#khub – IDeA Knowledge Hub

Yesterday I attended the IDeA Knowledge Hub Advisory Group in London at the IDeA offices.

Before today my only awareness of the hub was based on sporadic conversations with Steve Dale, which sparked enough interest for me to talk to colleagues internally and see the opportunities for the hub to solve a wide range of business issues being raised in my council.

It really has the potential to transform how the public sector and in-particular local government can share learning and collaborate on improving services. It will mean some pretty fundamental challenges to how practitioners get involved in sharing experiences and practices that a peer community can promote as practice worth repeating.

But also the hub sets out a new direction for the IDeA itself from:

The IDeA supports improvement and innovation in local government. We work with local authorities and their partners to develop and share good practice. We do this through networks, online resources, and support from councillor and officer peers – quote directly off the IDeA website

The khub transforms that relations and reverses their whole business model to one which gives control and ownership of the practice, publishing and content creation to the local government sector. A model that in time could signal the end of the IDeA as we know it today. It would essentially reposition the organisation to one which facilitates the knowledge creation and supports practitioners through learning and training programmes. But also the hub in time could be even bigger than that and could lead to being part of a more open, transparent government and foster a real knowledge sharing culture in the sector and wider. All based around story telling and first hand learning.

So I guess you may be asking “what is the knowledge hub?” Well conceptually that is sort of straight forward to explain but at this point in time practically what it takes is some diagrams and some excellent presentations from Steve Dale and Ingrid Koehler.

Steve Dales slides

Ingrid Koehler slides on Social Media Strategy

The Advisory Group itself was quite small but mainly due to other commitments not through interest, although it did have some usual suspects in and around the social media movement.

What i think some of the major challenges will be in relation to the Khub is the change in the underlying culture that restricts or stops people from sharing practice worth repeating and individual learning experiences. This is essentially the challenge to allow conversations and people to connect in new innovative ways without imposing barriers or silos over them to restrict those conversations.

I believe that everyone in all parts of the public sector understand the need for improvement and the challenge in identifying where and how improvement might occur, but if we could create and foster a culture that made learning a natural and fundamental part of our work i believe the Khub would revolutionise the sector as a whole. We also recognise the power of the social networks (offline) we are all part of that help us do our work and contribute to our learning. The opportunity is to widen those networks and to use the technology to connect people to conversations they may not have had access to.

There are also challenges within each council or public sector body, as it isn’t always straight forward and easy to surface the current practice that happens on the front lines, as most practice is often documented by policy officers who then rework policy to try and drive improvement, this process however is flawed because of the time it takes to go through that cycle.

The opportunity the Khub could provide is access to “live” improvement and learning information. We would then need to understand how our processes could and should change to allow progressive change and improvement and the policy aspect needs to be more fluid and dynamic to enable the freedom for front line practitioners to continuously improve their services.

The whole thing is exciting but yet huge and overpowering at this point in time, the great thing about being part of the advisory group is that we can contribute to the development and see this whole thing grow from the bottom up.  It also allows those involved to see things happening and not continually get distracted by the huge opportunities and challenges.

We need to take one step at a time and the next steps are influence the requirements and inform the procurement process.

A continuous task for the group as a whole is the promotion of this project, well in fact this programme of work across the public sector. This truly is a “business project” and not a technology project.

There are so many things going around my head since leaving the advisory group yesterday, and i will write a few more blogs as my thoughts clear and i am able to make sense of them. but in the meantime I’ll leave the final words to Steve and Ingrid who were captured on video by David Wilcox – Social Reporter

The inaugural Like Minds: Measuring Social Media

The inaugural Like Minds: Measuring Social Media event will be taking place in Exeter on 16th October 2009.

The event is looking like a “not to be missed event” especially if you live in and around the South West of England – but don’t let distance put you off if you live further a field – you will always be made welcome in Devon.

Tickets are currently going at £25 for early bird discount so get in now.

Speakers include Trey Pennington and Oliver Blanchard, who both have international reputations in Social Media.

The website explains better than i could where and what it is all about

A Like Minds conference was initially conceived after a chat between Scott Gould and Trey Pennington, after Trey travelled across the atlantic to attend a tweetup. In August 2009, Scott and Andrew Ellis co-founded Like Minds, after Andrew had a vision for something far bigger than just a conference.

Like Minds has become “a discovery service for identifying new stuff; including movies, books, music, people and places, with the help of other like-minded people.”

What you’ll find is relationship amongst innovative thinkers, collaboration on projects and campaigns, and the synergy that creative endeavours bring amongst people. What you won’t find are elevator pitches, uncomfortable networking meetings, and old thinking.

Our inaugural event is on Friday October 16th, focussing on the subject of ‘measuring social media.’

If you are available on the 16th October then you should really be considering going to this event.

Thoughts on BBC NEWS | Facebook banned for council staff

Now this is a very interesting story, not just because another council has banned access to a social networking site, but because the lack of tackling the real issues.

A council is to ban Facebook on its computers after it was revealed staff spent on average 400 hours on the site every month.

Portsmouth City Council said it had decided to change its policy and block access to the social networking site.

It added the figures equated to each of its 4,500 staff, who have access to computers, spending between five and six minutes a month on the site.

via BBC NEWS | England | Hampshire | Facebook banned for council staff.

The headlines in many of today’s newspapers are interesting but in fact that are inaccurate and do not truly represent the real issues around “waste” in councils.

Now i am in full support of eradicating waste in business and in processes, but this is not a good way to go about it and in fact reduces the opportunities that could be realised by council by using such sites for communications and engagement activities.

What i would suggest the headlines should read which would truly represent the real factor behind this story is:

Lack of Management in Council leads to 400 hours a month being wasted

Now I get really annoyed and frustrated when i see councils make decisions like this because the real thing to concentrate on is the lack of management is that leading to this amount of time being wasted.

Why are we not focusing on the poor management practices or lack of performance management instead of the 5-6 minutes per employee per month on facebook.

It is easy for councils to focus and even target sites like facebook because they can monitor and measure usage through the corporate networks (unless of course people are accessing on their mobiles or via wifi connections)

BUT what about the other activities that could be classified as “waste” that we are not focusing on for example: phone calls, chatting with friends, emailing friends and colleagues plus many more including smoking.

It is quite sad that people are focusing on the technology when that is not the problem, just like technology itself can not solve business problems. What needs to happen here when these kind of decisions are made is to ask the question “What are we really trying to stop?” Is it time wasting? or is it access to social networks that councils don’t on the whole understand? i would suggest the latter.

There is a huge opportunity to promote such networks, in fact i am a member of a government funded and supported social network (IDeA Community of Practice) so i would ask what fundamentally is the difference between the two platforms from a technology point of view? How much council officer time is taken up accessing the community of practice and would this also be classified as “waste”? I feel that being part of that community saves me time in accessing information and research from other council staff and stops me emailing them or phoning them for the same information. This is what social networks can facilitate – information and knowledge exchange.

Now i’m not promoting facebook as such, but this is a decision which allows councils to make further blocks and banning orders easier unless they start to truly understand what is happening in online spaces where communities are alive and thriving and councils need to be connected if they want to understand the needs of local people in designing services. Would we consider a member of staff visiting a village hall and listening to community issues and communicating with them about council services a “waste” of time or would that be considered community engagement? If so then why ban access to social networking sites…