Web 2.0 is opening up new opportunities for local and central government to provide more citizen-centric services using cost effective technologies. Innovation in the private sector is making Web 2.0 tools easier to use and cheaper to deploy. Social networking and use of social media tools is fast becoming ubiquitous; the question that most councils now face is when rather than if to embrace Web 2.0 facilities. How and why should local authorities be planning to exploit the collaborative features of Web 2.0 technologies? Feature for IT Adviser Magazine.

• GoingOn Home - GoingOn provides the most comprehensive ondemand solution for building interactive web communities. We are dedicated to helping our customers to transform their web presence from a static site to a vibrant community of employees, suppliers, partners and customers. The result is improved customer acquisition, higher productivity and increased revenues.
• OpenACS Home - OpenACS is a toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. OpenACS is the foundation for many products and websites, including the .LRN (pronounced "dot learn") e-learning platform.

  OpenACS is open source and is available under the GNU General Public License.

• Online Information - Home (CrowdVine) - Welcome to the social networking site for Online Information. Use this network to find and connect with people at the conference.
• Using Social Media To Create Social Media Training - Social Media Training - This site explores social media training and provides a resource for those looking to evangelize social media in their organizations.

  What should a 'Social Media 101' course cover? What tools should people be aware of? How should we use those tools? What are the pitfalls? What are the basics that everyone in your marketing/communications department should know?

  In the spirit of social media, there's no better way to develop a curriculum for social media training than through a wiki. Let the collaboration begin!

• Web 2.0 Stories and Community | BUZZ3R - Never read a twiller? Having twissues with your twerminology? Welcome, then, to the unforgivable abuse of the English language that some call Twitterspeak.

  The trick, in most instances, is to take the first two letters of microblogging service Twitter and meld them, often unwillingly, to the front of your chosen word. These ungainly neologisms are so numerous that they now require at least two sites to track them: Twictionary and Twittonary.

• CollectiveX - Create a Groupsite for Work, Life, Anything - Free Social Collaboration & Networking for Groups.

• YouTube - Podcasting in Plain English - CommonCraft Intro to Podcasting in Plain English
• YouTube - Video: RSS in Plain English - CommonCarft Intro to RSS in Plain English
• http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=-dnL00TdmLY&feature=channel - CommonCraft Intro to wikis in Plain English
• http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ddO9idmax0o&feature=channel - CommonCraft Into to Twitter in Plain English
• http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=muVUA-sKcc4&feature=related - CommonCraft Intro to Google Docs in Plain English
• http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=6a_KF7TYKVc&feature=channel - CommonCraft Social Networking in Plain English
• http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE&feature= channel - CommonCraft Social Media in Plain English
• http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=x66lV7GOcNU&feature=channel - Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• OmCollab - MIKE2.0, the open source methodology for Information Development - omCollab is a powerful, Enterprise 2.0 collaboration product completely built on open source software. It provides a web portal environment to create, share and search Microsoft Office content, files, shared bookmarks, blog posts and wiki articles across the enterprise. omCollab integrates some of the most powerful open source software applications into a single collaborative environment. It enables organisations to drive innovation, collaboration and community building.

  omCollab is a composite of a number of different products that provide a solution for collaboration. omCollab is used to provide the collaborative environment for MIKE2.0

• The TALK Project - TALK - TALK is a wiki for the public sector in the UK and beyond. It started out as a Communities and Local Government project to try and help people in the local government sector work together more effectively. What began as a project to carry out research into the National Projects has morphed into an effort to provide people in local government with spaces where they can work together.
• CommunityIntelligence Ltd. - We facilitate transformation that strengthens authentic connection between people
  to realize the next level of collective potential.
• How the children of the digital age will change the way we work | Money | The Guardian - They helped propel Barack Obama into power - and now the children of the digital age are about to change the way we work. Don Tapscott explains why the rest of us need to shape up.
  Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott is published by McGraw-Hill Professional
• e-Government National Awards - 68 finalists from among the 588 nominations have been announced in the e-Government National Awards 2008 - this year's 'best of the best' in public sector ICT & e-Government.
• Bringing Micro-messaging to Enterprise 2.0 - Qik.com - The huge success of Twitter has triggered a number of firms (e.g., QikCom, Yammer, and Present.ly) that now provide micro-messaging for use behind the firewall. This is yet another example of a personal web 2.0 tool creating a market for an enterprise 2.0 version.

The two categories that the IDeA CoP’s have been shortlisted for are:

1. e-Government excellence: Leadership & Profession
2. e-Government excellence: Innovation in Strategy on a National Level

The local government CoP strategy was conceived in 2005 in order to support more effective collaborative working across the sector and as an incubator for service improvements and innovation. The CoP platform was ultimately launched in December 2007. Since then, over 19,000 public sector staff have registered on the platform and there are currently over 550 active CoP’s, working on a whole range of activities, from policy development, children’s services and health to leadership and knowledge management.

For me, this is the culmination of 3 years work in getting the strategy implemented. But it doesn’t stop here. New technology and products (Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0) are making it far easier to connect with experts and peers and providing enormous opportunities for co-creation and personal development. What was started 3 years ago is just the foundation for change and improvement across the whole public sector.  Planning for the next 3 years has already started!

There is more background to the IDeA CoPs in the attached pdf.

Communities of Service

• InternetNews Realtime IT News - Better Social Networking From… Intel? - In his demo, Otellini showed a prototype social networking system that could help a new employee get oriented in their new position. For instance, the display could show a diagram of connections between the user — represented by their image — to their colleagues images and profiles. It would also present links to wikis for finding expertise relevant to the team she'll be working with.
• CoP Benchmarking - In Phase I, the Knowledge and Innovation Network at Warwick Business School collaborated with some of the world’s leading organisations to benchmark their networks and communities of practice against other organisation and sectors.

  The results of the Phase I benchmarking excercise are published in a series of reports entitled
  'Communities of Practice (CoP) Benchmarking Report: Using CoPs to improve Individual and organisational performance':
  • Summary Findings (PDF Document)
  • Full Report (available on request)
  • Guidelines for Good Practice (available on request)

• Are we really collaborating? :: Blog :: Headshift - Collaboration' is being used pretty loosely these days and often in the same breath as enterprise 2.0. But, simply because people work together to meet objectives and reach goals, doesn't mean they are collaborating. Other 'c' words like communicating, co-operating or co-ordinating may be more appropriate descriptions of what is actually taking place.
• BarcampUKGovweb - Sustainable Community Action - Event wiki for the BarcampUKGoveweb event that was held 26th January 2008
• Gartner Says Citizen Social Networks Will Complement, and May Replace, Some Government Functions - By 2011, 70 per cent of social computing deployments in government that achieve business benefits will do so in unplanned or unexpected ways, according to Gartner.

  Gartner points out that the benefits of social computing — when accrued — will rarely occur in the context of government-driven initiatives. For example, governments’ desire to retain ownership and control of the network, through restrictive participation policies, will be detriment to magnetism.

I thought I would post a couple of examples of how communities of practice (CoPs) are becoming increasingly mainstream in developing policy and seeding innovation in the public sector - an area of work I continue to support through my involvement with the Improvement and Develpment Agency.

News from the Cabinet Office on how the Social Exclusion Task Force has set up a Socially Excluded Adults Community of Practice as a spin off from work that the IDeA have been doing to support councils to help people with learning disabilities into employment. The CoP was announced by Kevin Brennan, Minister for Social Exclusion at the Children and Adults conference last week.

And as an example of how to bring fresh and dynamic perspectives into a CoP,  Paul Barber will be holding a live ‘hotseat’ forum  session in the Beacon Scheme CoP on 12 November 2008 11am - 12noon. Paul may be better known for his appearances in TV series such as Only Fools and Horses, and the film The Full Monty. Paul has recently launched the paper back version of his book, ‘Foster Kid‘, and will be in the forum to discuss the book and issues it raises about children and young people in care.

These are just two of the 550+ CoPs that are currently being supported on the IDeA’s CoP platform.

• VoiceThread - Group conversations around images, docs, and videos - A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or phone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too.

  Users can doodle while commenting, use multiple identities and pick which comments are shown through moderation. VoiceThreads can even be embedded on web sites and exported to MP3 players or DVDs as archival movies.

  With VoiceThread, group conversations are collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world. All with no software to install.

• Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War - Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War. Interesting if slightly mis-guided essay by Venkatesh Rao, which has recived some sharp and polarized reactions in the blogosphere. You either believe (as Venkatesh does) that KM is ultimately at odds with SM and doomed to die, or that they are compliemtary and form two sides of the same coin called 'learning and sharing' - which is what I believe.
• KMWorld.com - from the editors of KMWorld magazine - Covering the latest in Content, Document and Knowledge Management
• Web 2.0 Expo In Berlin - Day 1 Highlights - Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin Day 1 highlights
• Web 2.0 Expo In Berlin - Day 2 Highlights - Web 2.0 Expo In Berlin - Day 2 Highlights

• 7 Facebook apps for Enterprise 2.0 | digiculturetravelexpatasia - Word of mouth marketing (WOMM) works by leveraging blogs, online video, social networking, micro blogging and social bookmarking, aka social media. Social media happens to be dirt cheap when compared to traditional and mainstream advertising and PR campaigns.

  Facebook is where the cool kids are today and by the looks of things that’s where many companies are also trying to maximize their ad dollars.

  eMarketer today came out with the report, Retailers Get Social with Facebook

• Report on how Web 2.0 technologies can lessen impact of aging work force - In the study, “Web 2.0—The Inflection Point for Knowledge Management,” Manufacturing Insights said that demographic realities and the emergence of commercially viable Web 2.0 technologies will make future knowledge management efforts more likely to succeed than previous ones.
• Patient Opinion | Home - # Tell people what happened
  # See what others are saying
  # Find out how patients are changing the NHS
• Innovation Catalyst | The Young Foundation - The Innovation Catalyst is a partnership with the Innovation Unit, supported and funded by the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) and working in conjunction with Essex, Knowsley, Sheffield and Westminster Local Authorities. Initially funded until March 2009, this first year is a development phase for the future work of the Catalyst.
• andrewlewin: let me think about that … - Public Sector Online 2008 conference, 28 October 2008. Summary of the sessions.
• http://www.mywebspiration.com/ - Collaborative mind-mapping application

New features include:

• a more compact and cleaner design for the Welcome page which now includes: (i) service and general information announcements, (ii)details of  most active communities and (iii) details of new communities, (iii) details of featured/special communities.
• a “tag cloud” for quickly finding content and communities by keyword.
• the MyHome page has been changed from green to blue to ensure consistency with any personalised content pages (My Profile My Blogs, My Alerts, My Messages, My Contacts etc.)
• finding an existing Community of Practice has been made simpler by the addition of an A-Z index and tag cloud to the ‘Communities’ webpage.
• the Help facilities have been improved to ensure users can make the most of all the various features on the website.
• a new on-line process for setting-up communities enabling faster turnaround.
• the addition of ‘themes’ for Forum threads and Library files, enabling a blended approach between taxonomy and tags for organising content
• the Forum section now allows for ‘sticky’ discussion threads, where a topic can be marked to remain at or near the top of the list of topics.
• a facility for closing threads, for example where a discussion must be time-limited.

This release is the first of 3 major upgrades being planned between now and early 2009.  Watch this space for further announcements, or better still, go the the CoP platform and start connecting, collaborating and innovating!

Background

The community of practice platform was launched in December 2007 as part of an initiative to encourage collaboration and more effective knowledge sharing between local councils. The anticipated benefits which are now being realise are better/more efficient public services and greater opportunities for innovation and co-production.  It currently supports over 18,000 users and more than 550 separate online communities, working on a range of initiatives from climate change to preventing violent extremism.  The platform supports a range of social networking and social media tools.

[Steve Dale is the business analyst and technical lead for the IDeA CoP Platform]