Dissident World

An interesting item in Joitske Hulsebosch’s blog today about community facilitation. It refers to a
research study undertaken by Halbana Tarmizi and Gert-Jan de Vreede on
two key questions:

   1. What are the most difficult tasks in CoP facilitation?
   2. What are the most important tasks in CoP facilitation?

The
results are based on 45 people who took an online survey. The most difficult tasks were (according to facilitators with more than 5 years experience):

   1. Encouraging new members to participate in the community’s activities
   2. Creating and maintaining an open, positive and participative environment
   3. Creating comfort with and promoting understanding of the tools and tool outputs

The most important tasks (facilitator with >5 years experience):

   1. Building cooperative relationships among members
2. Keeping community focus on its purpose; creating and maintaining an
open, positive and participative environment; mediating conflicts and
managing community through guidelines and rules (all equally important)

Encouraging participation is still the most difficult task, and is recognised as important too.

The full research article is here: Download identifying_challenges_for_facilitation_of_cops.pdf

This looks like a useful groupware application - a sort of del.iciou.us for inside the corporate firewall.
ConnectBeam’s CEO, Puneet Gupta, demonstrates a new kind of knowledge management system that uses Web 2.0 concepts.

Click here to watch (07:29)

A number of people have already picked up on Dave Snowdon’s excellent article on the future of KM. Just mentioning it here mainly for my own future reference.  There a couple of points that particularly resonate for me. One is the growing recognition of the (much under-hyped) role of Librarians in bringing intellectual rigor to KM, and the other is the (much over-hyped) importance of "tacit to explicit" knowledge transformation. Dave reminds us that the key components for effective KM are connecting and collaborating as human beings, and that structuring and organising information (usually with the help and assistance of IT) may help us to make more sense of the environment we work in, but doesn’t necessarily help us to improve our knowledge. For me,  ‘KM’ means human interaction of some sort, and anything that makes this easier is to achieve - whether it be social networking tools or Web 2.0 - has my full attention. 

It’s getting difficult to keep up with the plethora of social networking tools, but have just stumbled upon  StumbleUpon. Looks like it could be nifty little tool for discovering new sites and shared interests.

David Coleman has identified 10 rules for establishing on-line communities, which I quite liked.

1. Identify community founders/initiators, and explain the reason for starting the community, ongoing roles, and participation.

2. Provide a good reason for people to be in the community.  What are the benefits?

3.
Provide a community member directory (with profiles) and an easy way
for members to contact each other and learn about each other.  The goal
is to develop trust among members.

4. Establish
a way to handle conflict at the initiation of the community.  Present
these rules clearly.  Conflicts must be handled quickly and fairly or
they will tear the community apart.

5. Provide
a hosted or focused chat.  Appoint a facilitator with editorial
capabilities (with editorial policies stated), and appoint discussion
owners to drive the discussion to a decision, conclusion or action.

6. Create informal spaces for people to socialize and interact. This also helps to build trust.

7. Create a critical reason for members to be active in the community.
    a. It should be the only place they can get critical information;                
    b. People should receive intrinsic rewards from the community that make it important for them to  be there personally, and;
    c. People enjoy interacting with experts in the community and should be
able to learn much that is  helpful to them in their everyday work.

8.
Bring newbies up to speed fast (guides, buddies, docents, tours,
FAQs).  It is also a good idea to post or e-mail new members the "rules
of engagement" for acceptable behavior in the community.

9.
Keep the content fresh and new with critical information and regular
events that keep people coming back to participate in the community.

10. Monitor participation frequency and quality, and reward those who deserve it.

Picked up an interesting commentary from David Weinberger about Folksonomies in response to some criticism from the Taxonomy camp. Fully agree with David’s comments. Based on experience I’ve had in implementing enterprise search solutions, users presented with either a taxonomic organisation of content vs. doing a keyword or free-text search for what they are seeking, the vast majority of users will choose a free-text search. The reason being that users don’t want to spend valuable time trying to understand the taxonomy, and particularly where the new breed of search engine is able to return relevant results AND cater for the serendipitous nature of some search queries. Interestingly, Verity (now part of Autonomy) had developed a collaborative taxonomy facility for their K2 search engine, where common terms could be identified for taxonomy labels. Sounds to me that they had recognised the limitations of the inflexible top-down taxonomy approach and were heading towards the realms of folksonomies without realising it. David concludes by stating:

Folksonomies are not only frequently more useful than top-down
taxonomies; they better reflect the bottom-up, messy, ambiguous,
inconsistent, social nature of meaning—despite Aristotle and the
tradition his genius spawned.

Wish I’d said that!

Interesting post by David Wilcox today about digital inclusion in the era of social networking. I have to admit to some concerns that there is an implied need to fully engage with the ‘digital world’ in order to be an effective social networker. The digital medium might present more opportunities for social networking, but doesn’t create an effective social networker. But perhaps I’m over-simplifying the argument.

David goes on to mention a workshop game he is developing for the Digital Challenge Inclusion Network that
will help people play through the design and development of
a digital inclusion strategy. He suggests a set of propositions for this game:

1. Digital inclusion is social inclusion.
2. The main social benefits stem from interaction.
3. Digital inclusion technologies must be personal.
4. Personal social benefit occurs in a network environment.
5. Inclusive networks require support roles.
6. Walled gardens offer limited benefit.
7. Digital inclusion requires a collaborative culture.
8. Civil institutions must join in.
9. Technology is not the starting point for design.
10. Go with the Web 2.0 flow.
11. Staff need to be digitally included too.
12. Walk the talk.
13. Co-design rather than consult.

For a more detailed explanation of the above, best to read the full posting.

I’m not sure if anyone else has tried out the beta ‘Coop’ facility recently announced by Google.

Dave Briggs has used this to set up a federated/personalised search engine - LGSEARCH - for searching across all local government web sites.

I think this is an excellent demonstration of how the technolgy can be used to obtain more relevant results by restricting search to trusted or authoratitive sites. Something I’d already included in the next set of requirements for the IDeA’s Communities of Practice site but without knowing what the solution was. I think this could be it! My thanks to Dave for demonstrating what is possible.

Have just picked this up from Mike Gotta’s Collaborative Thinking blog. Microsoft’s plunge into the social networking and collaboration space doesn’t look too bad.  Aggreg8 is for the use of the IT community, but it’s not so much the type of community that interests me as the overall functionality of the collaborative workspace. Very similar in many respects to the community workspace recently released by the IDeA, which I was was responsible for - e.g. you can keep track of your trusted network, find others through your network with similar interests, create sub-communities etc. Plus a range of collaboration tools, allowing members to create postings, post files, share events etc. The IDeA version has some additional features - such as a wiki and a self-contained blog, but lacks the autonomy at member-level to create their own groups. I’m not sure whether the public sector (most likely non-IT) is ready for this degree of flexibility… yet.

The IDeA community workspace is only in it’s first release and further functional enhancements are planned. I’ve now handed over responsibility for the site to my colleagues at IDeA, who I will encourage to monitor and learn from what is happening at Aggreg8.

I arranged and co-hosted a meeting for the Regional Improvement Partnerships on 8th November. The RIP’s have received funding from the DCLG for developing best practice and service improvements amongst local authorities within their region. There are nine regions covering North East, Yorkshire and Humber, North West, E Mids, W Mids, South West, South East. East of England and London.

Most of the RIP’s appear to work autonomously and independent from each other, and have used a significant proportion of the funding they’ve received to build their own knowledge repositories (aka web sites). One of the objectives of the meeting was to introduce some cross-collaboration by encouraging the creation of one or more communities of Practice’. This is part of the IDeA’s KM Strategy it is currently rolling out across the local government sector, and includes training for community facilitators, and a virtual workspace for encouraging community collaboration.

 Towards the end of the meeting, we held a plenary session where delegates were asked to imagine there were no business, financial, technical, managerial, cultural or political barriers to achieving their objectives. We called this session "Wouldn’t it be nice if…", or WIBNI for short.

This was quite revealing, since despite the fact that the RIP’s had chosen to work independent from each other, creating - as they have done - islands of knowledge in the form of non-integrated web sites, the top four statements coming out of the WIBNI sessions were:

1. there was one web site with all relevant information
2. people knew where to go to find information
3. we shared strengths and areas for development in an open and trusted way
4. councils looked to each other for expertise

It seems to me, that - maybe apart from  1 - all of these objectives could be met by breaking down the silo mentality that has permeated local government for too long now, and encouraging thematic communities of practice that ignore regional/geographical boundaries. Item 1 is only likely to be met through having better methods of searching what’s already out there and presenting the results to the user in a consistent way. We’re not far from this with some of the enterprise search engines (e.g. FAST Search & Transfer), but  still some way to go with  the likes of Google.

Suffice to say, the delegates went away encouraged that the IDeA actively trying to build the bridges between the various regional agendas and appeared to be committed to creating one or more communities of practice around their priority themes. Will be interesting to see how this develops over the coming months.