I’m privileged to be chairing this year’s Online Information Conference, which starts this Tuesday, 30th November and runs until 2nd December. The conference is linked with the Online Information Exhibition, with over 200 international exhibitors and more than 9,000 attendees from over 40 countries across the globe. The exhibition covers 6 different subject areas: Content Resources, ePublishing Solutions, Library Management, Content Management, Search Solutions and Social Media.
It’s hard to believe that 12 months have elapsed since the previous conference. Where did that time go?
The social media revolution continues apace, with many hundreds of new apps and web services appearing each day. The technology we use at home or in our pockets is often far more advanced than what we use in the workplace. We’re using mobile devices (iPhones, iPads etc.) that give us instant access to the web, and have a choice of literally hundreds of thousands of applications that support our on-line activities and lifestyles – over 300,000 apps for the iPhone alone.
Some commentators have likened the disruptive effects of social computing to the industrial revolution of the early 19th century. The main difference now is that whereas large Enterprise used to lead technology innovation, it’s now being driven bottom-up by users and consumers. We’re now all connected and far more willing and able to share knowledge and co-create.
I’ve lost count of the number of start-ups and services that have been spawned on the back of Twitter, which maybe demonstrates the inherent scalability of the intranet and the web, where potentially millions of users can be supported by a teenager with a PC working from his bedroom. Delivering services with minimal infrastructure is one of the new paradigms of the social web; the threat to traditional red brick business models is no longer confined to their traditional big business competitors, but also lightweight “micro” businesses that use web services to provide scalability and agility.
We’re also seeing a revolution in the use of open and linked data. Driven primarily by the public sector in response to the expectations of citizens for greater transparency in government, which in turn has spawned a whole new breed of Social innovators and armchair auditors. Everyone is now a data analyst. We’ve never had so much data and information to play with.
Coupled with this we have the “Google effect”, with users now expecting almost instant access to information as it happens. Accuracy and objectivity is becoming less important than speed and accessibility.
All of this is driving rapid behaviour change in both society and the workplace. Whether we’ve realized it or not, consumers are now driving the technology revolution and business is trying to keep up.
How are users and business adapting to this changing information and technology landscape? What innovative new products and working practices are emerging from the disruptive effects of these changes? This year’s conference will be looking at all of these issues, with presentations and an insight from some of the industry’s leading thinkers. This year we have four tracks or themes that will look at many of these industry trends and issues:
1. Exploiting open and linked data. Introduced as a track in its own right in 2009 and of growing importance especially in the public sector; open and linked data is creating new opportunities for information professionals and the creation of new information services and products.
2. Harnessing opportunity from the social web and the cloud. Although the use of social media is now mainstream in many organisations there are still barriers and limitations that are preventing the benefits of social media to be fully realised. This track gets to the heart of the issues with many real world experiences.
3. Information Professionals demonstrating value and impact. In economically straitened times when information services are under scrutiny information professionals need to be able to demonstrate value and impact to justify their existence, focus will be on challenges facing academic libraries and new projects that are using cutting edge technologies to deliver positive bottom line results.
4. New platforms and user behaviours for delivering content. Focusing on using mobile and “the cloud” to deliver information services, how are libraries and organisations using these technologies, what are the opportunities, how will these technologies change the future role of the information professional?
We also have a great line up of speakers, with special mention for our keynote speakerDion Hinchliffe, an Internationally recognized business strategist, enterprise architect, author, blogger, and consultant on Web 2.0, enterprise architecture and co-author of the book ‘Web 2.0 Architectures‘.
So, I’m hoping that all of the delegates will make the most of this year’s conference. The quality of the papers and presentations submitted to the organizing committee has established a new benchmark, and I for one will be looking forward to attending as many sessions as I can. If you are a regular reader of this blog, or know me in either a social or business capacity, please do come and say “hello”.
The confluence of a number of initiatives around the UK Government’s transparency agenda has opened up a significant and exciting opportunity to deliver the first of a number of applications that will be made available in the Knowledge Hub App Store. The foundations for this initiative include:
1. The transparency agenda requirement for all authorities to openly publish spending data in reusable from January 2011 onwards.
2. Announcement about the publication of Government spending data
4. ESD-Toolkit project to develop an online tool that will convert council csv files on spending into RDF, Linked Data format.
5. The announcement by Talis to offer UK Local Authorities free Linked Data hosting for published expenditure data
6. The Knowledge Hub project to provide an open platform for community collaboration and development of value-added applications (mashups etc.).
The key differentiators between this KHub app and the many and varied apps and websites that are now publishing details of government or local government spend data are:
1. The purpose is to provide insight and opportunities for improving local council performance and efficiency and not just to know where and how money is being spent. This will be achieved by including additional contextual data from sources such as ONS, to provide data on spend per head for specific service lines, e.g. social care.
2. The app and the business intelligence it offers will support the work of local council officers and heads of department; it can be used by citizens though this is not the primary audience.
3. It is, as the name suggests, using linked data to add context to open spend data, i.e. delivering the benefits of a semantic web application. (What is open and linked data?)
The proposed KHub App will interface with an aggregate store of local authority open spend data, hosted on the Talis platform. The App will enable the user to perform deep-dive queries and visualisation of specific spend data categories, and spend data comparisons across local authorities.
The specification of the Linked Data Spend App is currently work in progress, but some ideas for what the App could potentially deliver include:
Spend by category: charts and tables, drill down into service
Spend by supplier: charts and tables
Supplier by categories: who are the suppliers and who do they supply: table with links to companies house information
Spend by region or council by category: overlaid on an interactive map
Spend by region or council by service: overlaid on an interactive map with drill down into service and category
Spend over time
Productivity measures: spend per head on social care, spend per head on bin collection, spend per mile of highway maintenance.
Outputs from this project, apart from the app itself, will be:
Documentation on how the application(s) could be hosted on any web site.
Published code developed for the visualisation application(s) under open source license.
The Linked Data Spend App will be launched early 2011 and will be one of many apps delivered as part of the Knowledge Hub App project.
This is a presentation I did for the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO-UK) for their conference on 14th September 2010 on the topic “The Future of Knowledge Organization on the Web”.
The presentation covers the issues faced by users who need to connect and join-up online conversations and information from multiple networks and websites in order to gain domain specific insight and knowledge. Conversations are becoming increasingly disaggregated; useful data is disconnected and lacks context. The Knowledge Hub connects and semantically links multiple information sources to deliver a personalised user experience for supporting improvement and innovation in UK public services.
The Knowledge Hub is a LG Improvement and Development project that will be launched in February 2011. If you are interested in knowing more, or participating in some way in the delivery of this ground-breaking initiative, you may want consider joining the Knowledge Hub Community of Practice.
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 an 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 “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.
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 KHub 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.
