Government launches public sector app store No comments yet

I came across this artcle on the BBC website today. For those who remember my involvement with the early design and business requirements for the Knowledge Hub, the Khub App store was one of the main features of the new platform. Regretably it got lost in the budget cuts (or was de-priotised?), and hence an opportunity lost.  As can be seen from the announcement, this could have been a net revenue stream for LGA as opposed to being perceived as adding to bottom line costs. See this earlier blog post.

To quote from the BBC article:

“It is hoped the service will allow organisations to purchase services on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, rather than be locked into lengthy contracts. They typically include services such as email, word processing, system hosting, enterprise resource planning and electronic records management.

The Cloudstore would help contribute to overall planned savings of £180m by 2015, the government said, although a spokesman admitted it was “difficult to anticipate total saving with the constant changes in technology”.

Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, said: “Simply stated, purchasing services from Cloudstore will be quicker, easier, cheaper and more transparent for the public sector and suppliers alike.This bold move has potential to showcase the UK as a global leader in online service delivery, providing the procurement culture in government evolves to take advantage.”

And the following could almost have been lifted word for word from my original business case:

“Cloudstore (read Khub Appstore) represents a revolution in how the public sector buys (procures) software and services,” Chief executive Suraj Kika said.  My additions in brackets.

However, whilst feeling (perhaps understandably?) frustrated that the App Store never got implemented for KHub, I am encouraged that UK Gov have seen the benefits of using an app store as a cost-effective way of procuring and delivering business software, at a time when more and more users are getting familiar with this way of accessing and using new functionality. As I mentioned in my original article, the benefits of this distribution model are:

• 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.

Maximising the power of collective knowledge 1 comment

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:

1. Supporting sociability, relationship and trust building
2. Seeding and feeding discussion topics
3. Maintaining and sustaining the community ‘rhythm’.
4. Curating and signposting knowledge artefacts for capture and reuse
5. Helping to connect community members
6. Providing help with the CoP tools and facilities
7. Ensuring the community space is kept “tidy” and navigable
8. Reporting CoP activity – metrics, evaluations, newsletters
9. 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.

Communities of Practice: a strategy for more effective collaboration 2 comments

Acting as a public administrator, it was my privilege to arrange and facilitate a meeting this morning between a delegation from the Government of Singapore and some of the ‘expert’ Community of Practice Facilitators from the local government Community of Practice platform. My thanks to Etienne Wenger for making the original connections with the Singapore Government, and to Adrian Barker (Policy & Performance CoP – 3913 members), Neil Rimmer (Productivity and Efficiency Exchange CoP – 2513 members) and Michael Norton (Facilitator’s CoP – 528 members) for their input and presentations.

The delegation was from the Public Service of the 21^st Century Office (PS21 Office) and was led by the Government of Singapore’s Permanent Secretary, Ms  Lim Soo Hoon. The purpose of the visit was to share knowledge about building sustainable learning and sharing networks in the public sector, and we used the learning experience gained over the past 5 years in establishing the LGID Communities of Practice platform as the largest and most successful professional network in the UK, with over 96,000 users and more than 1,500 CoPs.

During the course of what turned out to be a highly interactive session, I was reminded of so many useful lessons as to what makes a successful CoP, in terms of user engagement, establishing and sustaining a culture of sharing and trust, and building a knowledge ecology that encourages cross-organisation, cross-agency and cross-regional collaboration. Though I’ve been involved (and in all humility – I started it all off!) with the local government CoP strategy since 2005, there is no better learning experience that hearing from practitioners who have been at the sharp end in building and nurturing their communities, and having a real understanding of the skills and effort involved in facilitating a CoP.  They know what works and what doesn’t, but if there was one common denominator, it was that successful CoPs invariably have active and engaged facilitators (sometime also referred to as community managers or community moderators).

I’m not at liberty to post all of the presentations used at meeting (except my own – see below), I thought it might be useful to summarise all of the key lessons for establishing and sustaining successful CoPs, as follows:

Facilitation – what is it?

• Facilitator’s engage and connect community members by encouraging participation, facilitating and seeding discussions, and by keeping events and community activities engaging and vibrant.
• Guiding a group to use its knowledge, skills and potential to achieve its goals.
• Helping by making the processes easier. It’s about guiding rather than directing.
• Looking at the process rather than context – how you do something rather than what you do.
• Making it easier for the group to get to their agreed destination.
• Striking a balance between ‘the group’ and ‘the task’.

Factors influencing success:

• Forums, blogs, events, library.  Wiki less so.
• Good quality, active facilitation: making it useful; concise, informed, informative; and giving community members  ‘room to breathe.’
• Day to day content; monthly update summarising key content + alerts; one-offs (e.g. on-line conferences)
• Size – critical mass.  Confidence that someone will respond.
• Face to face element
• Honesty and trust (who else is listening in?)
• Keep on topic (urgent, immediate, wide interest, range)
• Openness, honesty, trust (who else is listening in)
• Technology – ease of use, facilities, integrated elements (e.g. wiki draws on discussions)
• An art.  Non-linear: results don’t automatically match your efforts.  A few small things can make a big difference.
• Presentation at regional and local events
• Promotion through other online channels (website pages and bulletins)
• Links with social media channels, e.g. having a Twitter account
• Organised regular ‘Hot’ and Warmseat’ events to stimulate interest
• Use of regular polls to assess member opinions

Lesson Learnt:

• You need trained and dedicated community facilitation
• On-line events take at least as much organisational resource as traditional – but save time, money and the planet!
• Need to constantly engage members with interesting and new content
• Membership rises whenever we promote events – it keeps their interest fresh
• Use social media channels for promotion for the new on-line generation
• Lots of work needed to engage older, traditional generation.
• We are social beings who thrive from human interaction; technology is just an enabler.
• Don’t be over-prescriptive; give the community a range of collaborative tools and let them decide which ones they want to use and how to use them.
• Don’t assume everyone understands how to use social media tools.
• Identify and look after your (power) contributors.
• Identify and look after your facilitators – they are quite often the difference between successful and unsuccessful communities.
• Condition your managers for failure – not every CoP is going to be successful.
• Most senior managers still don’t get it!
• Command and control will hamper the development of a community.

So, once again – my grateful thanks to all of the contributors to this morning’s meeting, both the presenters and the members of the Singapore delegation.  I wish the PS21 Office every success in establishing their own collaboration and knowledge sharing networks, and can assure them that there is plenty of help, advice and support available from the growing global CoP environments.

Knowledge Hub – part 5: Day of the App 1 comment

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

The Knowledge Hub – part 3 :User Experience (UX) 9 comments

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:

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’

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
• http://www.fuelyourinterface.com/cognitive-dissonance-why-your-users-brains-hurt/

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.

Knowledge Hub Linked Data Spend App. 2 comments

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

3. LG Group Practitioner Guide to publishing local spend 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.

Data flows for the Linked Data Spend App.

See also the Talis blog on this project.

More details will be provided as part of the launch communications. In the mean time I will be happy to respond to any questions.

Bonfire of the Quangos 1 comment

The promised axe is coming down hard today on 192 quangos that will be abolished, with another 289 being radically overhauled. 380 quangos are staying.

As one insightful blogger noted:

The regular hoeing to keep the soil clean has rather been neglected these last few years. Hence the need now for the Round-up and flame-thrower approach. It’s brutal, but it’s cleansing. With the rubbish cleared, the productive can be nurtured.

Any bets on when the first new quango of this coalition will be created?

Public-Bodies-List-FINAL 14-10-2010

The Lean Machine No comments yet

Much has been written about ‘Lean‘, and what a ‘lean’ organisation looks like. ‘Lean’ quite simply means creating more value with fewer resources. A popular misconception is that ‘lean’ only applies to manufacturing industries, but in fact it can be applied to any business process, including within service industries. Clearly it it is a concept that should be concentrating the minds of Government and Local Government in these austere times, though whether an intelligent and disciplined approach is being made to the cost cutting we’re now seeing, or whether its more of a ‘slash and burn’ approach I’m not too sure. Perhaps this will become clearer when the spending review is completed this Autumn.

While we wait for this, and for anyone still confused as to what ‘Lean’ actually means, I can recommend this presentation from Claudio Perrone. The best I’ve seen in explaining a simple concept in simple terms.

Government sticks with IE6 for all the wrong reasons No comments yet

Below, just some of the reaction to the UK government’s response to a petition submitted to Downing Street in February that opposed UK Gov’s continued endorsement of Microsoft’s IE 6.   It shows a complete and absolute misunderstanding of the issue. As the author here says, “…you could quite easily use IE6 for IE6 only sites, and receive the protection of a more modern browser such as IE8, FF and Chrome for everything else”.

Apart from which, it’s not just an issue of cost of replacing IE6, it’s the cost across the whole of the public sector of maintaining websites that must support the IE6 browser. I know we’ve spent at least 25% of the development cost for the local government CoP platform on making every change backward compatible to IE6.

And not forgetting, it’s not just a security issue, it’s a usability and a productivity problem – users can’t access facilities on some sites (e.g. YouTube), and lack of support for plug-ins means you can’t use some of the neat integration facilities that support sharing and collaboration on many social media/social networking websites.

But then again, user productivity doesn’t appear to feature in this decision. Something the government may yet come to regret once someone calculates the true cost of sticking with IE6!

See previous blog on this topic.

UK.gov sticks to IE 6 cos it’s more ‘cost effective’, innit

Computers in Whitehall will largely continue to run Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, which will make web coders spit out their cheese‘n’pickle sarnies this lunchtime.

“It is not straightforward for HMG departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems. Upgrading these systems to IE 8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users.”

“To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users,” it said.

The petition itself was sent to Number 10 earlier this year asking then Prime Minister Gordon Brown to follow German and French governments’ decisions to ditch IE 6.

“Apparently the IT team in Whitehall has yet to realise you could quite easily use IE6 for IE6 only sites, and receive the protection of a more modern browser such as IE8, FF and Chrome for everything else,” Reg reader Mark told us.

“As a senior web application developer, the mention of the positive word ‘standards’ in a document about IE6 makes me die a little on the inside — ‘Public sector organisations are free to identify software that supports their business needs as long as it adheres to appropriate standards’ — I’m not sure which standards they mean… but certainly not the HTML ones.”

Alas, Internet Explorer 6 is here to stay to keep the wheels of central government turning in this big fat society of ours, people.

Read more at www.theregister.co.uk

See this at Amplify

Knowledge Hub (part 2) 3 comments

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.

(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 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.
• It will be launched in the third quarter of 2011.

Now see the video!