Social Workplace Conference 2012 No comments yet

I’m looking forward to the  Social Workplace Conference 2012, taking place this week on Thursday, May 24, 2012.  I’m anticipating hearing how various organisations have overcome some of the barriers I listed in my earlier post on this topic. The line up of speakers and the organisations they represent should make for a highly rewarding day of learning and sharing good practice in the deployment of social software in the workplace, and – more importantly – the organisational changes required (e.g. operational, cultural, leadership) that will ensure a successful transition to “social business“.

Another interesting facet to the whole debate about the impact of social media in the workplace is the issue of the “disconnected workforce”, i.e. those that side-step the restrictions and limitations placed on use of corporate social software solutions by using of their own devices and applications to solve business problems.  In other words, the growing trend towards ‘bring your own device’, or BYOD, where smartphones and tablet applications can circumvent corporately approved systems and information management policies. Even where a BYOD policy has been approved, there can be repercussions, as IBM has recently found. I will be interested to get some views from the panel on this particular issue,

Speakers and Panel Members Include:

• Vic Okezie, Conference Director & Founder, Crexia
• Angela Ashenden, Principal Analyst, Collaboration, MWD Advisors
• Laurie Hibbs, Human Resources Director, LexisNexis
• Liz Pearce, Chief Operating officer, LiquidPlanner Inc
• George Reynolds, Managing Director, CloudsMatter (Qontext UKIE Partner)
• Neil Campbell, Head of Product & Marketing, brightsolid online Technology
• Lee Provoost, Head of Strategy & Transformation, Dachis Europe
• Priya Banati, Collaboration Strategy Lead, Accenture UK
• Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Principal Analyst, ECM & Enterprise Search
• Jens Schroeter, Snr Consultant, Social Media & Collaboration, Siemens AG
• Rita Chambers, e-Communications Manager, Sodexo UK
• Justin Hunt, Founder, ITSOPEN and Social Media Leadership Forum
• Leon Benjamin, Internal Collaboration Manager, Virgin Media
• Del Green, Group Internal Communications Manager, Bupa

It should be an interesting day, and I’ll be tweeting on the key discussions throughout the day (hashtag #swconf).

I look forward to perhaps meeting up with some colleagues and friends during the day – please come and say ‘hello’ if you know me

Engaging the Social Web for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) 3 comments

I’ve recently re-vamped the social media/social networks training that I do on behalf of TFPL. The training has always been about using the social web for personal and professional development, (and anyone outside of marketing and comms may argue that this is what it’s really for!) but I wanted to re-emphasise the value for those interested in Personal Knowledge Management (PKM).

Details of the course are on the TFPL website (link above), but replicated here:

Introduction:

There is a desire to develop more effective knowledge sharing and a culture of collaboration in most organisations, but little recognition of what this means in terms of staff development and overcoming barriers to change. The enormous growth of social media tools and social/professional networks over the past few years has created new opportunities and new challenges for people and organisations that want to embrace this dynamic world of social interaction and fluid knowledge flows. However, It is not widely recognised that collaboration and knowledge sharing are skills and practices that rarely get taught. It’s something we may learn on the job in a hit or miss fashion. Some people are natural at it. Others struggle to understand it.

This one-day course provides a practical and detailed introduction to social media and social/professional networks that will enable delegates to have a greater understanding of their context for use and deployment within their organisation and for personal and professional development.

Outcomes:

• An understanding of social media tools and social networks, and their context for engagement and knowledge sharing
• An understanding of the three-step process to personal knowledge management: seeking; sense-making; sharing *
• Developing an approach to more effective management of information ? avoiding information overload.
• Using free web tools for discovery, research and engagement.
• Knowing how to overcome the barriers to knowledge sharing and build a trusted network.

Programme:

• Overview of the social web
• Creating and maintaining your personal profile
• Seeking, listening and observing: an introduction to social bookmarking, aggregators and tracking tools.
• Sense-making: an introduction to blogs & blogging, wikis, Twitter, Yammer, Facebook, Google+
• Social capital, trust and reputation.
• Sharing and participating: an introduction to social networks and Communities of Practice for personal and professional development.
• Creating and personalising your KM routines and digital environment for enhanced learning and professional development
• Practical exercises and examples of the Social Web in action

Teaching style:

Highly interactive workshop and lecture

Who should attend?

Those who wish to understand and engage with the Social Web as an environment for personal learning, professional development and effective collaboration.

I should add that apart from the scheduled events organised by TFPL (next training event is on 2nd October 2012), I can schedule and run the training to meet specific needs of people and organisations, using the organisation’s in-house facilities or an external training venue. Just let me know your requirements and I’ll provide a quote.

These training courses tend to fill up quite quickly, so get on your computer and book now if you’re interested!

* The “Seeking, Sense-making, Sharing model is based on the work of Harold Jarche.

Future Trends in Social Media & Social Networks 1 comment

I recently co-presented a session for NetIKX on “future trends in social media & social networks” with Geoffrey Mccaleb, with a solo follow-up Webinar for the Knowledge and Innovation Network (KIN). The content for this presentation was gleaned and curated from numerous sources, including books, white papers, vendor websites, industry reports and numerous blogs. In other words, not an insignificant research project in its own right.  I only mention this to illustrate one point – whether or not you agree with the content of the presentation, the data and trends described have – where possible – been validated against at least three different sources, and have not been artificially manipulated or otherwise obscured by personal opinion. Facts (if they are facts) on numbers of users for each social network are based on data made public by the vendors themselves, and oft-repeated by the industry press. It’s difficult to challenge this data where there is no independent reference source.

The Slides

The slides are available on Slideshare and embedded at the end of this blog. The following points provide some additional context to each slide.

1.  Cover slide – The Future
2. Wordle picture of the overall content.
3. Let’s start with some statistics
4. Big numbers with a common trend – they’re all getting bigger! Two thirds of the world’s population visits a social network at least once a month.  Facebook has 800 million users and is projected to reach 1 billion users by the end of 2012.  With the rollout of its Timeline feature, and the development of apps that integrate with it, Facebook’s strategic focus is now to encourage users to spend more time on the site, sharing more information with their social contacts. Data mainly sourced from  http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/01/17/internet-2011-in-numbers/
5. At present, Google+ reaches 90 million global visitors, accounting for 5 percent of the global social networking audience. While this early adoption bodes well for Google+, whether or not the network can sustain this growth and a strong level of engagement among users will be better indicators of its success in the future. Google+ might emerge as a social networking leader in its own right in the years to come, but exactly how big it will be remains to be seen. Twitter reports 225 million accounts (note that an “account” might not be a physical person; bots make up some of this number). LinkedIn reports 132 million users (mainly B2B). Data sourced from Comscore , CNN and phill.co . There’s some interesting commentary about the accuracy of Google’s data at Venturebeat.
6. With more than 800 million users, Facebook is running into a nice problem to have: There are only so many more people to add. While the site will continue to grow in emerging markets that are only now getting online, Mark Zuckerberg has shifted the conversation to sharing and engagement, arguing that sharing on Facebook grows exponentially and that users will double the amount they share each year. That sharing is driving users to spend more time on site — the average Facebook user now spends nearly 7.5 hours on the site each month, up from 4.5  hours just two years ago. With the arrival of Timeline, increased focus on media and entertainment consumption, and continued growth in social games, engagement will surge even further in 2012. Also see: “Facebook adds Pinterest + 59 new apps”
7. New models for engagement. Based on an original ideas by Dion Hinchcliffe. Ambient communication – Today, everyone can talk to anyone, just about anywhere for nearly (thought not at) at zero cost. Global information flows – The largest, fastest growing, and most freely flowing source of information available is the Internet. This trend will only continue into the future as all information platforms move online. Social computing – Social models for communication, collaboration, and business are proving to be more effective and fundamentally better than non-social ones. Market discontinuity – There is both space and demand for major changes in the way we do things in business today.
8. Nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online is now spent on social networking sites – a stark contrast from when the category accounted for only 6 percent of time spent online in March 2007. Time spent on social networking sites gained ground during this time by taking share predominantly from web-based email and instant messengers, reflecting its emergence as another primary communication channel for users. Ornoklassniki is a Russian Social Networking website. Sina Weibo is a Chinese site. Data sourced from Comscore.
9. While sites like Digg and Reddit have been around for years, a new crop of sites like Polyvore, Svpply and, most notably, Pinterest are allowing people to organize their favourite discoveries from around the web into themed collections that friends and contacts can follow. Pinterest has seen phenomenal growth over past 12 months, proving that social media continues to evolve, bringing new opportunities for multimedia social platforms. It appears that sites that offer new and personalised user experiences can have a major influence on social sharing and internet traffic. There’s a very useful introduction to Pinterest in this Slideshare presentation from the US Army (yes, surprising who’s using this stuff!).
10. Content curation is the organising, filtering and “making sense of” information on the web and sharing the very best with your network. Examples include paper.li, scoop.it, Flipboard and Storify. If you want to get further information about content curation, read this article by Robin Good – What Makes A Great Curator Great…
11. Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented through the latest technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces in ways and on a scale never possible before. Examples given included Barclays Bikes, Zipcar, Airbnb and TaskRabbit – but there are many hundreds of other P2P services out there, and growing exponentially. Incidentally, the most requested task on TaskRabbit is for assembling IKEA furniture, so if you’re an expert on that, go earn yourslef some money! Specifically, much of the material originates from the book “What’s Mine Is Yours” by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. Reputational Capital (i.e. who can we trust) will be increasingly important the more that we use the internet for transactional services.
12. Big Data – ok, not specific to social media or social networks, but big enough to impact both.
13. Big data are datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. Difficulties include capture, storage, search, sharing, analytics ,and visualising. This trend continues because of the benefits of working with larger and larger datasets allowing analysts to spot business trends, prevent diseases and combat crime. Though a moving target, current limits are on the order of terabytes, exabytes and zettabytes of data.Scientists regularly encounter this problem in meteorology, genomics, connectomics, complex physics simulations,  biological research, Internet search, finance and business informatics. Data sets also grow in size because they are increasingly being gathered by ubiquitous information-sensing mobile devices, “software logs, cameras, microphones, RFID readers, wireless sensor networks and so on. One current feature of big data is the difficulty working with it using relational databases and desktop statistics/visualization packages, requiring instead “massively parallel software running on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers.”The size of “Big data” varies depending on the capabilities of the organisation managing the set. “For some organizations, facing hundreds of gigabytes of data for the first time may trigger a need to reconsider data management options. For others, it may take tens or hundreds of terabytes before data size becomes a significant consideration.” NB. Bus stop photo:  Bus users in Blackburn can now receive up-to-the minute information on the whereabouts of their buses following the launch of a pilot project by Blackburn with Darwen Council and bus operator Transdev Lancashire United.
14. The increasing use of visualisation techniques,  infographics and smart analytics that enable complex data to be presented in new and interesting ways.
15. Some people – wrongly – see gamification simply as the process of adding points, badges or rewards to the learning process and instantly creating engagement, interactivity and motivation for learning. When done correctly, gamification provides an experience that is inherently engaging and, most importantly, promotes learning. The elements of games that make for effective gamification are those of storytelling, which provides a context, challenge, immediate feedback, sense of curiosity, problem-solving, a sense of accomplishment, autonomy and mastery. Examples here include Big Door, Gamify-it, Scvngr and Badgeville.
16. It would be remiss to say nothing about the trend towards mobile platforms. People are now free from the shackles of the office PC.
17. We’re now at least 3 years into the next major technology trend – mobile.
18. Morgan Stanley made the prediction in 2010 that mobile platforms would outstrip sales of traditional desktop systems within 5 years. The enormous success of Apple’s iPhone and iPad may even have accelerated this timescale.
19. More people own mobile phones than toothbrushes!  There will be 7 billion mobile phones by 2012 – more than the global population. More than 4 billion people around the world now use cell phones, and for 500 million the web is a fully mobile experience.
20. Apps – not just for gamers any more. Apps offer an entirely new business model. Users are now far more comfortable using apps for solving business problems and organisations are developing apps that are providing a richer experience for users of their on-line services. Also an opportunity to lower transactional costs (e.g. when compared to telephone or F2F support). Users have no particular loyalty to apps, and will discard the ones that no longer serve a useful purpose and download or update the the ones that do.
21. The traditional vendor software development priorities of designing for the PC with (maybe) the mobile platform in mind are being reversed; any new product or application must work (and be optimised for) mobile platforms, with (maybe) the PC in mind.
22. The trends reinforce the view that apps are becoming ubiquitous in how we work and play. Users are comfortable with the software distribution and update models offered by app stores.
23. Location-based services (LBS). Product and service providers are realising the value and potential to make information services highly personalised. One of the best ways to personalise information services is to enable them to be location based. An example would be someone using their smart phone or tablet to search for a restaurant. The LBS application would interact with other location technology components to determine the user’s location and provide a list of restaurants within a certain proximity to the mobile user. Services such as Foursquare go one step further and link location with your social network, so that you can see if you have any friends within your vicinity. Other examples include using a GPS-equipped smartphone to reveal your location and in return offered special promotions from nearby businesses, or the Easy:park – smartphone app, which enables payment via smartphone and a countdown timer showing how long is left. A future release will find an available parking slot based on your GPS location – a must for the city motorist!
24. Augmented reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality. Examples shown here include New York Nearest Places,  Golfranger GPS Rangefinder, Cyclopedia, Panaramascope, Theodolite, Starchart.

Summary

The remaining slides summarise the overall trends:

Bookmarks associated with the presentation can be seen at: http://groups.diigo.com/group/ki-network/content/tag/webinar06jan12

Other blog posts from the session:

• NetIKX
• Information Today

I hope this information is of some use – whether you’re dipping your toes into or fully immersed in the Social Web!

Exploiting Knowledge in Networks (training event) No comments yet

I’ll be running the above mentioned training course next week in Edinburgh for delegates from Scottish Government and the (Scottish) Improvement Service. The training has been commissioned through TFPL, and details of the event are on the TFPL training pages.

It is perhaps worth noting that – as far as I am aware – this is one of the few training events that focus on social media and social networks for ‘Personal Knowledge Management‘ as opposed to the many and varied events on social media for communications and marketing.  Yes, we’ll cover the elements of communications and marketing, but from the perspective of personal engagement strategies and managing relationships, rather than from a corporate perspective.

A definition of Personal knowledge management (PKM)

Refers to a collection of processes that an individual carries out to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his/her daily activities and how these processes support work activities. It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers increasingly need to be responsible for their own growth and learning and represents a bottom-up approach to knowledge management, as opposed to more traditional, top-down KM . Source: Wikipedia

To quote myself from the course synopsis:

“…..It is not widely recognised that collaboration and knowledge sharing are skills and practices that rarely get taught. It’s something we may learn on the job in a hit or miss fashion. Some people are natural at it. Others struggle to understand it. This one day course provides a practical and detailed introduction to social media and social/professional networks that will enable delegates to have a greater understanding of their context for use and deployment within their organisation and for personal and professional development”

Specific topics covered in the training include:

• Overview of the social web
• Risks and rewards in the use of social media
• Creating and maintaining your personal profile
• Social media tools and their context for knowledge sharing
• Listening and observing; an introduction to aggregation, sentiment and tracking tools
• Developing your social network and managing relationships (includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+)
• Communities of Interest/Practice for personal and professional development
• Practical exercises and examples of Social Media in action
• Building a personalised collaboration toolkit

I have created a general web resource for material used on the training – which is a moving feast, given the rapidly changing environment – and maintain a Diigo social bookmarking group for collecting useful links to social media, social business and social networking resources (feel free to join and contribute !).

The course notes are proprietary, and hence not available from the social media toolkit link, but to give a visual flavour of the content I’ve run the notes through Wordle – which is the image shown at the start of this blog. Click to enlarge.

Please contact me if you are interested in the training or just need more information.

Public bodies struggle to cope with Twitter Volume 8 comments

Evidence (if any was needed) of how public sector bodies are still struggling to understand what social media is all about. In the ‘follow the herd’ instinct by councils and other public sector bodies to set up Twitter accounts, there’s a dawning realisation that Twitter is not a one-way broadcast channel. It’s clearly come as something as a shock that citizens who follow these tweets may on occasion send a reply, or maybe even use the @xxxxx address as a means of communicating with the faceless entity they know as their ‘local council’.

“We are becoming an arm of our complaints service, but with no budget – and the complaints team itself won’t monitor Twitter,” says one delegate from the Building Perfect Council Websites conference.

Social media needs to be fully integrated with the organisation’s communications strategy, which means ensuring it is properly managed and resourced, and not a bolt-on activity to be managed by a small cohort of social media enthusiasts. Whether it’s a Twitter account or a corporate blog, you have to be prepared and resourced to handle these as two-way communication channels.

If you’re a public sector body and you want a broadcast channel, use your website (preferably with an RSS feed) and leave social media alone. You’ll find life a lot simpler, albeit less rewarding.

Google+ answers the Facebook challenge No comments yet

Google has announced details of it’s latest foray into social networking with Google+. The core components appear to consist of :

• Circles (equivalent to groups) – where information can be shared privately. With Circles you can put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another and your boss in a circle all on his own!
• Hangouts – lets friends know that you’re free for a video chat or impromptu virtual meet-up.
• Sparks – a sort of activity stream subscription feature, It looks for videos and articles that it thinks you’ll like, based on what your interests.

There’s also a Google+ mobile app available in the Android Market, which will no doubt soon come to Apple’s App Store.

It seems that Google have put a lot of thought into making all of this hang together in a seamless and natural way, and this is clearly laying the foundations for Google’s future presence in the social web. It will certainly make Facebook sit up and take notice, but I’m not sure whether it will pull many users away from Facebook. However, I do believe there is room for more than one social media behemoth in the market, and for the significant many who dislike Facebook or find it overly complex, Google+ offers a compelling alternative.

Google+ is currently in an invitation- only “Field Trial” period, so only a select few can access the service at this time. Google+ will be going live to the general public soon, the company says.

More details of the release are contained in the following article, sourced from Digital Trends:

Google turned the world of social media on its head today with the much-anticipated unveiling of the “top-secret” Google+ project, a massive new type of service that essentially turns all of Google into one giant social network.

While Facebook, with its 700 million users, is a vast social network, made for connecting with as many people as you can get to accept a friend request, Google+  aims to redefine the way people connect online by letting users create a variety of smaller groups, called “Circles,” which allows people to share information and content with only the friends or colleagues they choose.

“We believe online sharing is broken. And even awkward,” said Google’s President of Social Vic Gandora in an interview with TechCrunch. “We think connecting with other people is a basic human need. We do it all the time in real life, but our online tools are rigid. They force us into buckets — or into being completely public.” By comparison, he says, “[r]eal life sharing is nuanced and rich.” With Google+, Google has tried to adapt the richness of real life interactions into an online software.

Like Facebook’s News Feed, Google+ gives users a dashboard with a flow of updates from their friends. Shared content, comments, photos etc are divided into “Streams,” one for each Circle of friends. Users can customize their security settings to allow some contacts to view personal information while hiding it from others.

Google+ can also be controlled through a newly redesigned navigation bar, which will appear at the top of the page of any Google product. Through this, Google+ users can access their profile, check notifications, and instantly share content to their various Circles.

Google has also built in a friend-finding feature called “Sparks,” which acts as a kind of search engine for hobbies. So if, say, you’re interested in single malt Scotch whisky, simply enter in “single malt Scotch” into the Sparks search bar, and Google will deliver content it thinks you might enjoy. (Google’s recently-launched +1 Button plays a role in what makes it to the top of these lists.) Find something you like, and simply click on it to add it to your list of interests. You can also connect with fellow enthusiasts in the “featured interests” area, and see what they are chatting about.

Next on the staggering list of Google+ features is what Google calls “Hangouts,” which is a group video chat feature. A Google+ user can simply launch a new Hangout session. Friends are alerted, and are free to join in. Up to 10 users can be in a single Hangout at a time. Any more, and they’re placed on the waiting list.

The final major feature to Google+ is its mobile functionality. The Google+ mobile app is currently available in the Android Market, and will soon come to Apple’s App Store. The Google+ mobile features include “Huddle” for group messaging, as well as an auto-upload feature that automatically adds any photo or video taken on your smartphone through Google+ to a private folder in the cloud. These files are then accessible the next time you log on to Google+ on a computer, and can be shared for up to eight hours after upload.

Google is currently in an invite-only “Field Trial” period, so only a select lucky few can access the service at this time. Google+ will be going live to the general public soon, the company says.

From what we’ve seen so far, Google+ seems like a giant leap in the right direction for Google — and far more robust than Buzz or Orkut. Obviously, there’s a lot here to sort through, so check back soon for more on Google+

Social by Social Game 1 comment

I’ve had a few people asking about the Social Media Game that is mentioned in the “Web 2.0 Tools for Facilitating Knowledge Management” training event that I ran earlier this week. The game was originally developed by Beth Kanter, David Wilcox and Drew Mackie, and has undergone a number of iterations and refinements, resulting in the “Social by Social Game“, which is the version I use for these training events.

The Facilitator’s notes for running the game can be found on the Social by Social website, reproduced below with a few modifications for the way that I run it.

You can play the Social by Social game in two ways – as a simulation around a situation that you invent, or “for real” in relation to a place or an organisation

In each case the sequence is much the same:

Delegates are asked to describe or invent a situation (a problem, or project)  that they are facing. I try to encourage delegates to think about a real work-related situation as opposed to inventing something, otherwise later stages of the game can become a little abstract if there isn’t a real-world context. This then is the scenario.

Delegates are split into groups of not more than eight people, around a theme or set of issues. Then each group:-

1. Defines what they are trying to achieve:  the goals.
2. Identifies the people they wish to engage, choosing methods from a set of cards. Cards have budget points as costs – so you have to prioritise.
3. Think about the communication and engagement methods that are needed to achieve the goals, and choose the social media tools or other activities from another set of cards.
4. Review the plan that is being developed and think about the resources that will be needed, and the roles to carry it out.
5. Choose a number of the characters who figure in the scenario, and tell the stories of what happens to them over some months, or longer.
6. If there is time, the Facilitator can throw in crises and opportunities for the groups to consider – e.g. key resources being pulled from the project, or funding being reduced.

Numbers

You can play with any number from a few people upwards. Ideally you need two groups, so six is a realistic minimum to get useful discussion. If you have large numbers you just split into lots of groups. The effective limit is set by the time it takes for groups to report back – but there are ways around that: see below.

Facilitators

One or two people, respected by participants, should act as facilator(s). They should ensure that participants are briefed; organise the room; manage the flow of the game without being directive; and make sure that any report back and final discussion relates to the purpose of the exercise. They should check that people are clear about the purpose of the workshop, and help them reach useful conclusions.

Equipment

You will need flip chart paper, preferably on easels, marker pens, one set of cards (engagement, tools, resources, roles), blu-tack, post-it notes. If you want a record, you’ll need a camera for photos and maybe video.

Establishing goals

Give groups a planning sheet, and ask each group to write into the top left quadrant their goals – what they are trying to achieve in the situation they are addressing.

• Identify who you wish to engage
• Ask groups to think about the different interests they need to engage with, and make a note of those in the top right quadrant.

Using the cards

Offer the groups the cards that they will use to plan their engagement, and then to develop their plan using the different tools and activities. I split the cards into the various categories and issue them in the following order as the group’s plans develop:

• tools and methods (yellow marking)
• engagement  activities (green marking)
• roles and resources

Each card has a “budget” of effort/cost – 1, 2 or 3. Set budgets so groups can’t choose all the cards: say, 10 for engagement, 15 for tools. Ask groups to stick engagement cards top right, tools bottom right … adding their own ideas on blank cards or post-its, and amending cards if necessary. They are really just aids to conversation … so encourage as much discussion as possible, not just a mechanical exercise of playing the numbers.

After groups have chosen engagement and tools cards, ask them to consider what resources they will need, and what roles.

Reporting back

At this point, invite groups to report back. That could be to the room as a whole or just to the group that provided the challenge, if that’s the way things were set up.

By posting the flip chart sheet to a wall, then inviting people to wander round and review. That’s a good way of doing things if you have a lot groups, and limited time.

Variations of the game

1. A slight variation of the game is that after the scenario and goals have been defined, the “challenge” is swapped with another group, i.e. the other group are now acting as consultants to the first group in delivering a solution that meets their goals, and vice versa. This can lead to some interesting dynamics and forces each group to think about how they present their recommendations to their “customer’ group.
2. The Facilitator can introduce Resource cards where delegates need to consider how the project will be funded and maintained.

I’ve attached  copies of PDF’s containing all the material for running this game, that is:

• Planning Sheet
• Tools/methods cards
• Engagement cards
• Roles cards
• Resource cards

I’d be interested in getting feedback from anyone who has facilitated or took part in this game and whether it achieved the objective of thinking first about the problem and then what tools are required, and not (as so often happens) to implement the tools before really understanding what problem they are meant to fix. I’d also be interested to hear about any other variations of the game that people have developed.

Below is a photo I took of the output from the game from the “Web 2.0 Tools for Facilitating Knowledge Management” training event.

Web 2 Tools for Facilitating Knowledge Management 1 comment

Doing final prep today for the Web 2 tools training course that I’m running on Tuesday 29th March. Key outcomes for the training are:

• An understanding of social networks and social media and the overlap between personal and professional identities.
• An understanding of the barriers to knowledge sharing and collaboration and how these can be overcome.
• Creation of a personalised social computing toolkit to support on-going learning and development in collaborative tools and techniques.

This will be highly practical, hands-on training event, since I firmly believe that you can’t really ‘teach’ social media. The best way to learn is by doing!

The programme includes:

• Social networks, privacy, digital orientations and the increasing overlap between personal and business networking.
• Risk and rewards in on-line engagement and collaboration.
• What does effective collaboration look like and what skills are needed to be an effective collaborator?
• Micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter) and its role as a business tool.
• Social Media Game – a fun game which introduces delegates to the various social media tools, how they can be used to solve real business problems, and the pros and cons of the deployment of these tools.
• The power of social bookmarking for knowledge sharing and collaboration.
• A practical introduction to Web 2.0 collaboration tools, including Google Apps, Blogs and Wikis.
• A practical introduction to social networks and social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare.
• Tools and techniques for developing and fostering successful communities of practice.
• Building a personalised collaboration toolkit.

Venue for the event is:

Etc. Venues

The Hatton

51-53 Hatton Garden

London EC1N 8HN

I’m looking forward to meeting the delegates – a good cross section representing both public and private sectors. It should be a good day!

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.

Social Media Policies and Guidelines (List) 5 comments

I’ve been running a regular social media training event for some time now and have gradually built up a fairly comprehensive knowledge asset at the Social Media Toolkit Wiki that I use as the foundation for the training. Given the general thirst for information on social media policies and guidelines, I thought I’d collate a few of the more popular links here. I hope this is useful to anyone who is in the process of developing policies or guidelines, or indeed, for anyone interested in Social Media. If anyone knows of other useful links, please let me know and I’ll add them to this list.

Employee Guidelines

• Civil Service guidance on participation online
• New Zealand Government – Guide to Online particpation
• Carl Haggerty’s Social media and online participation guidelines
• Intel’s Social Media Guidelines
• IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines
• Social media explorer – Employee Policies for Social Media Participation
• Scout blogging -  Corporate Guidelines for Using Blogs and Forums
• Sun Microsystems Communities: Sun’s Guidelines on Public Discourse
• BBC personal use of Social Networking and other third party website
• CIPR Social Media Guidelines
• Draft guidance for New Zealand State servants using social media
• Gartner Public Web Participation Guidelines
• Greteman Group (Marketing Agency)
• CISCO Internet Postings Policy
• HP Code of Conduct
• Harvard Law School – Terms & Policy
• US Navy “Web 2.0″  Utilizing New Web Tools
• CIPR Chartered Institute of Public Relations Social Media Guidelines
• US Air Force Social Media Policy (includes flow chart)
• Porter Novelli
• Government Policy
• Dow Jones Social Media Interaction Policy
• Harvard Law School Blogs Terms of Use
• Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse
• Dellâ’s Online Communication Policy
• United States Airforce “new media and the airforce”
• Telstras 3 r’s of social media engagement

Blogging guidelines

• Councillor’s Guide to Blogging (SiS)
• BBC staff blog guidelines
• USA.gov “Government and Social Media” advice on blogging
• BlogCouncil – Disclosure Policy
• Opera Employee Blogging Policies
• Electronic Frontier Foundation How to Blog Safely about Work
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation blogging rules
• Opera Blogging Policy
• Sun Blogging Guidelines (pdf)
• GM Motors Blogging Policies
• Media companies: For Journalists entering into public debate
• IOC Olympic Athletes Blogging Policy
• Yahoo’s Personal Blog Guidelines for staff

Twitter Guidelines

• Learning Pool’s Twitter Guide
• The ultimate list of Twitter tools

General Guidelines

• Using Social Media: A Guide for Councillors
• A Councillor’s Guide to Social Media
• Liz at LGEO Research
• Carl Haggerty’s notepad
• Web 2.0 in Local Government- Steve Dale
• Laurel Papworth
• 123 social media
• Govloop
• Christyweb
• Mashables 10 must haves for your social media policy
• Stap isi -  where to post local government online guidelines
• Step two designs – Moderating internal discussion forums, blogs and other social media
• IBM Social Computing Guidelines
• The Guide to on-line participation (NZ Gov)
• Ten things you should cover in your Social Networking Policy
• Social Media Policies and Guidelines Database
• Social Media Guide for Public Involvement (Orange County USA)
• Local by Social: How developments in social media might affect, and be used in, the work of local government.