Comments(0) Slides from my recent presentation “Communities of Practice in Local Government” for the Online Information Conference are available on Slideshare.
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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!
Comments(0) 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??)
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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.
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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.
Comments(0) It remains something of a tragedy that most public sector web sites still don’t support RSS. I can probably accept that council officers and other senior public sector workers don’t understand what RSS is, but surely the various ICT departments or outsourced web design agencies have a duty to inform and educate the people they’ve been commissioned by to host/design/manage their web sites? Well, clearly not! In the mean time, if you want to know what is happening at your local council, you’ll have to keep visiting their web site.
For the uninitiated, here’s a very useful article about RSS (all you need to know but were afraid to ask).
Comments(0) I was looking for some inspiration in putting together some guidelines, rules and policies for online communities of practice. Nancy White over at Full Circle Associates is always a good starting place for this sort of thing. Here is another example. Feel free to use or elaborate on:
Responsibilities of Use
For many, participating in an on-line community maybe a new experience. In this particular community we hope you’ll be able to be honest, open and informal with each other, share experiences, ask and give advice, create new knowledge together through collaborative dialogue and provide examples of best practice. It wouldn’t be much of a community if you didn’t challenge each other’s ideas, assumptions and working practice either.
In order for us to collectively build such a place, where many of you may not previously have known each other, may never meet and be new to an on-line community, there are certain responsibilities you need to accept in order that a trusting and friendly atmosphere can be created and sustained. By logging into the system, members are agreeing to these responsibilities of use.
They are as follows:
This is a private community, treat everything within it as confidential
Without the non-verbal cues, please always assume good intent