Dissident World

David Wilcox over at Designing for Civil Society has done an excellent job in putting together a social media glossary. I’m sure this will become a definitive reference source for many people involved in this fascinating and developing topic, and the fcat that it’s available under a Creative Commons licence will promote its widespread use across a plethora of other web sites.

It also stimulated me to think once more about creating a wiki glossary of local government terms. Something I was keen on doing during my previous tenure as Head of Knowledge at the IDeA, but it floundered against a whole raft of other priorities.  The observant reader may note there is already a glossary of terms on the IDeA web site, but this in not definitive, and barely keeps up to date with the changing initiatives happening across the public sector. I wonder if there is any interest out there in demystifying some of the jargon used in local gov?

I assume that like me, anyone who signed the road pricing petition (see earlier blog)  got their ‘personal’ email from  Tony Blair today. For anyone   interested in seeing what Tony has to say about it, you can find a copy of the email here: Download epetition_response_from_the_prime_minister.htm

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There’s an excellent commentary by Barb Brown on the role of Technology Stewards.

Being a technology steward has very little to do with being an expert
technology user, instead it’s much more about understanding the
connections and interactions of human networks.

In The Full Circle Online Interaction Blog, Nancy White along with Etienne Wenger and John Smith define Technology stewards as: “people
with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its
technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take
leadership in addressing those needs.”

I think this hits it squarely on the head.  I would only add that it also requires a lot of ’soft’ skills, such as  patience and diplomacy. Based on my own experience with the Improvement and Development Agency’s communities of practice, I spend more time explaining to current and potential users why we shouldn’t be embarking on some particular technical enhancement - which  may meet the needs of one or two users at the expense of aggravating several hundred others - than getting on with ensuring the overall environment is fit for purpose. A recent request was to enable postings by ‘proxy users’ - i.e. for someone to submit a blog or a forum entry in someone else’s name. Quite where this would have left us legally if the ‘real’ person had disagreed with the content being published in his or her name by the proxy is anyone guess. Thus I think the ’stewarding’ is probably more important than the ‘technical’ part of the job title!

I’m afraid this is off theme a bit, unless I try and make a very tenuous link to story telling techniques described by Shawn Callahan over at Anecdote! Actually, I picked this up from The Times yesterday in relation to a compilation of anecdotes from celebrated figures of the 1950’s,  being auctioned for charity today in London. This one appealed to my sense of humour: 

Sir Arthur Bryant. 18 February 1899 – 22 January 1985

I had 12 bottles of whiskey in my cellar, and my wife told me to empty the contents of each and every bottle down the sink, or else…!

I withdrew the cork from the first bottle, and poured the contents down the sink with the exception of one glass, which I drank. I extracted the cork from the second bottle and I did likewise, with the exception of one glass, which I drank. I withdrew the cork from the third bottle and emptied the whiskey down the sink, with the exception of one glass, which I drank.

I pulled the cork from the fourth sink and poured the bottle down the glass, which I drank. I pulled the bottle from the cork of the next and drank one sink out of it, and threw the rest down the glass. I pulled the sink out of the next glass, and poured the cork down the bottle, and drank the glass. I corked the sink with the glass, bottled the drink and drank the pour.

When I had emptied everything, I steadied the house with one hand and counted the bottles, corks, glasses and sinks, which were 29. To make sure I counted them again, and when they came by I had 74, and as the house came by I counted them again and finally had all the houses, bottles corks, glasses and sinks counted, except one house and one bottle, which I drank.

Yes, I think I’ve been there!

I was drawn to this item on the Phronesis blog by Bev Trayner. The Knowledge Management for Development Journal (KM4D Journal) has issued a call for papers on “Stewarding Technologies for Collaboration, Community Building & Knowledge Sharing in Development”, for their KM4Dev Journal  Vol. 3, Issue 1, June 2007 publication. It appealed to me with respect to the work I’ve been engaged on at the IDeA for development of a Community of Practice strategy, which included a technology component (web site) for support of on-line collaboration. An abstract from Bev’s blog: 

The ‘Knowledge Management for Development Journal’ (KM4D Journal) is an open access, peer-reviewed, community-based journal on knowledge management in development – for and by development practitioners and researchers. The journal is closely related to the KM4dev community of practice, and can be read and downloaded at: www.km4dev.org/journal

Vol. 3, Issue 1, to be published in June 2007, will focus on innovative practices and uses of ‘technologies for knowledge sharing’. This focus comes on the wave of new web based tools and processes supporting knowledge sharing, knowledge management and organizational learning that have emerged. Sometimes called "Web 2.0" technologies, these tools allow people to collaborate over time and distance in both new ways and in new networked forms. It builds on previous issues on the importance of networks, working across boundaries and even sustainability.

Guest editors are comprised of Nancy White, Beth Kanter, Beverly Trayner, Partha Sarker and Brenda Zulu, in combination with Chief Editor, Lucie Lamoureux.

Proposed deadlines

• Submission deadline for the title and abstract 28 February 2007
• Acceptance of paper proposal 15 March 2007
• Submission of paper 15 April 2007
• Peer-review completed 15 May 2007
• Author revision completed and final version of paper submitted 31 May 200
• (e)-publication date 15 June 2007 

If anyone wishes to submit a paper, or be actively involved in this initiative in any other ways, you shoiuld send your abstract (minimum one paragraph – maximum one page) or your message by email to km4dj-editors@dgroups.org

They say that the Great Wall of China is the only man made object visible from space. WRONG! Check this out from Guardian Unlimited (look at the grass, left hand side, close to the path).

All you wanted to know about Web2.0 in just under 5 minutes! An excellent video by Michael Wesch. No voice explanation necessary. Just sit and watch the pictures. Brilliant!

Public Sector Forums has linked a recent blog I published on the topic of the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV) with an organisation I’m presently undertaking contract work for. I would like to emphasise that the thoughts and opinions I express through this blog are my own, and do not in any way represent the policies of organisations I work for (or shortly don’t…in this case!).

I was reading an article by Martin Veitch in last week’s IT Week about the release if IBM’s Lotus Connections, a set of tools that brings MySpace-like social networking to big business. IBM has been reported as saying that …"Connections will offer a way to automate knowledge management through the usability of social software combined with security, authentication, directory, storage management and integration with enterprise software such as Lotus Notes". This coming hot on the heals of Microsoft providing wiki-like functionality to Sharepoint.

What I’ve not been able to detect with all this Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0  hype emanating from the  big vendors is any real understanding of the human side of social networking and how to cross the divide between the hobbyist and fun culture underlying environments such as Myspace and Flickr, and the culture of big business or government. Control and command cultures still dominate, particularly in the world of central government, where the very thought of having self-organising communities of practice that might threaten the unitary culture is tantamount to encouraging revolution! Encouragingly, there is growing evidence that social networking and use of software to facilitate more effective networking and knowledge sharing is gaining some foot holds in local government.  However, even here, interference by IT departments (wherever they detect some loss of control) and managers who ‘just don’t get it’ can still deter all but the resolute. Maybe its not quite a revolution yet, but the natives are definitely stirring. The IDeA’s version of Enterprise 2.0 - its Community of Practice platform - has grown from nothing to supporting 29 CoPs in only 4 months. My own experience during this time has been that developing the software tools is the easy bit; getting people to understand that this heralds an entirely different way of working is the challenge. I’d like to see some of the big vendors in this space, such as IBM and Microsoft, devoting a bit more time and attention to the cultural shift that must occur before there is any significant take-up of social software within business or government. The revolution is coming, but the rebels need some help!