Dissident

New links on Communities of Practice @del.icio.us 2008-05-04

THIS BLOG IS MOVING TO STEVE-DALE.NET

Tools for Communities Wiki

A companion piece to a forthcoming book Stewarding Technologies for Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith. It collects knowledge about how Communities of Practice use different tools. Like all Wikis, this is a work in progress. It collects knowledge about how Communities of Practice use different tools. The vision is to provide a community perspective on these tools and their key features.

GroupTweet

GroupTweet piggy-backs on the Twitter service via the Twitter API. It allows you to set up a private group on Twitter for sending and receiving text messages (tweets) to members of the group. This tool might be a great introduction to Twitter as quick information sharing tool for a small community of practice and people who are new to Twitter.

CoPs at the boundary of institution and innovation

David Wilcox over at Designing for Civil Society has posted some additional comment on the Community of Practice Facilitators Workshop. My thanks to David for his probing questions and insightful comment.

Community of Practice Facilitators Workshop

We had a very good day at the IDeA Community of Practice Facilitator's Workshop on Friday 11^th April. These are regular (bi-annual) events where we get the CoP facilitators (and several guests) together to share knowledge and experience of facilitating one or more of the 300+ CoPs now active across local government.

The day was organised and facilitated by a team from the IDeA, led by Michael Norton, who interestingly enough has just put his toe in the water and started his own blog. I'm sure he'll have lots of valuable things to say about his specialist area - knowledge management.

Socialreporter David Wilcox was there with an eye on proceedings and video camera at the ready. David did a video interview with Michael Norton and me, but not quite sure where this will appear (note - since posted here). David is also trialling video streaming using QIK and his new S60 Nokia so we'll look out for some instant video commentary next time!

One of the key themes for the day was how to make a CoP fly. We used the analogy of the CoP being a hot air balloon, and the need to ensure it could gain sufficient height to cross a mountain range. The injections of hot air being the various activities that a facilitator could take to keep the CoP flying. There's a useful article over at Knowledge Board about this.

We also had a video from Nancy White, who has been chairing a hotseat in the Facilitators CoP for the past two weeks on the topic: Are our assumptions about sustaining groups online out of date in the network era?

My personal interest was in listening to the stories ‘from the coal face', i.e. the experiences of the various facilitators. I have a role as technical steward for the CoP platform, so I want to make sure that the technology is meeting the needs of the facilitators and ordinary members, and that future developments are keeping pace with how the platform is being used. I briefly covered what was being planned for next phase of development, and fortunately the new features seemed to be consistent with what users were asking for. However, I was a bit surprised at how some people were using blogs - not as I had anticipated in that they would be associated with personal comment and promotion on what is happening in a CoP, but in some cases as the vehicle for collecting and distributing confidential CoP comments and documents to just the members of the private CoP. My plans for changing the blog facility from being just internal to each CoP to more of a platform-wide facility to encourage more inter-CoP communication and collaboration may have to be reviewed - though I still think this is a valid need.

Overall it was a very successful day, with lots of useful tips interchanged on how to keep that CoP flying. The benefit of all these type of events is the realisation that you have colleagues out there facing similar issues to you, and can draw on the collective knowledge and experience of a growing cohort of facilitators.

There were a few quotes I will remember:

"I'm not sure that we have permission to innovate in our organisation"

I'd like to think that CoPs do empower people to make change, but the heavy hand of command and control is still evident in many organisations, and could in some cases snuff out that spark of innovation that is in all of us.

"Someone read and commented on my first blog! I got a real buzz out of that - it's not an ego trip or anything, I'm just so pleased that someone thought I had something interesting to say"

Yes, let's have more of that!

"We're all learning together; IDeA does not have all the answers - it's up to us to help each other"

On that note, I went away feeling quite happy with life!

Communities of Practice in Local Government

So glad to see the Community of Practice (CoP) website for local government getting some blog coverage.

Happy to provide any help, information, advice to anyone wishing to use the platform, or anyone wishing to start up a similar initiative for their communities.

Steve

Fostering a collaboration culture

An excellent posting from Shawn over at Anecdote about fostering a collaboration culture. A good corollary to my recent postings about what I see as growing and misplaced belief that Web 2.0 is the solution to more effective knowledge sharing. They key point I was trying to make is that technical solutions (blogs, wikis, RSS) by themselves do not create, nurture or develop learning and sharing communities, or improve engagement between government and citizens. I emphasised the importance of people in the equation, both in terms of skilled facilitators (those who support and encourage conversations and collaboration) and the willingness of the users themselves to actively engage (e.g. a shared domain of interest). Shawn refers to fostering a culture of collaboration, which I think is quite often overlooked by those who are rushing headlong into implementing Web 2.0 facilities in order to achieve better knowledge management.  To put this into perspective, the investment (time, cost and support) for the 'people and process' side of the communities of practice being developed across local government exceeds the cost of the technology by a factor of ten or more. Furthermore, this is recurrent cost and not a one-off capital expense.

However, I'm not encouraged by recent conversations I've had with representatives from one or two large government departments, who seem to have a budget for progressing a collaboration strategy, which extends to implementing a technical solution (usually Sharepoint) and nothing else. To quote Shawn "I think it's a big problem because this narrow view of collaboration starts to get the concept a bad name: "yeh, we did collaboration but no one used it."

Let's all hope the 'people' message is getting home.

It's not the (social networking) technology - it's the people that matter

This is getting to sound a bit like my hobby-horse. In response to a query from someone working in local government who wanted to know how they could use social networking sites to engage with their citizens,  I felt compelled once again to remind them that technology by itself was not the answer.

I know this is a very contentious thing to say, but you don't need online social networking tools to engage with citizens.  You could  - for example -  talk and listen to them (an ancient craft, dating back several millennia, but rapidly falling into disrepute).  I don't want to knock the advantages now available through social networking, which provides enormous opportunities for connecting people we wouldn't otherwise know existed, but let's not lose sight of the fact that technology is an enabler and not in itself a solution. It doesn't necessarily follow that building the best website with all the latest social media widgets will deliver better/more effective engagement with citizens.

The blinding light of Web 2.0 hype seems to be obscuring the fact that the most important aspect in building any community (of interest or practice or whatever) is the people and NOT the technology. Though I do appear to be an increasingly isolated voice on this point. And just in case I'm accused of having Luddite tendencies, I did design and develop the (very successful) Web 2.0 community platform being used across local government (almost 9000 registered users and growing). There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it's continued success is very much a factor of the considerable investment in the people that support and facilitate the communities within it and not the fact that they have access to the latest social media tools. Surely I can't be the only one who thinks this way? I'm deeply troubled if I am :(

International ePaticipation and Local Democracy Symposium

I will be attending (and presenting) at the International eParticipation and Local Democracy Symposium on 28/29 February. I will be joining Diane Downey (Assistant Corporate Head of ICT - Delivery, Sunderland City Council), Richard Wilson (MD of Involve) and Matt Rhodes (Head of Research, FreshNetworks) in a joint session entitled "Citizen Empowerment: Where do we begin?"  Full agenda here. Download symposium_agenda.doc

I'm anticipating (nay - hoping) the session will stimulate some discussion on the apparent dichotomy between empowering citizens to engage with central and local government whilst at the same time disenfranchising citizens through lack of consultation prior to the introduction of bi-laws and regulations. The proposed increase to congestion charges in London is a typical example (and I have no hidden agenda here, since I neither live in or use a car to commute to London).

I will also touch on the success of the communities of practice in local government as an example of how staff working in local councils are empowering themselves to improve services - quite often without the knowledge or understanding of their respective Chief Executives!

It should be an interesting couple of days.

Measuring the value of communities of practice

Ed Mitchell over at Platform Neutral picks up on the issue of Return on Investment (ROI) for on-line communities, quite rightly identifying this as growing topic for debate and argument over the coming months. In Ed's words:

"ROI for ‘communities’ is going to appear on our horizons for proper this year. We will have the debate from the sponsors asking if it’s worth it, and another one about which way around it should be - ie: ROI for whom? The sponsors, or the participants. Likewise there is much talk about the ROI of ’social media’, and all of the projects I am working on have measurement built into them at the strategy level"

Personally, I haven't quite cracked this nut for the virtual communities using the IDeA platform (240 of them at the last count). Since many of the communities are closed, self-organising networks, I only really see the platform-wide metrics. So, for example, I can see:

• Total number of communities
• Total registered users
• Total contributors 
• Members per community
• Total topics 
• Threads with responses
• Responses per thread
• Participating users
• Total number of blogs
• Total posts
• Total comments
• Total number of Wikis
• Total edits
• Articles per community
• Total number of documents
• Total number of document comments
• Number of Documents per community
• Total number of messages
• Number of users sending messages
• Number of users receiving messages 
• Total events posted
• Events per community

I can get the same raw data from each individual community (but it's a tedious process doing this for 240 communities!) - though this does at least give a more accurate indication of the health of the individual community (where my definition of 'health' means 'activity'), but none of this information can provide me with a 'value' or ROI - no matter how I slice and dice the data.

Hence the need for a more qualitative approach, in the form of membership and user surveys etc. Picking up on Ed's comment that all of his community projects have measurement built into them at a strategy level - which sounds like the right approach - it should also be noted that even this can be difficult to quantify in terms of an ROI. The IDeA community strategy was developed to "improve local government services". I can infer from the platform statistics that the communities appear to be active, but I cannot yet connect a specific output (service improvement) to the work of any individual community.

So, allowing for the subjective nature of user surveys, I still think they are more likely to give an indication of ROI if not an absolute measure.  If I'm right, the next step is in asking the right questions!

The Online Community Research Network are doing a survey on this, so please have a read, fill it in, and pass it on. The more responses the better.

Ed Mitchell over at Platform Neutral picks up on the issue of Return on Investment (ROI) for on-line communities, quite rightly identifying this as growing topic for debate and argument over the coming months. In Ed's words:

"ROI for ‘communities’ is going to appear on our horizons for proper this year. We will have the debate from the sponsors asking if it’s worth it, and another one about which way around it should be - ie: ROI for whom? The sponsors, or the participants. Likewise there is much talk about the ROI of ’social media’, and all of the projects I am working on have measurement built into them at the strategy level"

Personally, I haven't quite cracked this nut for the virtual communities using the IDeA platform (240 of them at the last count). Since many of the communities are closed, self-organising networks, I only really see the platform-wide metrics. So, for example, I can see:

• Total number of communities
• Total registered users
• Total contributors 
• Members per community
• Total topics 
• Threads with responses
• Responses per thread
• Participating users
• Total number of blogs
• Total posts
• Total comments
• Total number of Wikis
• Total edits
• Articles per community
• Total number of documents
• Total number of document comments
• Number of Documents per community
• Total number of messages
• Number of users sending messages
• Number of users receiving messages 
• Total events posted
• Events per community

I can get the same raw data from each individual community (but it's a tedious process doing this for 240 communities!) - though this does at least give a more accurate indication of the health of the individual community (where my definition of 'health' means 'activity'), but none of this information can provide me with a 'value' or ROI - no matter how I slice and dice the data.

Hence the need for a more qualitative approach, in the form of membership and user surveys etc. Picking up on Ed's comment that all of his community projects have measurement built into them at a strategy level - which sounds like the right approach - it should also be noted that even this can be difficult to quantify in terms of an ROI. The IDeA community strategy was developed to "improve local government services". I can infer from the platform statistics that the communities appear to be active, but I cannot yet connect a specific output (service improvement) to the work of any individual community.

So, allowing for the subjective nature of user surveys, I still think they are more likely to give an indication of ROI if not an absolute measure.  If I'm right, the next step is in asking the right questions!

The Online Community Research Network are doing a survey on this, so please have a read, fill it in, and pass it on. The more responses the better.

Public Sector Social Media Meet

Dave Briggs has posted details of an event being arranged on 26th February as part of the Community of Practice for Social Media & Online Collaboration. This will be of potential interest to anyone working in (or for) the public sector who is using - or thinking of using - social media/social networking applications to support improved collaboration shared learning. The event is both an opportunity to see and learn how others are applying Web 2.0 technologies in their departments and as a showcase for anyone wishing to contribute information about their pet project. I've been a member of this particular CoP since Dave started it off and can highly recommend it to anyone who is currently struggling with the breadth and scale of the technology options available to them in this particular domain. Full details of the posting here:

Members of the Community of Practice for Social Media and Online Collaboration are meeting up at the Learning and Skills Council National Office in Coventry on 26th February 2008 between 10am and 3.30pm for a day of Web 2.0 fun and frolics, including:

• The benefits of using social media in the public sector, real life examples
• Building social web sites: blogs, wikis, forums and social networks
• Making social online video
• Group discussions on where the potential is for social media to make a real difference and a "how do I?" : Matching tools to problems
• Future developments of the CoP

If you aren’t already a member of the community and you feel it would be worthwhile attending please join us here and sign up on the wiki to say you’ll come.

Presentation: Communities of Practice in Local Government

Slides from my recent presentation "Communities of Practice in Local Government" for the Online Information Conference are available on Slideshare.

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