As some of my regular readers will know, I’m involved in a major new project to deliver the ‘next generation’ community of practice platform for UK local government organisations – see previous blog posts about the ‘Knowledge Hub’. The current platform has been (and continues to be) a huge success, with over 63,000 users and more than 1,300 active CoPs, working towards various outcomes but with a common goal to improve public service. These will eventually be migrated to the new platform when it goes live early in 2011.

The new platform will use open source software and delivered using an agile development process (a series of Sprints and Scrum workshops), which means incremental but rapid delivery of features and enhancements. More about this in a future post.

Having been heavily involved in the architecture and design of the current platform, I was caused to reflect on some of the key design characteristics that need to be considered as we progress to the new platform. In fact, we should be able to learn from the mistakes (yes, there were quite a few) in the design of the original platform and ensure these characteristics are optimised for the new environment.  Not all of this is hard-wired stuff, but it should cause developers and system administrators to ponder on whether their design solution will support the usability and sociability requirements needed to encourage community engagement, collaboration, reciprocity of knowledge and an inherent trusted community space.  Understanding the users and their needs is a key starting point.

Users typically want to know whether they can find and do what they want, when they want, and that their interactions are comfortable. The eight questions that follow raise the typical concerns expressed by most users. The answer to these questions provides heuristics for developers, system administrators and community moderators/facilitators. In conjunction with guidelines, they are useful for guiding the development process and planning evaluations. They will be used as we begin the development and design for the Knowledge Hub.

It’s taken a while for me to get around to posting an update to my ‘Knowledge Hub Part 1’ post, mainly as a result of being fully immersed in the technology procurement process these past several months.  This phase is now almost complete and we will shortly be starting on the actual development of the Hub, so now seems to be an opportune moment to remind everyone what this ‘Knowledge Hub’ thing is, and to give a first airing of the accompanying video (commissioned from Learning Pool – thanks guys). The following is brief summary, partially lifted from an explanation I produced for http://www.local.gov.uk/knowledgehub – and in plain English as far as I’m able:

What is it?

The Knowledge Hub is essentially the next generation development of the highly successful local government CoP platform (a previous project of mine).  It will replace the existing infrastructure with new open technology facilitating integration with mainstream social media applications (for example Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN) and the rapid assimilation of new applications and web services as they emerge.  This will enable, for example, much better personalisation and permeability of content.  In addition Knowledge Hub will provide facilities that allow data on performance to be combined and shared (so called “linked-data”) potentially providing the framework to deliver the wider move to transparent government

Why is it important?

As the UK moves towards economic recovery it is expected there will be greater demands on local government to:

• continue to demonstrate cost-effective delivery methods
• be ‘fleeter of foot’ in gathering and using sector knowledge – not only to learn from others’ experience but also to accelerate the development and implementation of innovative delivery.

The strategy is based on the premise that knowledge of ‘what works’ and ‘what doesn’t work’ can be found within the local government community. Unleashed, this knowledge can be collectively focused on excellent public service delivery.

The overarching outcome of the Knowledge Hub programme is that by 2012/13, the culture of local government will be one of collaborative knowledge generation. This will involve everyone learning, sharing and problem-solving using a technology platform provided by LG Improvement & Development but owned by the local government sector.

While a working title of a ‘Knowledge Hub’ is being used it is perhaps more appropriate to use the metaphor of a dynamo-powered light, which shines brighter and illuminates the way more clearly the more involvement there is from participants and users.

What is the scope?

The Knowledge Hub will comprise three interdependent elements:

(a) Technology:

This includes the systems, software applications, hosting and service support.

(b) Data:

This will be a combination of:

• user-generated content (blogs, wikis, forums, libraries etc.)
• system-generated content (data visualisation, graphs, reports, statistics)
• approved datasets (open and linked data)
• incoming data feeds (RSS, Atom etc.)

(c) Knowledge Ecology

Support for and development of culture and user behaviours that will foster the dynamic evolution of knowledge sharing and innovation through improved evolutionary networks of collaboration.

Some of the key features

The Knowledge Hub will not replicate or replace any similar initiatives currently being used, developed or proposed by individual councils or partnerships. Rather, the Hub will bring together information about innovation and good practice from any number of these sources to help the development of the whole sector.

• It will be a web-based service and will be accessible through any device with web capability, including mobile phones and PDAs.
• The technology and systems will support ‘agile’ development, allowing new functionality and services to be added quickly.
• It will find and follow people with same/similar interests, leading to opportunities for collaboration coproduction and partnership working.
• It will provide visualisation tools e.g. ‘heat maps’ showing emerging trends and ideas.
• It will enable performance data to be shared between councils for comparison and benchmarks.
• It will have a ’serendipity engine’ which will identify related ideas and themes.
• It will aggregate and integrate conversations and content from different sources and enable key themes to ‘bubble up’ to the top.
• It will support open standards and be available as an open platform with a published application programming interface (API) enabling third party developers and social innovators to create new applications, widgets and mashups.
• It will be launched in the first quarter of 2011.

Now see the video!

The following is a transcript of the Knowledge Hub ‘Hot Seat’ on-line question and answer session that took place on 26th February 2010 on the IDeA CoP Platform.

Further information about the Knowledge Hub is available at: http://www.local.gov.uk/knowledgehub

Video Transcript:

Just a brief introduction to the knowledge hub.

Have you ever had problems finding information amongst all over conversations going on out in the virtual world? Yes you can do a Google search and you might be lucky and find the information relevant to you, but the fact is these days there are more and more conversations and they are increasingly disaggregated. Anybody can set up a new network; anybody can post a blog and twitter about things. What the Knowledge Hub will do is connect all of these conversations, whether they are tweets, blogs, community conversations or feeds from individual websites, into one place.

The clever bit is to be able to aggregate and theme all of this content so that users can make some sense of it. The Hub will link information (data) to conversations and conversations to personal profiles, so that users can identify the knowledge that is most relevant to them and their needs.

The Knowledge Hub will also support ‘mash-ups’ and data visualisation apps for comparing performance (e.g. efficiency metrics) against benchmark data and other statistics. We will be encouraging people who use the knowledge hub to create their own applications and make them available through things like an application store, so that anybody in the sector can use these ‘widgets’ and plug-ins with iGoogle or their iPhones or other PDA devices.

I’m happy to give you further information as part of this hotseat session and will try and answer any questions that you have.

See also the Knowledge Hub Community of Practice.
http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk/c/1195520/home.do

PDF File of Q&A Session

Khub Hotseat

Output from Khub Hotseat 26Feb10 – final

I’ve just completed my first ‘Hot Seat’ session for the IDeA Communities of Practice. My specialist subject “The Knowledge Hub”.  I think I managed to answer all of the questions correctly, and was encouraged to see that we had over 470 page views during the 2-hour session. I was encouraged by the interest in this project from such a wide variety of users. Some challenging questions as well – all available at the Facilitation Now! conference 26th Feb.

Thanks to the KM team for arranging this session.

It’s always pleasing to get some good publicity about how Communities of Practice are reshaping the way that local government works; creating new opportunities for knowledge sharing, collaboration and co-creation.

The article in e-government bulletin says it all, and indeed I was one of the panel of three who were invited to judge the entries for the CoP of the Year award mentioned in the article.  A very difficult decision I might add, since all of the entries demonstrated the passion and commitment of the facilitators and community members in delivering improvement in local government services. Well done to all involved.

I would just like to add (before I get completely air-brushed out of history) that I was responsible for the original concept and strategy for the IDeA CoP platform, which emerged from a 3-year  knowledge management strategy I was asked to produce for the Improvement and Development Agency, and I’m still involved in the strategic development of the platform.  Some background to the project can be found as a Case Study on  my website.  It seems I need to take care of my own publicity!

If anyone is interested in ‘what happens next’, the follow-up strategy (’the next 3 years’) is all wrapped up with the Knowledge Hub, a topic I’ve previously posted on and will be adding to over the coming weeks. A case of ‘watch this space!