This means that that the app will be interoperable with any other social network system that supports this standard. This is part of the underlying “open standards” design philosophy for Knowledge Hub, which is positioned as an “open” alternative to the Facebook Platform.
Why is any of this important? Well if you’re not one the several million smart phone users that are accessing and downloading the million or so apps available from the various app stores, then maybe you’re not aware of what the fuss is about. This is clearly a growing market – some analyts are quoting growth of over 70% for this year alone.
For the public sector it offers new and exciting ways of delivering products and services at a fraction of the cost of traditional channels (e.g. online transactional websites). Opportunities will be fuelled by the growth of publicly available government/local government data (Open Data). This offers a number of models that can be exploited by users of the Knowledge Hub, e.g.:
- downloadable mobile or desktop apps – Apple-style app store approach. These apps can make use of externally hosted datasets registered on Knowledge Hub, datasets uploaded to and registered within Knowledge Hub and external datasets not registered on KHub.
- hosted web apps – runs on a server somewhere and the user logs into it via a browser. Knowledge Hub could in principle provide hosting capabilities for this kind of web app as part of a ‘premium’ service to the sector, but demand for this sort of facility will need to be tested with users and stakeholders.
- client-side Javascript mashups, visualisations, apps. Code that is downloaded as part of a web page and runs as Javascript inside the user’s browser.
As with the majority of the commercial app stores, Knowledge Hub will encourage users to rate and review the apps they download in order to identify the most popular apps.
The main benefits of the apps store can be summarised as follows:
- Easy to use and trusted conduit of software.
- Download model is widely understood by both consumers and developers of software.
- ‘Mashup’ tools will make it easy for apps to be built and shared by anyone.
- Provides centralised control and value-add including commercial, security, access controls, digital rights.
- Stimulates ideas for compelling new business scenarios and service innovation.
Though I’ve frequently mentioned mobile devices in this post, this does not mean apps are just for small screens. Newspapers and e-books have started to wrap their content in apps that come with additional features, hoping that it will allow them to charge for more things. And as other electronic devices—television sets, alarm clocks, e-readers and even electricity meters—become smarter and more connected, consumers will be able to download apps for these too. Perhaps, in the end, everything will have an app!
Some examples of where apps are being used in local government:
Scores on the Doors lets you and I see businesses’ and schools’ hygiene ratings by searching through its online database. You can check the hygiene ratings for any takeaways, pubs, clubs, schools, restaurants and food halls in your area (as long as your council is one of the 200 participating in this scheme!)
Smartphone owners can report graffiti, vandalism and anti-social behaviour in Wokingham thanks to a new app. The Looking Local app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch enables residents to use a ‘Report It’ feature to let Wokingham Borough Council about problems in their area.
Daventry District Council used location-based technology to improve refuse collection routes through better planned routes. This resulted in £223,000 savings from reduced mileage, less overtime, smaller vehicles and fewer rounds.
London Transport for iPhone – Real time journey planning, live departure boards, licensed taxi booking, wireless printing, bus stop timetables, nearby stops and stations, live traffic cameras, and more…
In a future post I will explain how apps can be developed using the Knowledge Hub’s “Mashup Centre“.
NB: Knowledge Hub is built and supported on the PFIKS Intelligus Platform
I presented the Knowledge Hub at yesterday’s (21st May) OpenTech event. The following is a synopsis of the project; the slides are available for download from Slideshare and include notes. Previous blog posts on this topic:
http://steve-dale.net/2011/04/06/introduction-to-the-knowledge-hub/
http://steve-dale.net/2009/09/21/knowledge-hub-part-1/
http://steve-dale.net/2010/07/06/knowledge-hub-part-2/
http://steve-dale.net/2011/01/31/the-knowledge-hub-and-user-experience-ux-3/
http://steve-dale.net/2011/03/10/knowledge-hub-4-social-graph-and-activity-stream/
The Knowledge Hub (KHub) is a “Web 2” social media development that builds on the LG Improvement and Development Community of Practice initiative (www.communities.idea.gov.uk) which, with over 85,000 registered users, is already the most advanced online practitioner group in the public sector.
Imagine the social networking aspects of Facebook , the recommendation element of websites such as Tripadvisor, product and service comparisons similar to websites such as moneysupermarket.com, access to value-added ‘apps’ similar to the iPhone app store and a serendipity engine to suggest useful content, like on-line retailer Amazon, and you’ll start to get some idea about what this innovative project will deliver.
The KHub’s matching engine will trawl through online and user-generated content and using semantic web techniques it will suggest communities, people and content you might like, utilising data from your user profile and your digital footprint (on-line activity).
As well as all this, the KHub will be an interactive information exchange where users collaborate online to solve problems, with facilities for uploading datasets, enabling users (e.g. councils) to compare and benchmark their performance.
Best of all, the KHub is being developed on an open platform, using open standards and will be published to the open source community under the GNU General Public License, hence this huge investment will be available for use and re-use by the open source community.
The KHub is being delivered by PFI Knowledge Solutions and is built on their innovative Intelligus platform.
The KHub is scheduled for Beta release later this month (May), with new features being added in a series of releases between May and October 2011. See the Local Government Group website for further details.
This blog post is to thank all of the participants (presenters and delegates) to the Knowledge Hub Data & Apps workshop that was held in London yesterday (27 April 2011). The workshop was used to establish the foundations for the “KHub Data and Apps Advisory Group”, who we are hoping will help us to shape the forthcoming data/apps developments for the Knowledge Hub.
As readers of my previous posts about the Knowledge Hub may be aware, the first (Beta) release will go live next month (May – exact date TBD). This represents the completion of Sprint 9 of 22, which delivers the collaboration tools and facilities (blogs, wikis, library, events, people-finder, library, web conferencing, activity streams etc.). [NB. Sprints are the functional elements delivered as part of an agile development process].
The remainder of the Sprints will be delivering key data intelligence/data management features, including:
1. Semantic Matching Engine
- Will match aggregated conversations, communities and topics to people;
- Will suggest connections between people
- Will recommend content according to explicit and implicit profile data
2. Data library/catalogue
- Can upload data/datasets in semi-structured and machine readable formats (e.g. Excel, CSV, XML)
- Can identify and catalogue external (e.g. open and/or linked) datasets
- Ability to create/edit metadata for each dataset (e.g. for provenance, licensing etc.)
- Datasets can be permissioned.
- Datasets will be indexed by the KHub search engine
3. Mashup Engine
- Allows users to combine or compare data (meaningful comparisons will require a common schema)
- Data can be ‘mashed’ using KHub-sourced data and external data sources.
- Support for data visualisations
- Features similar to mashup.org
- Will use open source mapping services
- Potential to provide index of SPARQL end-points
4. App Store
- Supports any app compliant with the OpenSocial standard
- Mashups developed on KHub can be simply added to the App Store
- Will include reviews and star ratings
- Support for free and commercial (licensed) apps
- Apps will be able to use data from both Khub (via an API) and/or external sources
Data Repository
- Requirements to be refined, but intention is to be able to support triple-stores (RDF/SPARQL) and XQuery/XML)
All of the above is scheduled to be developed and released between June and October this year. The Data & Apps Advisory Group will be instrumental in shaping these features and capabilities, as well as providing advice on the underlying support and operational procedures, and skills/training needs.
Initial outputs from the workshop are available on the Knowledge Hub Community of Practice (Data and Apps Advisory Group Theme).
Terms of Reference for the Data & Apps Advisory Group is in the attached PDF. If anyone with the appropriate skills and knowledge wishes to be involved in this group, then please let me know (add your expression of interest into the comments section of this blog).
I will post an update to this blog once the full report from the workshop is available.
Data & Apps Advisory Group ToR
As we approach the first (Beta) release of the Knowledge Hub, a project that has consumed my very existence as lead consultant for these past 2 years, I thought I would share a presentation I put together for the Knowledge Hub Conference that was held on 1st March 2011 (yes, a month ago, but still relevant). My previous blogs on this topic…
…will give some appreciation of the scope, scale and capabilities of the Knowledge Hub, but in a paragraph….
“The Knowledge Hub will build on Local Government (LG) Improvement and Development’s community of practice (CoP)-based approach to knowledge management. It will support multiple communities, using the best features and functionality that have evolved through the development of the CoP service. It will offer a range of free tools and services to help the sector share and analyse their data and engage more effectively online. It will provide a platform for developing and publishing open source applications created and owned by the sector.”
But even this doesn’t begin to explain what this is all about; an issue I was well aware of before the 1st March conference. Until people are actually using the Knowledge Hub and exploring for themselves its capabilities, any text-heavy communication is likely to paint a rather abstract picture in people’s minds.
Not that a PowerPoint slide set will achieve a level of understanding that I was striving for, but based on the old adage that “a picture paints a thousand words” it’s probably as good as I can do pending users experiencing the product for themselves.
The quirky angle on this was to consider how social media and the social web is currently being used (or not, as the case may be) across UK local government and the wider public sector (target audience for the Knowledge Hub). I’m only too aware of the fact that many public sector organisations block (or severely restrict) access to social media facilities for their staff. Even after several years of accumulated evidence of how social media and social networks can lead to greater productivity and improved learning and sharing opportunities, the word ‘social’ means ‘wasting time’ or ‘reputational risk’ to many senior managers.
In order to realise the full benefits of the Knowledge Hub, users will need to have access to the rich conversations on their particular domain of knowledge that are happening beyond the limits of their enterprise firewall. Conversations – e.g. on blog sites or Twitter – that many staff can only access via their smart phones or when they are at home. One of the many features of the Knowledge Hub is to aggregate and connect these conversations and associate them with user profiles – i.e. users see information that is relevant to them and not so much of the irrelevant noise.
One of the other features of the Knowledge Hub is the ability for councils to upload datasets – e.g. on performance – and compare (benchmark) with other councils, thereby highlighting potential areas for improvement or savings. Is this new? No! Most of us do something similar when we’re buying products, e.g. car insurance (e.g. Compare the Market/Meerkat), who’s got the best value in terms of coverage and cost?
And then there’s the issue of how we attach value and trust to what we read. Do we always believe what is in the travel brochure, or do we check out websites such as Tripadvisor to find out what real people have to say about the hotel or resort we’re thinking of booking? Similarly for the Knowledge Hub, where we’ll be able to see peer reviews of documents and other knowledge assets, and gain a degree of confidence in using or adapting that particular policy or process.
And not forgetting our Amazon experience, where recommendations are made on what we’ve previously bought. In a similar way, the Knowledge Hub will recommend contacts, workspaces (communities) and documents based on what the user has flagged as relevant, or what the user has shared in their personal profile (e.g. expertise, location etc.).
So, most people seem to be comfortable using social web facilities and applications in their personal lives, and maybe not even realising they are doing so. All we need to do is to provide a trusted and secure environment where these same activities can be conducted in a business environment. The real power of the Knowledge Hub is that you don’t even have to go to lots of different websites and applications – each with their unique design and interface – to find the information you need to do your job, or to do those performance comparisons or download that app you need. You can do it all in one place – let the data and information come to you! That, in essence, is the Knowledge Hub!
Check out the slides below. The Slideshare originals include notes, which will explain why the elephant appears (a clue – it’s to do with the time, pain and anguish of public sector procurement!)
Continuing with my posts about the Knowledge Hub (Beta release in April 2011):
I wanted to touch on another of the key features being delivered by the new system, the ‘Social Graph’ and ‘Activity Stream’. These are intimately related and hence it makes sense to discuss them as one feature or capability.
Social Graph
A social graph in its broadest context is the mapping of everyone and how they are related. The term is usually used to refer to online identities, e.g. as used within social networks.
As of 2011, the largest social graph in the world is Facebook’s, which contains the largest number of defined relationships between the largest number of people among all websites due to the fact that it is the most widely used social networking service in the world. (Source: Wikipedia).
Concern has focused on the fact that Facebook’s social graph is owned by the company and is not shared with other services, giving it a major advantage over other services and disallowing its users to take their graph with them to other services if they wish to do so, such as when a user is dissatisfied with Facebook. Google, has attempted to offer a solution to this problem by creating the Social Graph API, released in January 2008, which allows websites to draw publicly available information about a person to form a portable identity of the individual, in order to represent a user’s online identity.
You can see what your Facebook social graph looks like by adding the Social Graph App. Mine looks like this:
If you’re a member of the LinkedIn network (an open standards network), you can generate your own social graph here.
Mine looks like this:
The first release of the Knowledge Hub will not support a graphical representation as shown in the examples above, but the system itself will maintain the data representation, which will be used for managing the activity stream described below. A graphical representation will be considered for a future release.
The Knowledge Hub is an open platform that is adopting Open Standards wherever relevant and possible. We will be exploring the use of Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) standards for creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. FOAF defines an open, decentralised technology for connecting social Web sites, and the people they describe.
Activity Stream
The activity stream is a chronologically ordered list of activities of ‘friends’ or contacts that have been mapped to the ‘Social Graph’ for each individual user. Facebook users will no doubt be familiar with the activity stream (referred to as the ‘News Feed’ in Facebook) showing what their friends are doing and saying. Only people who are in the user’s social graph (i.e. those who have been confirmed as ‘friends’) will show up in the activity stream.
Any and all actions are logged in the activity stream such as writing or commenting on a blog, uploading a document or photo, confirming attendance at a meeting, joining a new workspace or group etc. The system will automatically create an activity stream (or ‘digital footprint’) for each user, based on the actions they carry out. Each user will see an aggregated stream of activities for all of the people in their social graph, and for the workspaces that they have joined. Filters will be available for showing the activities for a specific user (who must be either part of your social graph or a member of one of the workspaces you have joined), or updates from the members of a workspace to which you belong, or just your own updates (a ‘Me’ filter). It will also be possible to block updates from a specific user, e.g. if you find their activities irrelevant or overwhelming!
So, what’s the benefit of all of this?
Activity streams are ubiquitous to any social network; I’ve mentioned Facebook, but they are also present in LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Twitter and just about any other social network you can mention. The activity stream provides information and intelligence about events that are likely to be relevant to a user and the broader workspace.community members. The user’s social graph is built up over time and includes people who the user has specifically identified as ‘people of interest’, for example:
- a shared interest or hobby
- working for the same organization
- working in the same location or region
- having a similar job
- an expert in a topic you are following
- a thought leader
- etc.
We expand our networks and our knowledge by social interaction, i.e. we learn from others. When we’re in meetings we pick up lots of information from the tacit conversations we have with our colleagues. The activity streams we see in these virtual spaces are fulfilling a similar function, albeit far more powerful, because we can pick up on ALL the conversations and activities from a group as opposed to just the people we have had the time to talk to in a meeting.
For example, how useful might it be to know that your colleague had just joined a community of practice that you were completely unaware of, but given you both have similar jobs is likely to be as relevant to you as it is to your colleague? Or to know that another colleagues have just posted information about a conference that is looks highly relevant to you?
There are many other tools, facilities and capabilities embedded into the Knowledge Hub, but in my opinion, the most powerful and useful of them all is the activity stream, because it provides the ‘glue’ that links otherwise unconnected actions and events together, providing both a lens and a filter on the things that are most likely to be of interest to you.
For the next Knowledge Hub post I’ll talk about some of the exciting developments around the App Store.
I thought it was probably about time to post an update about the Knowledge Hub; I’ve had my head under the bonnet of the technology for longer than I had intended and given the proximity of the Beta release in April this year I should probably surface for air and reorientation.
Background
Given it’s been a couple of months since I last posted on this topic, a quick recap on what this is all about:
The concept for the Knowledge Hub surfaced as part of a 3-year Knowledge Management Strategy I was commissioned to produce for the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) in 2008. IDeA has since been rebranded as Local Government Improvement & Development (LGID). I’ve since been involved in the project as lead consultant in bringing the concept to a functional reality. This included an exhausting and exhaustive technology procurement process that lasted almost 9 months and was completed in November 2010 with contracts signed with PFIKS. We’re now in the actual development stage.
We’re using an agile development (Scrum) process, where the original 260 or so business requirements have been distilled into ‘stories’ describing the outcomes and which are clustered into a series of 2-weekly Sprints. Each Sprint is tested and signed-off before moving onto the next Sprint. There will be 28 Sprints in total, taking us up to a live launch around end of September, but an early ‘Beta’ release is being prepared after Sprint 8, which as noted earlier will happen around April. PFIKS and Liberata are the technology partners for delivery of the KHub and the technology solution will be developed on the PFIKS Intelligus Open Source platform.
I’ve previously blogged about KHub (Part 1, Part 2), and there is a growing mountain of material describing what it is and what it will do, including a video and a ‘de-jargonised’ or Plain English description that I’ve added as an attachment to this blog post. I don’t propose to regurgitate all of this background information here, but have tried to condense the key aspects into the following two paragraphs:
The Knowledge Hub is an open collaborative platform, developed using Open Source software, that will support greater knowledge sharing across the local government and public sector community, including Third Sector and private sector partnerships. It will join up conversations, data sets and information sources and make available free online tools and services shared across the local government community.
Aside from the collaborative aspect of KHub, data and services (e.g. Apps and Mashups) will be key to providing added value to the KHub as they provide tangible deliverable products within KHub which can be accessed and reused across the local government community. Providing an environment for uploading, accessing, reusing and further developing data and applications will result in savings of software development and data management.
However, coming to the point of this blog post; I’ve been aware for some time that generalised descriptions of KHub positioning and benefits do not adequately describe what this ‘thing’ is, or what it will do for its users. To this end (and to satisfy my feelings of guilt for not having blogged more frequently about what I firmly believe is an incredibly innovative product) I have decided to start a series of blog posts which (I hope) will illustrate in more depth and detail some of the fundamental design decisions. I’m also going to focus more on user experience than any detailed technical discussion, though I may need to refer to the technology when describing some of the features. I’m using a numbering scheme in the blog title to assist with assembling these posts over time into a comprehensive knowledge asset.
User Experience (UX)
For this post I will look at what we are doing for ‘User Experience, or ‘UX’. This is arguably the most important element of the project, since any amount of investment in the technology is worthless if people have difficulty in using the system or it isn’t fit for purpose. If we get this wrong then our current cohort of over 80,000 Community of Practice users (who will be migrated to the KHub platform during 2011/2) will abandon the new platform, and new users will try it once and leave.
Maybe before delving too deeply into this topic, we should pause to clarify the difference between the User Interface (UI) and the User Experience (UX)
The UI is defined as the system by which people (users) interact with a machine. The user interface includes hardware (physical) and software (logical) components. User interfaces exist for various systems, and provide a means of:
- Input, allowing the users to manipulate a system, and/or
- Output, allowing the system to indicate the effects of the users’ manipulation.
(Source: Wikipedia)
The UX is about how a person feels about using a system. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s feelings and thoughts about the system. User experience is dynamic, because it changes over time as the circumstances change.
(Source: Wikipedia)
As starter for this exercise we developed a number of pen portraits for typical users. These were then expanded into user profiles that can be used to inform the business flows that we need to develop for the user interface, and the types of knowledge assets that need to be available. The four roles that have so far been mapped out in this way are:
- Director of Finance and Performance
- Social services Team Leader
- Organisational Development Manager
- Deputy Head of Environmental Health
They can be seen at http://picasaweb.google.com/steve.dale/TheKnowledgeHubOffer?authkey=Gv1sRgCMeA5aG6v8TIXw#
It is recognised that these are only four out of potentially many hundreds of different user roles operating in the public sector, but more will be developed, (a priority will be Council Member roles) but it’s a useful start.
UX Design Considerations
The following points highlight the main User Experience design considerations:
1. KHub is significantly more complex than the legacy CoP platform and even experienced users migrating from the legacy platform may find the new environment confusing. In fact, legacy CoP users may have more problems getting to grips with the new environment than first-time users since they will be looking for familiar navigation features, typography and functionality that they have used with CoPs.
2. KHub is leading-edge technology and we need to bring leading edge thinking into the UX design. The UX for the legacy CoP was unique at the time in providing a clean and simple interface, devoid of any clutter and limited in terms of personalisation options. This suited the demographic of the time (2006 launch) that were only just starting to use social networking facilities. Much has happened during the intervening five years, and many public sector staff are now both familiar and comfortable using social media tools, hence we can start to deliver to a more sophisticated audience. However, we must also ensure that we continue to cater for the novice user and strike a balance between user freedom to explore the features and facilities without the clutter of context-sensitive help, and the guided navigation that some users may require.
3. We should seek out design/UX experts and exemplar websites and in particular, to consider moving away from the traditional approach of presenting the user with lists, tabs or buttons which label various tools (blog, wikis, forum, wiki, etc.) and more towards ‘calls to action’ that describe business processes. Or in other words, to design around what the user is trying to achieve rather than the traditional typography of labelling tools in a toolbox. For example, if a user wants to open up a document for collaboration, the call to action may be ‘collaborate with contacts’. The actual social media application being deployed could be a wiki, but the user would not necessarily have to know that.
Jyri Engestrom calls this “finding your verbs”. Given a noun, what actions are associated with it? So, going back to school-day English lessons:
| Nouns (objects) |
Verbs (actions) |
| Videos |
Play, stop, edit, store, upload, comment on, embed. |
| Articles |
Read, archive, quote, link to, share, comment on, annotate, tag, review |
| Photos |
Store, views, add to favourites, edit, link to, make prints, share, comment on, embed, tag |
| Books |
Read, purchase, add to wish list, comment on, rate, tag, discuss, review |
Many of these verbs translate directly into features and can inform the typography to be used for the site. Also notice that the verbs are both personal and social. This is to be expected since we interact with objects on a personal level and a social level.
4. We need to seek out and utilise UX design good practice, for example, limiting the available choices on any page to no more than 4 or 5 options in order to avoid ‘cognitive dissonance’
5. We need to ensure that there are no ‘dead ends’ for any user process, e.g. always ensuring the user remains oriented and in a position to choose other actions on completion of an action they have started.
6. We need to recognise the continuing role of email in the daily work routines of users. We should ensure seamless integration of workflows between email and KHub facilities, e.g. making it simple to pots content to Khub from email clients, and ensuring relevant KHub content updates can be received by email.
And last but by no means least:
Community Building isn’t about Features. If there was one immutable law of social software, it would be this: Technology cannot solve people problems
No matter how great the technology you are using, it can’t solve what are fundamentally human social problems. Garnering interest, getting people excited about a topic, reciprocating knowledge – these are all social interactions. Technology may help you along the way, but it can’t have conversations for you and it’s no substitute for actual human interaction. It might be worth remembering that it’s people who collaborate, not machines!
Example of User Experience Design
The following is one of the many business scenarios we have used to help develop thinking around the features, functionality and content that the Knowledge Hub must deliver. The questions probe for solutions to the business problem, and answers to the questions inform the design for the UX. All references to places and individuals are fictitious, and any association with real people or places is purely coincidental.
Parking problems in Freedom City are now, in the words of one opposition councillor, the nightmare that won’t go away. Since the introduction of new parking restrictions in the City, each day sees councillor postbags packed with complaints about new parking rules, behaviour of the wardens employed by Yellow P (the parking contractor), and new higher rates of charges and fines.
Today the Freedom Times (the local morning newspaper) has run a single front-page picture story headlined ‘We’re Alright Jack!’ A picture takes up half of the front page and shows Council Leader Jack Bright parking his car next to other members and staff cars, in the city council’s own car park, right in the heart of the city centre. The article fills page 1 and most of page 3. It reports that Freedom Council provides all year around free city centre parking for members and staff, while at the same time pushing through ‘massive’ increases in charges and parking fines for ordinary residents. The Chamber of Commerce, city centre businesses and residents are all quoted condemning the council for hypocrisy and being self-serving. The paper says that the council was asked for a response but that the Director of Highways refused to comment.
The paper’s editorial condemns councillors for feathering their own nest with free parking, while at the same time ripping off residents, businesses and visitors to the City. It has started a petition demanding that councillors and staff pay for their parking like everyone else.
(Freedom City has been experiencing recruitment problems for key jobs such as social workers and planners. It has recently highlighted free parking as a benefit to people applying for the hard to fill jobs)
Councillor Bright is away in London today. You have agreed to appear on the regional evening news programme to put the council’s case.
Questions:
1.1 Where would Councillor Bright go to find evidence of what other councils’ policies are for town and city car parks?
a) KHub will be a key resource. It will identify policies and charges made by other councils. Additionally KHub will identify
a. Parking for Councillors being a key benefit used to keep salary and recruitment costs to a minimum
b. Information from Freedom City on average commuting distances and numbers of council workers living in rural areas
c. Freedom City’s carbon footprint and how this has been reduced over the last few years
d. Car sharing as a % of council workers’ commuting practices
e. Numbers of workers who also carry childcare duties and therefore have flexible transport needs
f. Innovative thinking (such as that by Richmond) on charging based on engine size
g. Facebook/Twitter etc. campaigns relating to for/against parking arguments
h. Policies of the Green movement
i. Other Freedom City initiatives that reduce the carbon footprint
1.2 How could this council compare their costs for maintaining free parking for staff with other councils?
a) Charts and graphs by councils around the nation relating to different vehicle types
b) Chart average revenue per car/resident comparing Freedom with other councils
c) Allow user to select five(?) comparative councils and drill down (tabular/visual) into deeper metrics
d) Set up an online debate / forum with councillors from other national councils
e) KHub search and filter tools across all third party content to re-present that content in the most relevant format for the user’s needs and mode
f) Develop marginal cost/benefit analysis through dynamic online whiteboarding solution
1.3 How could this council identify opportunities for efficiency savings?
a) Closed/open consultation process with councillors/council workers/public
b) Public debate captured both on KHub and in the Freedom Times with RSS feeds in/out to both sites (depending on security settings)
c) Online debate (with offline element?) between Council leaders and local activists
d) Consideration of entire range of environmental efficiency savings put to public/private vote
e) Use of KHub to explore and consider efficiency savings and developments from other local councils.
f) Use of KHub to identify and converse with leading national voices on the issue to bring outside expertise and depoliticise the issue
(Other examples business scenarios available on request)
Other References:
1. Designing for the Social Web, Joshua Porter, ISBN13:978-0-321-53492-7
2. Digital Habitats, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, John D Smith, ISBN 13: 970-0-9825036-0-0
3. UX Experience User Design http://uxdesign.com/
4. UX Design Planning, Boxes and Arrows.
5. Knowledge Hub briefing October 2010 V1 (PDF)
In future blog posts I will cover:
- ‘Social Graphs’ and ‘Activity Streams’ (which are key to how users will interact with the Knowledge Hub)
- Workspaces – setting up and managing
- Personalisation
- Semantic search and the power of the Intelligus Retrieval and Matching Engine
- The Mashup Centre, the App Store and App development
- Open Standards, including OpenSocial, OpenID and OAuth
- Integration of web services (blogs, Twitter etc.)
- Online Conferencing facilities and Webinars
- Social Network Analysis, Analytics and other user/usage metrics.
