Tuesday 29th November, Track 2, 11.30 – 13.00
Knowledge Hub: A single window to improvement and innovation

The Knowledge Hub builds on the successful Local Government Communities of Practice website that already has over 100,000 registered users sharing knowledge on over 1500 topic areas and considered to be the most advanced online practitioner network in the UK public sector. Scheduled to go live in May 2011, the new Knowledge Hub environment will allow councillors, officers, policy makers, experts, regulators and practitioners across the public sector to take greater advantage of new media tools and techniques and to develop new applications for knowledge sharing and improvement of public and voluntary services.

The Knowledge Hub has been built using open source software on the unique and innovative ‘Intelligus‘ platform from PFI Knowledge Solutions. The open source solution will enable organisations to develop their own value added solutions, such as internet replacement or website portal development, offering a compelling (and significantly cheaper) alternative (or supplement) to Sharepoint.

The Knowledge Hub enables users to set up their own collaborative workspaces with access to a rich set of social media tools, including blogs, forum, wikis, calendar, peer reviews and ratings, tagging, document library and web conferencing. In addition, users will be able to easily integrate external web services such at Twitter or public blogs, and maintain a view of key events using activity streams and topic trending. Other features include a mashup centre , app store, support for performance comparison (benchmarks ), linkages to data repositories, and tools for managing open and linked data.

Learning points:

• How the integration of many open source social media components and services can deliver a collaboration platform that is greater than the sum of its parts.
• How the combination of open, linked and performance data can be used to develop benchmarks for public service improvement.
• How semantic extraction and a ‘matching engine’ can intelligently surface and suggest contacts, content and communities based on user interests and their ‘digital footprint’.