Dissident World

So, we wake up today to the news that our favorite government agency - Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has been responsible for the loss of personal data for 25 million people. The data included names, addresses, bank details, national insurance numbers etc., so possibly of mild interest to the criminal fraternity out there. What I can’t get my head around is why the Government spends so much time, effort and money on developing standards such as e-GIF, which are meant to enable secure and accurate electronic data transfer between government departments, but relies instead on burning sensitive data to two CD-ROMs and then putting these in the post to the receiving department. If this doesn’t already sound like one of those Brian Rix  farces,  consider also the fact that  (a)  the data on the CD-ROMs was not encrypted and (b) they were sent by ordinary mail, not registered mail, recorded delivery or courier.

Would you trust this government to run a national ID system? Answers on a postcard please to:  Gordon Brown, 10 Downing St.  London!

I will be presenting at the Online Information Conference 2007 on Wednesday 5th December, on the topic “Communities of Practice in Local Government“, which is part of the overall theme of connecting users and harnessing intelligence using social networking and social media technologies/applications. The presentation is a case study of the project I’ve been working on for the Improvement and Development Agency. The following is a synopsis of the session:

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.

The presentation will describe how the IDeA established Web 2.0 technologies and social media applications as the foundations for a new KM strategy for supporting communities of practice that would deliver service and productivity improvements across the local government sector, and how
resistance to this de-regulated environment was overcome. The key points covered in the presentation are:

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.

I’m hoping the session will be of particular interest to library and information professionals, since I believe these have a key role to play in support of these new collaborative KM initiatives, and communities of practice in particular. For example, they could be promoting the merits of personal content tagging to aid search and retrieval, and establishing best practice procedures for sharing knowledge and information via blogs and wikis. They could also be influential in the future development of Web 2.0 technologies and social media applications, ensuring librarian disciplines and standards are accommodated at the design stage and not introduced as afterthoughts.

I’m personally looking forward to the keynote presentation from Jimmy Swales, the session from Lee Bryant from Headshift and Euan Semple’s keynote session. However, I will be following all the presentations that have a Web 2.0 and knowledge collaboration theme.

Just picked up a new blog by Caren Levine at Techstew, which comments on the role of the ‘Technology Steward’. This is something I’ve been doing for the past 18 months for the I&DeA’s community of practice platform for local government. It’s good to see this is becoming a recognised role and function in the support of CoPs, and credit also to Nancy White over at Full Circle who’s done a lot to raise the profile of this important role. I look forward to swapping some insights with Caren, and will be sharing some of my own experiences in my slot at the 2007 Online Information Conference next month.