Dissident

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.

Facilitation Toolkit

I am grateful to Hilary Messeter from the National College of School Leaders (NCSL) for agreeing to present at a recently Community of Practice workshop I co-hosted. The NCSL have created a Facilitation Toolkit for their community of over 100,000 members. This is primarily focused on communities within the education sector, but the toolkit is a great resource for anyone who is new to the world of on-line facilitation, or indeed for anyone who is currently supporting a community of practice.

On-line interaction and fear of the unknown

An excellent commentary and explanation about on-line facilitation from Nancy White over at Full Circle. Very topical for me at the moment as I begin a new contract working as Interim Head of the Information Authority, a new Secretariat sponsored by the DfES and the LSC. One of the key responsibilities for this newly established body (the Information Authority) is to balance need against burden for all information and reporting requirements across the education sector.

My initial thoughts were along the lines of establishing a facilitated stakeholder community, consisting of all interested people, groups and agencies across the further education sector, and through this 'community', encourage  transparency on the impact (burden) of requests for new or changed information. Typical changes are in the way that schools and colleges measure success, and change requests can originate from many different sources, from Ministers and government bodies (e.g. Ofsted) to individual schools and colleges.

However, I soon learnt there is a language issue to overcome first. My initial soundings on the concept of using an on-line community approach to evaluate, process and agree changes to data standards and reporting requirements did not go down too well, and the concept of employing on-line facilitator's for managing change though this embryonic community was akin to talking about encounters of the third kind!

However, I've made some headway by making sure that instead of discussing  'communities', I refer instead to 'stakeholder collaboration', which is going to require 'change coordinators' to manage discussion and connections between the stakeholders (thus, for on-line facilitator, read 'change coordinator).

So lesson learnt here - speak the language that  people  you are working with understand.   The concepts of communities (of interest or of practice) and on-line facilitation are steps into the unknown for some people, and  anything unknown is perceived as a project risk!

More of this later when I've either been given the go ahead (or not) to progress with my 'stakeholder collaboration' and 'change coordinator' strategy.

My thanks to Nancy for enabling me to produce the job specification for my 'change coordinators' from her posting!