New Paradigms For Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing 2 comments

I was recently asked to present at an Institute For Employment Studies event for corporate HR and Heads of Learning & Development. The slides I used are embedded at the end of this bog, and also available at Slideshare and Authorstream.

The title of the event was “Getting maximum business value from your L&D activity”, which, for me, opened up an opportunity to discuss and describe what I see as the unprecedented opportunities and potential available through the Internet and the Social Web for learning and personal development (also referred to as “Personal Knowledge Management”).

The world of social interaction, fuelled by the plethora of social media tools, has opened up new opportunities to learn and share. Classroom training is no longer an essential part of learning and development. We can now tap into the collective wisdom of peers and experts as and when we need. Skilling ourselves for a challenging and volatile environment is a personal responsibility – we can’t rely on others, including the people and organisations we work for.

Sadly, for some, this is not as easy as it sounds. Workplace restrictions on what staff can see and do on the Internet are controlled and regulated by policies – and people – that have changed little since the 20^th Century. If you have a HR or L&D manager who has never blogged, does not use LinkedIn and refuses to engage with social media, it’s unlikely they will advocate the use of these facilities in the workplace, and consequently no business case will be made to provide access to social networks or social media tools. Consequently, more and more people find they need to use their smartphones in the workplace (unless these have also been banned) or revert to out-of-hours working to do the things they could and should have done at work.

This leads to some crazy anomalies, which really ought to be challenged more vigorously, such as the many public sector departments who use YouTube to promote their services but ban their own staff from accessing this medium. Or the NHS Trusts that prevent their staff from accessing networks such as Patient Opinion, and consequently don’t know what is being said about their hospital services and therefore unable to challenge or respond to complaints.

But this must surely change. Organisations (particularly public sector) can’t continue to trot out the same excuses as to why they restrict access to the social web. Yes, we know that anything “social” might mean time wasting, but that’s no different to misuse of the telephone, or attending one of those meaningless meetings that happen every Monday morning. Yes, there is a requirement for transparency and the need to comply with Freedom of Information, but these can’t be perennially used as obstacles to tools and networks that support collaboration and knowledge sharing. The day of the “lobotomised PC”, which limits access to company-approved applications and networks, must surely be coming to an end (as is the lobotomised staff who are not permitted to think and act for themselves!)

So, coming back to the main thrust of my presentation – that it is a personal responsibility to attain the necessary education and skills to survive and thrive in an increasingly unpredictable economy. Staff can’t (and shouldn’t) rely on the prescriptive nature of their company’s core training curriculum, which is more likely to be inward-focussed and heavily weighted toward policies, strategy and compliance rather than vocational training – unless of course you are fortunate enough to work for that rare breed of organisation that funds apprenticeship schemes. It is foolish to plan an entire career on the assumption that you’ll be working for the same organisation. Transferable skills should be the primary goal – which may not be the first priority for organisations that want to retain staff!  Specialism is all very well provided it’s not dependent on one specific industry or organisation. See wheeltappers for lessons learnt!

Perhaps the difference between ‘corporate’ learning and self-directed learning is best illustrated in this diagram:

In order to develop a true learning organisation, staff need to be given much more freedom to use the tools, facilities, applications and networks that they have chosen. After all they are far closer to the issues, problems and potential solutions associated with their work than a CIO, a CFO or head of L&D. It is my firm belief that social learning and personal development requires a shift from hierarchies to networks, and empowerment of the workforce to choose the tools they need to do the job. Organisation that can’t or won’t grasp this paradigm shift will struggle to attract and retain talent, and will struggle to survive against more agile and adaptable businesses that do.

What do you think?

Say No To Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) 6 comments

No to IE6

I’ve often wondered why there isn’t more of a groundswell of discontent amongst users who have no other choice but to use Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) as their interface to the web world. I’m thinking primarily of public sector workers who probably had this installed on their PCs several years ago along with the perfunctory use of Sharepoint.  I have to assume that in most cases they don’t know what they are missing with Social Web enabled browsers such as Firefox or Chrome.  Maybe there are some (a minority?) who do use alternative or more up to date browsers on their home PCs and laptops who do feel the frustration of stepping back in time whenever they enter their workplace, but I don’t think they have yet organised themselves into a sufficiently powerful lobbying group that will create the conditions for change.

Thanks to the efforts of Tom Watson MP, at least the issue has been given some focus in central government, subsequent to a series of parliamentary questions he raised requesting information about plans to upgrade from IE6. The underlying reason for the requests was that IE6 is not only less secure than later versions of the browser, but it limits or prevents staff making effective use of social media. Tom quite rightly thought that this was a potential staff productivity issue.  It’s slightly paradoxical that the one department who should be most worried about security is the only department that has no plans for upgrading.

MOD sticks with insecure browser: According to parliamentary written answers received by Labour MP Tom Watson, the majority of departments still require staff to use IE6. Most have plans to upgrade to the more secure IE7, and some to IE8, but the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has no plans to change.

But where is the voice of Local Government?  Who is lobbying for change in local councils? It’s all very quiet over at the LGA, “the voice of the local government sector” to quote from their website.  Maybe they don’t see this as cost-saving measure, which is perhaps understandable if you take the short term (some may argue ‘myopic’) view.  I’m assuming here that reluctance to upgrade from IE6 is likely to be because of cost; most internal websites (e.g. intranets) within Gov/Local Gov will have been tailored to work with the IE6 browser, and since IE6 did not follow W3C standards (Microsoft deciding at the time that they were above following any standard other than their own), any other browser type (Firefox, Opera, Safari etc.) would not render the content correctly. They (Microsoft) have since seen the error of their ways and have fallen into line with globally agreed standards when they released IE7 and IE8. The problem will be making changes to all of the legacy websites to work correctly with a new browser version.

From this perspective yes, there is a cost, but what appears to have been forgotten is that any new web services or enhancements to existing websites have to be made backwards compatible to IE6. I can speak with a bit of authority here because I’ve been involved with the development of the IDEA Communities of Practice platform over the past 5 years. I know for a fact that for every change and enhancement to the website, around 15-20% of the cost goes into making it work with IE6. I estimate this to have cost almost £100k over the 5 years. If we took these same figures, i.e. 15-20% of website development costs going into ensuring compatibility with IE6, multiplied by the 400 or so local authority websites (and not even counting the fire services, the police and other agency websites) we end up with a pretty significant cost.  I’m not quite sure how this squares with the LGA’s priority for 2009/100 of “Efficiency and value for money”.

But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps this article from Craig Grannell sums the issue up more succinctly than I can, abstract below:

Craig Grannell asks designers and developers if it’s finally time to take IE6 behind the shed and shoot it.

Many argue that IE6 hinders development, due to the number of hacks required to get sites working in it. Opera web evangelist Bruce Lawson goes further, squarely blaming IE6 for “hindering the development of the web”, due to its lack of support for advanced CSS and XHTML. Many in the industry tell such tales: horror stories of a third of a site’s development time taken up by dealing with IE6; major display issues requiring a partial site rebuild, despite everything looking fine in all other browsers; elements randomly disappearing entirely due to the ‘hasLayout’ bug. “If anything, things will get worse, since we’re now battling three versions: 6, 7 and 8,” says Tom Muller of Kleber. “They all display content slightly differently and we regularly work up a site in Firefox or Safari, only to spend a day figuring out why our valid, semantic code doesn’t render correctly in Internet Explorer.”

But aside from cost, there is the other issue I alluded to at the start of this article, i.e. productivity of staff.  We’re increasingly recognising the power of social media tools and the social web to connect people with similar interests; to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing; to get a better understanding of what people think about gov/local gov services and how they can be improved.  We need to give staff working in the public sector access to the same tools and facilities that ordinary citizens are using to connect, share and collaborate.  Doing nothing is not an option, and is likely to make the gap between technologies that are available a private user and what is available to a public sector worker even greater.  Fore example:

YouTube to stop IE6 support: YouTube will no longer support Internet Explorer 6, TechRadar can confirm, with Google beginning to roll out warnings to those accessing the video site that they should update to a better browser.

Google Docs, Google sites dropping support for IE6

And I’m sure we’re going to be seeing a lot of similar announcements in the coming year.

So, what do we do about it (if we’re passionate enough about the topic)?

1. I’d like to see a similar survey to that instigated by Tom Watson for central government, but this time getting information on council plans for upgrading from IE6. However, I assume this may have to be through the Freedom of Information route, since I’m not aware if or how a parliamentary question would solicit this information – unless CLG were obliged to supply it on behalf of all local councils in England and Wales.
2. In anticipation of cost being the main barrier for most councils, I’d like to see a policy agreed whereby staff could use an alternative browser for accessing social media websites and as a general productivity tool, whilst still using IE6 for accessing internally-dependent websites, thus circumnavigating the issues of cost. If necessary, and to accommodate the natural desire of IT departments to lock down all installed software, staff or their department could make the business case for having Firefox installed and then IT enable this as a Group Policy.
3. I’d  be interested to know where SOCITM stood on this issue, and whether they felt passionate enough about it to be a catalyst for change. After all, they are representing the IT managers. I have in fact written to them recently to solicit their views on all of this.

Other than this, I can only encourage those who are directly affected by their company’s/organisation’s reluctance to recognise this as an important issue to be tackled this year, to lobby their managers for change, and to join together in making more a of a noise. Maybe a bit of crowd-sourcing in the Social Web!

Discovering the value of Social Networks and Communities of Practice 4 comments

There has been much written about measuring the value of online communities such as Social Networks or Communities of Practice.  However, most pundits tend to think of measuring value from a purely financial perspective, i.e. the Return on Investment (ROI).  Clearly this is an important factor, but it’s not the only factor that should be considered. Surprisingly few organisations consider the value that is being created by having better informed and more knowledgeable staff, or the potential value of getting closer to customers and local communities. These latter factors are quite difficult to measure in terms of ROI, and will normally take more than one business cycle (e.g. a financial year) before any meaningful financial measures can be made. Unfortunately – and especially in today’s financial climate – organisations plan around 1 or 2 year business years, whereas online communities will not usually be time-limited, and very rarely be driven by finance and budgets. Allowing for the relatively small cost of bandwidth and technology, conversations are – for the most part – deemed to be free.

I was pleased to see that Matt Rhodes over at Freshnetworks did refer to non-financial ROI, though I would have liked to have seen more emphasis on the value that is generated for the members of these online communities, rather than the usual social media impact measures (numbers of page hits, numbers of conversations etc.) – important as these are, and adequately illustrated in the accompanying presentation.

I have taken a slightly different approach to the issue of how the value of online communities is measured, giving more emphasis to the discovery of value rather than the dispassionate assembly of a series of metrics – financial or otherwise. I should also add that the perspective is on public sector communities since this is where I’ve been primarily engaged over the past few years. The main points are covered in a presentation I gave to the Public Health Information Network Conference earlier this year and reproduced below:

1. We need to distinguish between cost and value.

I used the humble nutmeg to illustrate this point. Weight for weight more valuable than gold in 17th century Europe. The spice was held to have powerful medicinal properties. It rocketed in price when physicians in Elizabethan London claimed that their nutmeg pomanders were the only certain cure for the plague. So, cost was very high, but the value? Well, despite the assertions of the medical experts of the day, it certainly didn’t cure the plague!

The point is reinforced by the following quotations:

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.
Benjamin Franklin 1706-1790.

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900.

2.  We are more likely to find and create value from the communities we choose for ourselves than the communities we are compelled to join.

I have argued that one of the key characteristics of a Community of Practice is the fact that the members are self-selected, i.e. they are there because they want to be there and not because they have to be there. They may select to become members because they share the same interests, passions and goals as the other members. A successful CoP will create value for the members – either collectively in terms of working towards a common goal or objective, or personally, e.g. through self-development or sharing knowledge.

3. We are re-discovering networks and communities and through them, re-learning how to have conversations.

It’s sad fact that 20^th century working practices and pressures of modern life have led to a sense of personal isolation. Mass production, prescriptive and repetitive tasks and limited social opportunities in the workplace have created a workforce conditioned to think and act as a corporate entity, limiting individual aspirations and creative thought.  The opportunities for sharing information and knowledge have been gradually eroded over the past 50 years; social clubs have closed; people don’t have the time (or money) to regularly socialise after work; we are increasingly driven by task-oriented emails.

What is sometimes forgotten is that professional communities, where good and notable practice is shared amongst fellow artisans, are still flourishing today in the form of Worshipful Companies (over 800 in London alone), with most having existed for many hundreds of years. Communities of Practice are not new; they’ve just discovered they can exist in a virtual world. The key issue for many people though, is learning how to have on-line conversations.  The following points from one of the slides are worth re-iterating:

• We don’t know what we don’t know
• People don’t learn from content – they learn from other people.
• We don’t know the value of knowledge until it is shared
• We need to find where the conversations are happening….and join in!

And…

Dialogue is NOT:

• Discussion, deliberation, negotiation
• Committee, team, task or working group
• Majority wins, minority dominance, groupthink

Dialogue IS:

• Free-flowing exchange of ideas among equals
• All ideas are solicited and are considered
• Best ideas rise to the top

4. ROI doesn’t just mean ‘Return on Investment’

I’ve taken the liberty of using something I once heard Euan Semple say: “Keep the I small and the R will look after itself”. I think this is a good mantra because anyone worth their salt in the Social Media/Social Web world knows that implementing a social media strategy doesn’t have to cost a fortune. The days of multi-million pound corporate websites is fast diminishing, and anyone with this amount of money to spend is going to be quite rightly questioned on ROI – and they better make sure they have the answers.

I’ve given some alternative definitions for ROI, such as:

• Return on Influence
• Return on Interaction
• Return on Impact

These are the things which should be measured for value, and add a different dimension to the traditional financial measures.

5. Recognise that value to the organisation is different from value to the individual.

There is an over-emphasis on measuring value of online communities from the organisational perspective. I’ve given a (financial) example in the slides, using cost savings of online conferences as an example.  However, it is important to remember that there is also a value to the individual in being a member of an online community, and this aspect often goes unrecognised (and unmeasured). The value or benefit to a community member is quite difficult to measure (the member may not be able to articulate or recognise what knowledge they have gained from the community) and any outcomes may not be easily aligned with corporate goals (e.g. job satisfaction). It is nevertheless important to consider this dimension in any overall value measurement. Qualitative metrics can provide some answers, but it’s also useful to examine quantitative data to gain a better understanding of the community itself, e.g.:

• Number of community members
• Number of contributions
• Number of contributors
• Number of inactive users

Having a Social Network Analysis (SNA) application is even better, since this can reveal who the key ‘nodes’ are in the community chatter. It’s a useful discipline to consider what would happen to the online community if these community members decided to leave the community. Dependency on one or two ‘power’ contributors should be recognised as a risk.

The presentation concludes with a number of lessons learnt from the IDeA CoP platform , which has now been active (and by all measures, successful) for over 3 years. It’s always useful to have a distilled list of “do’s” and “don’ts”, herewith reproduced:

Do…

• ..identify and look after your facilitators – they are quite often the difference between successful and unsuccessful communities
• ..let users drive their own experimentation and use of tools.
• ..target and support areas that have a clear desire and need.
• ..build trust and relationships face to face where possible.
• ..condition your managers for failure – not every CoP is going to be successful.
• ..use online conferences and ‘Hot Seats’ to build membership growth and encourage conversations.

Don’t…

• ..think you can force people to collaborate
• ..assume everyone understands how to use  Web2.0/social media tools.
• ..assume everyone knows how to contribute.
• ..worry about the ‘lurkers’.
• ..let command, control or hierarchy hamper or kill your community
• ..set unrealistic targets

I hope this has been helpful to anyone involved with social networks or communities of practice, and particularly those who need to show that their online communities are delivering value. Just remember there is more to ROI than finance!

Ten Reasons Social Media Will Not Replace Email 4 comments

Email is here to stay – long live email?  Here are some reasons why email is not going to disappear soon:

1. People still send hand-written letters via snail mail, even though they could instead make a phone call, send an email, text message, or status update.

2. Nearly all sites on the web that require registration require an email address. Some are starting to integrate social media into this process (through things like Facebook Connect), but that is still a very small fraction, and they typically still allow for email information as well.

3. Email notifies you of updates from all social networks you are a part of (provided your settings are set up that way).

4. We haven’t seen any evidence yet that Google Wave really is the next big thing and will catch on on a large scale.

5. Email is universal, and social networks are not. Nearly everybody on the web (while there are no doubt some exceptions) has an email address. Many places of employment give employees email addresses when they begin working there. Meanwhile, a great deal of them are banning workers from even accessing social networks.

6. There are plenty of people who have no interest in joining social networks. Frequent news stories about security, privacy, and reputation issues do not help convince them.

7. Email is still improving. It hasn’t screeched to a halt with the rise of social media. There is still innovation going on, and integration with social media.   Google is constantly adding new features to Gmail.

8. Even social networks themselves recognize the importance of email. Never mind that they update users about community-driven happenings via email. MySpace (still one of the biggest social networks) launched its own email service recently.

9. More social media use means more email use. The people consuming the largest amount of social media are also the people consuming the largest amount of email.

10. As far as marketing is concerned, email is doing pretty well, as many companies continue to struggle to find the right social media strategy to suit their needs.

And apart from all this, have you noticed any decrease in your emails since social networks began to bloom?

Knowledge Hub – part 1 7 comments

This is the first opportunity I’ve had to write anything about the Knowledge Hub (Khub) Advisory Group meeting that took place last week (17^th September) in London, though a number of my colleagues have been pretty active in the blogosphere and twitterverse on the topic. In particular I found Ingrid Khoeler’s post pretty much spot on and wondered if indeed if I had anything more to say on the topic. Well, clearly yes, because I’ve started this post!

Maybe I should start by giving some background to this project. I think the story starts in summer 2005 when I was contracted by the Improvement & Development Agency (IDeA) to develop a three year knowledge management strategy. Though it’s only 4 years ago, much has changed on the KM landscape since then, not least of which is the development of Web 2.0 tools and techniques to support knowledge sharing. However, I distinctly recall that this was deemed a high risk strategy when I raised the concept of developing a Web 2.0 platform that would support communities of practice (CoPs) working in local government, and switching emphasis from publishing (i.e. broadcasting) information on cases studies and best practice to connecting people who have the same goals or same issues, such that they can collectively solve problems and share learning with other practitioners working in the sector. I should also add that the term “Web 2.0″ was not even invented when we started this programme; it is accredited to Tim O’Reilly who used the term for the first time later that year.

Winding the clock forward 4 years it is easy to forget how incredibly difficult it was to get this project off the ground and in particular getting to a point where there were sufficient number of users and communities to ensure the strategy was self-sustaining. With over 35,000 users and more than 900 CoPs, I think we’ve achieved this, and the CoP platform has gone on to win a number of industry awards for encouraging team working and knowledge sharing in local government. However it will come as no surprise to KM professionals working in this space to know that the technology was the easiest bit; establishing trusted communities and developing new ways of working is where the real effort was required.

I was almost caught by surprise when I was asked “what next?”when the anniversary of the 3-year strategy came around in 2008. I struggled with this question for some time, and spent an uncomfortable winter of 2008/9 coming up with a strategy for the next 3 years. However, I did eventually present a strategy paper to the IDeA KM Steering Group in February 2009 which described the idea of a Knowledge Hub. The concept is largely based on personal experience as a KM practitioner in trying to keep up to date with new ideas and good practice. This entailed belonging to many different professional networks, both on-line and off-line, active use of social bookmarking and development of many different types of lenses and filters, such as RSS feed aggregators and personalised dashboards – in order to make some sense of the growing mass of information that was available. In essence, picking out the conversations that add value from the background noise.

Reflecting on the tools and techniques I used, I realised that though the “Web 2.0″ landscape has made it far easier to connect with people and share knowledge, it has also created its own complexities. I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t get invited to join another social network. Standards such as Open Social do help in creating the links between the community platforms that adopt this standard, but we’re still a long way from having one ubiquitous standard that all vendors are happy to support, and maybe this is utopia.

In developing the next 3 years strategy it was also helpful to look at what had worked and what hadn’t with the IDeA CoP platform. Interestingly (and this is where I often wish I’d taken a degree in anthropology or sociology) most communities were being set up as private spaces, and there was little evidence of inter-community knowledge sharing. It was as if we’d created a platform which encouraged silos of knowledge to develop. And, with the exception of the IDeA-sponsored CoPs, it was very difficult to solicit information on how successful these closed and private CoPs were in achieving their goals. This has been partly addressed by having a “Community Hub”, an enhancement to the CoP platform that went live in October 2008 which encourages CoP members to publish what they are doing in a common community space visible to all users of the platform.

So, we come to the “Knowledge Hub”. What is it? How will it overcome silo’d knowledge repositories? How will it help users to connect and share knowledge more effectively? How will it help to improve local government services? Quite simply, it will support more effective decision making by making it far easier for users to filter, share and access the information that is most relevant to them, using personal profile data and activity streams to improve relevance. We’re all familiar with commercial websites such as Amazon which give us information about ‘customers who purchased this also purchased….’, and reviews from customers on how good/bad a product is, so why not reuse and adapt these techniques for professional networking platforms? Again, Amazon were doing this long before the term Web 2.0 was bandied around, yet they are one of the best exponents of Web2.0 technology to engage with and better understand their customers. So, we’re not really doing anything new with the Knowledge Hub, other than applying these tools and techniques to a professional network of local government staff.

The Khub will support social computing and adopt open standards that enable connections to be made between personal and professional networks.

It will be a vantage point and visualisation tool, providing “heat maps” showing emerging trends and ideas. It will have a serendipity engine which enables new topics and ‘hot’ conversations to bubble up to the top.

Content sources will include Twitter feeds, e.g. from local councils, Blogs, RSS feeds from council websites and other public, private and third sector organisations involved in public services. It will have access to publicly available datasets and enable mashups between different data sources to be created for value-added services. For example, overlaying data on knife crime with socio-demographic data, displayed against Google Maps to indicate hot spots or where local authority initiatives have had most impact.

It will be an open platform where APIs can be used for developing value-added services. Widgets and plug-ins can be developed for users to easily customise and personalise their interface to the system, e.g. using iGoogle,  Netvibes or iPhones.

It will support benchmarking and data visualisation tools that enable councils to compare and contrast services in order to identify lines of inquiry that may lead to greater efficiency savings (see post by Ingrid on the Efficiency Exchange).

It’s also a big, bold and ambitious project with many stakeholders, and particularly the department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) who are funding the project.

It is therefore extremely important that we have an empowered and “expert” Advisory Group, drawn from a cohort of freelance and independent social innovators who are currently delivering collaborative solutions to the public sector, together with stakeholders from central government and social media early adopters working in councils and local communities. The Group will help shape the project over the coming months, and help in identifying the training and support that may be needed in local authorities in order to ensure its success.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a 3-year strategy, but at least now the journey is now underway!

Check out the slides below to get a better perspective of what this all about or contact me if you need any more information. See also Dave Briggs post on The Partnerships and Places Library prototype – which is one of the discreet projects that will feed into the development of the Knowledge Hub. There’s a lot happening out there!

If you want to follow the conversations around this topic, then sign-in or join the FriendFeed ‘room’.

Taxonomies and Folksonomies 2 comments

Thanks to Steve Wheeler (aka @timbuckteeth) for picking up the conversation I started on Twitter  where I defined a Taxonomist as:

One who organizes information in ways that make sense to content providers, rather that content users.

Steve’s riposte was to define a ‘Folksonomist’ as:

One who organizes information in ways that make sense to his/her own community of practice or interest.

I know that strictly speaking the role of a ‘folksonomist’ may not exist, since folksonomies tend to emerge through the collective process of individuals assigning tags to things and that the creation of a folksonomy is the bi-product. However, this misses the point; the key point is that the information is organized in a way that makes sense to individuals working collaboratively, i.e. members of a social network who tag content are acting (possibly unconsciously) in the role of a ‘folksonomist’.

Steve goes onto reference the Holistic Web blogpost Taxonomy vs Folksonomy which defines the differences thus:

A taxonomy is predictable, whereas a folksonomy is flexible. Taxonomies are imposed, but folksonomies are democratic.

I can’t argue with any of these definitions, but I particularly liked Steve’s final summary definition:

In a taxonomy, the community defines the content. In a folksonomy the content defines the community.

I might argue that the ‘community’ in the first sentence is likely to be corporate-led and vastly different to the community in the second sentence. But that’s being pedantic. I like the overall simplicity of the statement and will re-use it often. I hope that Steve Wheeler hasn’t got a copyright on it!

One final point to allay any grievances from the guild of Taxonomists – I think that taxonomies and folksonomies can co-exist in the world of Information Management, and that they have complementary strengths.

US Now film now online 2 comments

For anyone that has been following the US Now project the film is now online to watch.

For anyone else this is the background:

In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power? Us Now is a documentary film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the Internet.

Us Now tells the stories of online networks that are challenging the existing notion of hierarchy.  For the first time, it brings together the fore-most thinkers in the field of participative governance to describe the future of government.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Is social networking learning? 5 comments

Great post by Shannon Turlington on the question of whether social networking is learning.  A point often missed in this debate is the serendipity inherent in social networking that enables you to discover new knowledge – i.e. we don’t know what you don’t know until we uncover it. Shannon writes:

What I like most about using social networking tools this way is how serendipitous it can be. Sure, I can ask questions or search for knowledge on a subject I know I want to learn about, but more often, it seems, I learn things I didn’t know I needed to learn. This happens when people in my network share what they are learning or thinking about or reading or writing about. That, for me, is where the real learning potential of social networking tools kicks in. I don’t think you can reproduce that quality with formal learning tools, because it is so ephemeral and unplanned.

Here are some other good points made in the conversation:

• “I learn far more about what’s news and relevant to my work from my ‘network of trust and interest’ than I do from common denominator mass media.”
• “Between spontaneous learning and network-of-trust filtering, you get a new level of just-in-time (JIT) learning: ‘before I knew I needed it’ learning.”
• “Not everyone is going to succeed using social learning.  Many of those that can already use it.  Some of the rest just need permission.  But if you aren’t really interested in your work, if you don’t think it is cool, how much is unstructured, social learning going to work for you. “

Someone also made this point: “There seems to be a tension … among the openness of informal learning, risk management and message control.” I think that tension is always there when there is also fear over loss of control. I have found, though, that in successful learning networks, people tend to police themselves. The organization must let go and trust its people, or people just won’t use the network sanctioned by the organization. If they are really passionate about learning and connecting with peers, they will find ways to do so outside of the organization’s control and without the organization’s blessing. So why not extend that trust and see what happens? The organization can only benefit from engaged employees actively learning about their fields.

And this I think is the essence of what social networking is all about; trust, freedom to act and taking responsibility for personal development. Organisations that don’t support these basic tenets, or erect barriers and conditions that inhibit their development, are going to find it increasingly difficult to survive in a 21st century economy.

Communities of Practice wins e-Gov National Award 6 comments

The IDeA Communities of Practice platform (CoPs) won first prize in its category at the National e-Government Awards in the prestigious setting of  at the Guildhall, London on Tuesday 20th January. The e-Government awards are supported by the Cabinet Office, SOCITM and SOLACE, and recognise excellence in public sector IT and transformational e-Govt projects.

See also John’s IDeA Blog for photos of John Hayes, Michael Norton, Lawrence Hall and me picking up the award.

CoPs was short-listed as finalist in two categories, and won under ‘e-Government Excellence: Professionalism & Leadership’ (Leading e-Government strategies and professional development which contribute to achieving positive transformation).

There were 588 entrants to the e-government awards, with CoPs being one of only 11 winners receiving the UK’s highest level commendation for the best e-government and technology-driven services. It was also pleasing to hear Gordon Brown, in his recorded speech for the evening, reference the good work that online communities had been achieving for government over the previous year.

This is some recognition (at last!) for the work I’ve been engaged on at the IDeA for these past 3 year’s, ably supported by the Knowledge Management team, and not forgetting all of the many excellent community managers and facilitators who keep the communities buzzing.

The CoP platform currently supports over 26,000 registered users across the UK public sector, and more than 600 individual CoPs, collaborating on policy initiatives, developing good/next practice for public sector service improvement or just sharing knowledge and ideas.

There was a brief mention in Gordon Brown’s videolink speech about on-line communities. I’d like to thik he had the CoP platform in mind when he said it!

Google discontinues many services 1 comment

I’m saddened to read that Google is discontinuing development of Google Notebook, something I’ve used extensively since it was launched. It seems that this is part of a general rationalisation exercise being conducted as part of the need to cut costs. Other Google services and applications being culled include  Google Catalogs, Dodgeball (a mobile social network aquired by Google) and Mapshup Editor.  Jaiku, the micro-blogging service acquired by Google will migrate to the Google App Engine and will no longer be actively developed.

I guess that none of this should come as any surprise since in these austere times most organisations are looking closely at the business models (or lack of them) which underpin their products and services. However, even loss-making services can serve a purpose if they are drawing users into other more profitable areas of an organisation’s business. I remember when I worked for Reuters that News was a loss making service but was packaged in such a way that revenue could be generated from the products it was packaged with, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. I can only hope that Google has thought this through and has assessed the impact that withdrawing these services will have on bringing users into the more profitable parts of their business, and their general desire to build interconnected social networks.

There is a lesson here for all of us who use freely available products and applications to support their digital lifestyle. For me, transferring all of my accumulated notebook content and tags to an alternative service will be a necessary and unwelcome activity over the coming weeks/months. It leads me to question whether I should have relied as much as I have done on Google’s applications to organise my various digital assets. Perhaps it is better to be in control of your own web server to organise and manage bookmarks, tags, and other digital resources. At least that way all I would have to worry about is keeping it all backed up. I’ll be doing some serious thinking about this in the near future, I suggest you do too!