Dissident World

I’m looking forward to attending the UKGovWeb barcamp this coming Saturday 26th January - though  not quite sure what to expect, this being my first barcamp event. However, I’m encouraged by the fact that  the organisers (and primarily Jeremy Gould) have done this sort of thing before and have avoided getting bogged down with over-prescriptive planning at the expense of delivery. Judging from the list of  presenters and topics noted on the barcamp wiki and the very active forum discussions in the Google Group,  there is enough creative energy to carry the day and make it a worthwhile learning and sharing experience for everyone.

Time and scheduling permitting, I will be presenting and discussing the work I’ve been doing these past two years in introducing social networking and Web 2.0 technologies into local government in order to  improve inter-authority collaboration and provide learning and sharing opportunities. The ultimate objective being to improve council services through smarter ways of working. The following is a brief synopsis of what I will cover:

“Social tools and technologies are changing the KM landscape, making it far easier to connect with peers and experts, and facilitating far more effective knowledge sharing and collaboration. We are moving beyond the factory model of ICT, which focussed on centralisation, standardisation and storage to a more diverse and less regulated environment.

For some, this provides the opportunity to break out of the silo working practices so prevalent across the public sector, and encourages a more productive and collaborative approach to online knowledge sharing. Others see this as undermining the integrity and quality of established (and centralised) knowledge repositories and best practice procedures, and equate social networking with purely leisure and entertainment activities.

1. moving from a culture of knowledge repositories (people-to-information) to one of knowledge collaboration (people-to-people),
2. introducing a sceptical and mature staff demographic to the concept of virtual collaboration using social computing/Web 2.0 facilities and
3. creating, developing and growing effective communities of practice in local government, where command and control systems are prevalent.” 

I would be interested in hearing from anyone at the barcamp who has tried a similar approach for encouraging shared learning, or is considering doing so in the environment they work in. I’m happy to share the lessons I’ve learnt, and anxious to pick up any hints and tips from those who have already trodden this rocky path.

I’m particularly interested in any anecdotes from delegates on how they have addressed the three points mentioned above.

I’m also interested in hearing views about how important the technology is in encouraging communities of practice or interest to develop.

You can follow the planning for this event (and presumably the outputs from the day) on the aggregated Pageflakes page that Dave Briggs - “the Web 2.0 dynamo” - has set up.

One for the kiddies…

Dave Briggs has posted details of an event being arranged on 26th February as part of the Community of Practice for Social Media & Online Collaboration. This will be of potential interest to anyone working in (or for) the public sector who is using - or thinking of using - social media/social networking applications to support improved collaboration shared learning. The event is both an opportunity to see and learn how others are applying Web 2.0 technologies in their departments and as a showcase for anyone wishing to contribute information about their pet project. I’ve been a member of this particular CoP since Dave started it off and can highly recommend it to anyone who is currently struggling with the breadth and scale of the technology options available to them in this particular domain. Full details of the posting here:

Members of the Community of Practice for Social Media and Online Collaboration are meeting up at the Learning and Skills Council National Office in Coventry on 26th February 2008 between 10am and 3.30pm for a day of Web 2.0 fun and frolics, including:

• The benefits of using social media in the public sector, real life examples
• Building social web sites: blogs, wikis, forums and social networks
• Making social online video
• Group discussions on where the potential is for social media to make a real difference and a “how do I?” : Matching tools to problems
• Future developments of the CoP

If you aren’t already a member of the community and you feel it would be worthwhile attending please join us here and sign up on the wiki to say you’ll come.

I guess most people choose the conferences they attend with care. There’s nothing worse than having shelled out good money (my own in most instances since I work as an independent consultant) on a 2-day conference when you realise within the first day that the general level of knowledge and expertise is at best equivalent to your own, and at worst, somewhere below your own level of competence. In other words, you’re not going to learn anything you didn’t already know. I accept there are still networking opportunities to be had, but this doesn’t always compensate for the time and money you’ve already invested in attending the event.

I was intrigued therefore by the recent avalanche of fliers and emails I’ve received since the start of the New Year advertising conferences on the general topic of ‘Web 2.0 in Government’. Even more intriguing was that most of the speakers seem to be from various (UK) government departments, and not – as I might have expected – renowned and acknowledged experts from academia or the private sector. Please excuse my cynicism, but I’m not sure how much I would have gained from one particular session entitled “Web 2.0 – was is it?” that was being led by a senior civil servant from the Home Office.

On digging a little deeper into the backgrounds of some of the ‘expert’ presenters, I found a fairly common theme – they have all implemented Sharepoint somewhere within their departments (usually their Intranet).

I find this slightly worrying from a professional point of view since some delegates at these conferences may come away with the perception that Sharepoint is an exemplar for Web 2.0 technology. I’ll admit that Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 – or MOSS 2007 – is a quantum leap ahead of its predecessor (Sharepoint 2003), but if anyone seriously thinks that the integration of a few collaboration tools and an improved content management system make this a serious contender for ‘Web 2.0 application of the year’ then they are sadly misinformed.

I can’t quite put my finger on why (once again) Microsoft have got it so wrong, other than they have taken a simple concept (networking and collaboration) and made it so complex to implement. What would take weeks to set up using MOSS can be implemented on something like Ning in a matter of hours. They also appear to have missed (or misunderstood) the difference between teamwork collaboration (which MOSS can do fairly well) with the development and support of communities of interest or communities of practice etc. In particular, the cost and complexity of using MOSS for supporting unbounded communities would be phenomenal – and why would anyone bother to even contemplate doing so when there are ‘proper’ Web 2.0 products out there such as Ning (previously mentioned, Community Server, Blogtronix or the hundreds of others too numerous to mention?

Maybe it’s a case of re-applying the old adage that “no-one ever got sacked for buying IBM” to Microsoft. However, I feel that some organisations will be regretting their choice very soon, and particularly if they really want to exploit the ‘community’ approach to learning and sharing – as we’ve done for the communities of practice in local government.

So – choose your conferences well. Unless you adopt a blended learning approach, where conferences are just one of many information sources, you may not know when you are being misinformed!

Euan Semple comments on the topic of social network analysis  (or measuring the immeasurable!).
Euan identifies two points that make him nevous about SNA:

“The first is because the activity is invariably couched in terms of one group - managers, the business - mapping the relationships of everyone else - the people prepared to open up and use the social tools in the first place.

The second is because they seek to make explicit something that is much better left implicit. We can all work out what the network is and where the good guys are from the using the tools and inhabiting the environments they create without having to have it drawn out for us.

If I felt that someone else was mapping my conversions and the relationships they represented - and wasn’t prepared to have the same done to them, I would soon stop talking.”

As I have commented on the blog, I detect a form of management paranoia; they don’t really understand what social networking is all about, they don’t want to dip their toes into what they consider to be muddy water, yet at the same they want to understand it in the only way that makes sense to them - numbers and statistics.

What worries me are the conclusions they may draw from this imprecise and flawed method of evaluation!

Slides from my recent presentation “Communities of Practice in Local Government” for the Online Information Conference are available on Slideshare.

Caught this item on a recent posting to Boing Boing. It shows the “security seal” tape that’s appeared over all the fire-extinguisher boxes in the London Underground. Because no terrorist would be so fiendishly clever as to counterfeit a sticky label. That would require, you know, an inkjet printer and stuff!

Oops, missed this event in my ‘Days That Change The World’ diary, but apparently it was National Plain English Day yesterday, 11 December 2007. To mark the occasion, the Local Government Association (LGA) published a list of 100 words that public bodies should not use if they want to communicate effectively with local people.

Local government leaders say that unless councils talk to residents in a language that they can understand, then the work they do becomes inaccessible and reduces the chances of people getting involved in their local issues. The list can be found here, but is replicated below. For anyone remotely familiar with ‘Govspeak’, this is a timely intervention by the Plain English lobby. It’s just a pity that something so obvious has to be published at all! (NB. Not quite sure why ‘welcome’ is on the list??)

The LGA’s top 100 ‘banned words’

1. ambassador
2. agencies
3. beacon
4. best practice
5. bottom-up
6. CAAs
7. can do culture
8. capacity
9. capacity building
10. cascading
11. cautiously welcome
12. champion
13. citizen empowerment
14. community engagement
15. conditionality
16. consensual
17. contestability
18. core message
19. core value
20. coterminosity
21. coterminous
22. cross-cutting
23. customer
24. democratic mandate/legitimacy
25. distorts spending priorities
26. early win
27. empowerment
28. engagement
29. engaging users
30. enhance
31. evidence base
32. external challenge
33. facilitate
34. fast-track
35. flexibilities and freedoms
36. framework
37. fulcrum
38. good practice
39. governance
40. guidelines
41. holistic
42. holistic governance
43. improvement levers
44. incentivising
45. income/funding streams
46. initiative
47. joined up
48. joint working
49. LAAs
50. level playing field
51. localities
52. meaningful consultation/dialogue
53. MAAs
54. menu of options
55. multi-agency
56. multidisciplinary
57. outcomes
58. output
59. participatory
60. partnerships
61. pathfinder
62. peer challenge
63. performance network
64. place shaping
65. predictors of beaconicity
66. preventative services
67. priority
68. process driven
69. quick hit
70. quick win
71. resource allocation
72. revenue streams
73. risk based
74. scaled-back
75. scoping
76. seedbed
77. service users
78. shared priority
79. signpost
80. single point of contact
81. slippage
82. social contracts
83. stakeholder
84. step change
85. strategic/overarching
86. streamlined
87. subsidiary
88. sustainable
89. sustainable communities
90. symposium
91. synergies
92. tested for soundness
93. third sector
94. top-down
95. transformational
96. transparency
97. value-added
98. vision
99. visionary
100. welcome

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted on the company blog last week apologising for missteps with the roll-out of their much maligned  Beacon advertising system. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg goes on to apologise specifically for “taking too long” to make the system opt-in rather than opt-out (where the site assumed no answer to the Beacon prompt was a ‘yes’ and went ahead and shared information). Last week Facebook made Beacon opt-in site-by-site, and they’ve added a privacy control that allows users to shut off the program completely.

One thing that can be said for sure about Facebook: even though they don’t always get it right the first time, they listen to their users and iterate continuously until they hit something people are happy with. When they first released the newsfeed and mini-feed last year, users were outraged that their information was being shared without their control to friends. Since then, Facebook has included increasingly more fine grained privacy controls that allow users to control what info gets published. The result? The newsfeed is often credited as one of the most appealing and important features of the network.

A thought-provoking and highly entertaining presentation from Roo Reynolds (IBM’s ‘Metaverse Evangelist’) at today’s Online Information Conference. I came away with a resolution to spend some time getting to grips with  Second Life  with a view to seeing how 3D virtual worlds  might be used to support the development of communities of practice. At the very least, it’s a good alternative to Webcasts as a synchronous collaboration tool/application. Probably a step too far for the public sector, where I’m currently doing work on developing a CoP strategy for local government - but if nothing else, I’ll learn something from the experience.

Thanks also to Roo for blogging on my presentation yesterday. I was slightly disappointed that there was no-one from the IDeA at the conference, who may have been in a better position to respond to the question I had from a number of delegates about why the community of practice platform was not being more actively and vigorously promoted and marketed across local authorities. I understand there are plans to do this in the New Year, but would have been good to have heard this from the IDeA.

Overall, I thought it was a very good conference this year, though all the presentations I attended seemed to lack sufficient time for the delegates to get properly engaged in the Q&A.

I wonder if Web 2.0 will still be the prominent topic next year? My guess is it will, and hopefully we’ll have some more case studies on the practical deployments of the technologies and applications.

I’ll be putting my presentation onto Slideshare within the next day or so.