Dissident World

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).

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

• Do not lie or give false information
• Respect the opinions of other members
• Do not use bad language
• Do not “borrow” other people’s work without prior permission - where discussions are concerned, they are the property of all the participants
• No advertising is permitted
• Do not share people’s contact details with anyone outside the community unless prior permission is sought
• Protect your password - the success of this community is based on its confidentiality

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.

The most comprehensive summary I’ve read so far on Microsoft’s foray into social networking via their Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) product. The article is an extract from a forthcoming white paper written by three Microsoft gurus - Eric Charran, Dino Dato-on and Greg Lang.

The article seems a bit too preoccupied with the profiles, active directory and people search facilities at the expense of how they’ve implemented tools such as RSS, wikis and blogs. However, it does seem to be a vast improvement over the facilities offered on Sharepoint 2003. Given the usual complexity that Microsoft seem to automatically build into the deployment of any of their products, it looks like it could meet the  social networking requirements of most organisations, provided that networking and collaboration is limited to within the organisation’s firewall. My guess is that it would be hugely expensive to deploy as a social networking solution across and between organisations,  e.g. for connecting councils in local government or for collaboration between agencies and learning providers in the education sector. Sector-wide social networking solutions for business still seem to be limited platforms such as GovX or I&DeA, and products such as Blogtronix and CommunityServer. Still, given the huge investment that many organisations have already made in Microsoft’s Office products, I anticipate a huge take-up for MOSS 2007. I just hope they’ll also recognise its limitations for (social) networking outside the firewall.

Search, information, cetgorisation, tagging, social bookmarking, social media - it’s all here in another excellent video from Mike Wesch.

I came across this post from Andrew Gent today, regarding ‘Management’s’ precoccupation with measuring the value of KM in their organisation, and - for example - using ROI as a measure of the effectivenes of CoPs. I suspect this will resonate with most KM practitioners, who must balance the demands of their managers to provide an empirical measure of value with the cummulative benefits to the organisation of establishing a learning and sharing environment. In other words, you don’t dig up a tree to measure the roots in order to verify that it is growing!

I attended a very useful session the other day, organised by my colleagues over at the I&DeA ,which brought a number of experienced community of practice facilitators together to their share knowledge and experience with two fairly new CoP facilitaors. One was seeking ideas on how he could generate more activity and interest within his CoP, the other was about to launch a CoP newsletter and wanted to pick up any tips on how best to go about this.

The session was organised using a traditional KM technique called a ‘Peer Assist’. The outcome from the session was a list of ideas and actions that the two ‘receivers’ could take away, with the confidence in knowing that these ideas were firmly rooted in the practical knowledge and experience of their peers .

The process is described below for anyone who would like to give it a try. There is also a very useful video showing the process in operation.

What is a Peer Assist?
A Peer Assist can be organised in a workshop or meeting form to gain knowledge and insight from people in other teams before embarking on a project or activity.  Essentially it seeks to encourage a flow of knowledge and experience, and consists of a receiver(s) – those seeking assistance – and a group of peers – those sharing their knowledge and expertise.&160; The time-frame of this activity depends on the subject matter and number of attendees in proportion to the project, so can be anything from two hours to a full day.

How do you run a Peer Assist?
There is no right or wrong way to hold a peer assist.  However, a recommended and simple method that works well involves a number of steps:

1. Appoint a facilitator – someone from outside the team who ensures that the meeting participants reach their desired outcome.

2. Select the participants - select participants who have diverse knowledge, skills, and experience.  There is no hard and fast rule about minimum or maximum numbers but the right participants are particularly important.

3. Share information - divide the meeting time into four parts:

• clarify purpose - during the first part, the receiver(s) presents the context, history and future plans regarding the problem.  They should be clear about what they hope to achieve (eg we are setting up a project on xx and want to check what has been done already in this area).

• encourage the peers to ask questions and give feedback - in the second part the peers discuss the receiver’s situation and share ideas and experiences.  The receiver should simply listen.

• analyse what you have heard - the third part of the meeting is for the receiver(s) to then analyse and reflect on what they have learned, and to examine options.  The peers should take a back seat.

• present the feedback and agree actions - in the final part of the meeting, the peers present their feedback to the receiver(s) and answer any questions.  Their presentation will respond to the analysis they have heard and be along the lines of ‘what we have learned from previous work, what options we see, and what has worked elsewhere’.

Interesting things happening at Google, with much speculation that they intend making a more serious and focussed foray into the social media arena. The recent purchase of Jaiku (similar to Twitter, but with more features), and the growing interest in Orkut – their current social networking site - may make uncomfortable reading for the folks over at Facebook, if the report by the Scolbleizer is anything to go by. I have to admit that I do like most of what Google do, and indeed use most of their web applications. However, they do seem to have a scatter-gun approach to acquisitions, so I’m hoping this latest Web 2.0/social media/social networking/communities buying spree will ultimately provide a more integrated (or rational) environment for their products.