It was a great privilege to be asked to become the next Chairman of the Online Information Organising Committee, and at the risk of appearing envious, I wish Adrian Dale a pleasant and stress-free retirement. He has been an excellent chairman over the past three years and will be a difficult act to follow. I should probably explain here that despite the surname there is no blood relationship, though I did briefly ponder whether one of the main criteria was a ‘Dale’ lineage!

Looking back at this year’s (2009) conference, I felt it struck an ideal balance between the three pillars of ‘people’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’. The opening keynote from Dame Wendy Hall and Prof Nigel Shadbolt gave us a glimpse of where we are going with open and linked data, and I’m certain this is going to be a hot topic in the coming year, particularly in relation to the “Make Public Data Public” initiative in UK Government. I also felt that the ‘Social Web’ theme hit the mark, and certainly all the sessions I attended were full and overflowing.

So, for me and with the expert guidance of Lorna Candy and the Executive Committee, the work starts in January 2010 in planning for the next conference. I feel slight trepidation at the prospect of trying to predict what the knowledge and information landscape will look like by the end of 2010; the pace of change is relentless. Will Twitter still be the ‘killer app’? Will Cloud Computing become ubiquitous?  Who will be gobbled up by the Google and Facebook juggernauts?

One thing I’m sure of is that none of us can be sure about anything and that we all need to continually refine and adapt our skills. I’m reminded of a quote which is (arguably) attributed to Darwin:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change”.

Let this be the mantra for 2010!

Stephen Dale

Chairman of the Online Information Executive Committee

Director, Semantix (UK) Ltd

I’m looking for to attending the Online Information Conference next week, which runs from 1-3 December at the Olympia. The schedule for the three days can be found on the Online Information website. There are some great speakers lined up, including Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell, who will be doing a keynote presentation on Thursday 3rd December.

Of particular interest to me is the Track 2 (Social Web ) Keynote session on the 3rd December  on:

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED ABOUT SOCIAL BUSINESS DESIGN

- which I’ll be moderating. The keynote presentation for this session will be given by Lee Bryant, co-founder of Headshift. I’ve been a keen follower of Lee for some time, and look forward to his perceptive analysis of how business is adapting to the social web. A brief synopsis of this track session as follows:

The application of social tools and social networking within business is all too often regarded as a purely technical exercise, where simply installing new software can solve business problems. In fact, the really interesting lessons of this new era of social business tools are about the affordances, behaviours and new ways of working that social networking makes possible. This session will look at some of the areas in which key concepts such as information flows, ambient awareness, networked productivity and cheap, easy collaboration are impacting on business processes and business design in various sectors and industries.

Learning points:

1. The basics of network-centric information management
2. How to identify business processes ripe for change
3. How to get started with social business design projects

We also have some great presentation and case studies from:

Mike Ellis, Solutions Architect, Eduserv, UK
Lisa Price, Website Communications Manager, Eduserv, UK
Lorna Ferguson, Associate Director of Knowledge Management, KPMG LLP, UK
Ceri Hughes, Director of Knowledge Management, KMPG LLP, UK

I’m anticipating that this will be a very well attended session and feel very privileged to be sharing a platform with those who are pioneering collaborative and knowledge sharing solutions through the social web. Organisations and people are still finding their way through a fairly confusing ‘Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0′ landscape, which appears to be bounded and stifled by anachronistic 20th century working practices, rules and protocols. I believe this session will offer some insight into where we are heading in building 21st century working practices and the role that technology will have in supporting these changes.

I hope to see some of my friends, colleagues and blog/twitter followers at the event. But for anyone reading this who will be at the event, please do come and say hello.

The IDeA is in the business of improvement by local government for local government.  At the core of our offer is peer support.  We use peers at every level of everything we do, not least our knowledge management approach – that is the stories and case studies, the guidance and toolkits that we publish on IDeA Knowledge.

Our communities of practice platform was an attempt to move beyond the IDeA prepares knowledge (working with you) and then hosts it on a website – which you can then read, but which you can’t necessarily feed back on or let anyone else know how you used it.  And it was a successful attempt – there are now over 35,000 members and 800+ practitioner communities.

But the world is moving on fast and while social networks like the CoP platform certainly have their place, we need to move to the next phase of the maturity model of peer to peer support in improvement and the knowledge of improvement in councils and across local areas.  More and more local government practitioners and councillors are using tools like Twitter or blogs or joining social networks like GovLoop which is actually American.  We’re sharing knowledge all over the place.  And of course, there’s relevant knowledge  from a host of different official sources, too.  And guidance, practice and stories from health and the police are often just as relevant to the local government practitioners.  And there’s always been a rich collection of face to face networks of practitioners across the sector, and more of them are sharing some of what they do online.  The IDeA must move from a model of holding knowledge, to corralling knowledge to helping practitioners dip into the stream of fast-flowing knowledge in an orderly and helpful way.   And we need to encourage practitioners to share how they’ve used that knowledge, to rate, to refer and recommend and to share their own stories of practice, too.

Details of my session as follows:

The Knowledge Hub: launching an online knowledge sharing community for local government and beyond.

• Bringing knowledge sharing and practice development alive through storytelling techniques
• Moving from ‘knowledge repositories’ to ‘action learning’
• Aggregating good/next practice in information and knowledge management from across local government
• Leveraging open platform technology and APIs to provide personalised and value-added applications
• Looking ahead: opening the service out across the public sector and to citizens

I do hope this sparks some interest because I’m a firmly of the opinion that this project offers enormous potential for more effective learning and sharing across the public sector, and leverages the very latest in Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies in helping people to connect, share and collaborate on the issues that are important to them.

Hope to see you there!

I am privileged to have been asked to do a keynote presentation at the forthcoming Public Health Information Network (PHIN) conference being held in Atlanta, Georgia between 31st August and 3rd September 2009.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who are sponsoring the event, have been instrumental in the development of PHIN Communities of Practice (CoPs) to support more effective learning and sharing amongst PHIN professionals. The PHIN Communities of Practice provide a participatory environment for PHIN members to learn, share expertise, and collaboratively develop solutions to improve public health’s capacity to electronically use and exchange information.

My keynote will be based on the 3+ years experience I have gained in setting up a CoPs for UK local government and will address some of the issues that I’m sure CDC and PHIN will encounter (if they haven’t already done so) and primarily how to measure the value of collaborative working - i.e. the vexed question of Return on Investment (ROI).  Thus, the title and synopsis for my keynote are as follows:

Discovering the value in social networks and communities of practice

Social networks and communities of practice are becoming ubiquitous in our increasingly connected world, and many people are generally involved in a number of them - whether that is at work, school, home, or in our civic and leisure interests. Many managers and organisations remain sceptical about the value that is being created by such networks and communities. How do we value shared knowledge? What is the ROI for a collaborative network? This presentation draws on the practical experience of communities of practice working in UK local government and will aim to answer the elusive ‘value’ question.

I will make my slides available on Slideshare after the conference.

I will be presenting at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York on 12th/13th May 2009. My session is on Tuesday 12th, entitled Social Search for Knowledge Sharing and will cover the innovative use of a search vendor’s Application Programming Interface (API) to support a personalised web search facility for members of a Community of Practice Platform, enabling better precision and improved relevance of search results when compared with a standard web search. The following is a brief synopsis of the session:

The Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) for local government has integrated Exalead’s API online search functionality into its Communities of Practice (CoP) Platform. Many online communities have been established by local authority and IDeA staff. Community facilitators can now generate a “favourite” list of websites for members that are used as the basis of their domain-specific online searches. This improves precision and relevance of results, since only CoP member-recommended websites are included in the search. The effect is that members of the CoP platform —all 411 councils in local government in England and Wales—have access to a collectively agreed set of favourite websites to support the knowledge domains of their individual Communities of Practice.

This is an example of the ‘wisdom of crowds’, where a collective membership determine and agree an optimised ‘favourits’ list of websites  that can be dynamically refined on the basis of the precision and relevance of the results to their domain of knowledge.

A discount on the usual registration fee for the event is available or use discount code SPEAK3 when registering.

Stop the Data Rot:
Embedding Robust Information Governance
25 February 2009

09.00 Registration and coffee

09.30 Chairman’s Introduction and welcome
Paul Duller, Chairman, The Records Management Society

09.45 Trends, attitudes and impacts of the changing information management landscape.
Stephen Dale,Semantix (UK) Ltd

10.30 Coffee and networking

11.00 Openess v. Security
Linda Stewart, Information Management Consultant and New Formats of Information Manager, The National Archives

11.45 Managing Information Risk to Gain Information Assurance and Operational Advantage
Elizabeth Lomas, Northumbria University

12.30 Lunch and Networking

13.30 Personal Data: A Toxic Asset?
Lynne Shackley, Data Protection Practice Manager, Information Commissioner’s Office

14.15 Consumer vs Corporate/Government: Whose data is it anyway?
Tom Ilube, CEO, Garlik Limited

15.00 Tea

15.30 Pest Control - Dealing with email infestation
Tim Murray, Departmental Records Officer, Department for Communities and Local Government and Department for Transport.

16.15 Implications for Records Management of the Rise of SharePoint and of the Rise of Web 2.0
James Lappin, Consultant & Trainer, TFPL

16.55 Chairman’s Summary and Close
Paul Duller, Records Management Society

17.00 -
19.00 NETWORKING EVENT (with additional guests)
Drinks, additional presentations and networking evening

For those who may have missed it in the Online Info Brochure, I will be doing a brief session on Thursday 4th December, 13.45 - 14.15 in Theatre A on Communities of Practice, and specifically how Web 2.0 technologies and processes have been used to support the development of virtual CoPs across the local government sector.

The initiative was formally launched in December 2007, since which over 580 CoPs and more than 20,000 registered users are actively engaged in some element of local government service improvement.

During my session I will cover the following points:

1. Introducing a sceptical and mature staff demographic to the concept of virtual collaboration using Social Computing/Web 2.0 facilities
2. Developing a trusted environment in a permiable network.
3. Leveraging Web 2.0 and social media applications for virtual collaboration.
4. What makes a successful CoP and how is success measured?
5. Lesson learnt.
6. What next (future developments)

Whether you’re thinking of developing a CoP strategy, or you you already have one, come along to this session and compare notes.

I’ll also be happy to meet up during the conference, or answer any questions before, during or after the conference.

My session will cover the development of Communities of Practice in the UK local government sector and how Web 2.0 tools and techniques are supporting greater collaboration and knowledge sharing across and within local councils. The session will provide an in-depth account of:

• How a knowledge and learning culture was successfully developed using Communities of Practice
• How virtual Communities of Practice are delivering innovation and improvement to local government services
• How to create, develop and grow trusted communities of practice in the public sector
• How social media tools (wikis, blogs etc.) and Web 2.0 technologies can facilitate more effective networking and collaboration across the public sector.

We will also be having a practical demonstration of the IDeA Communiy of Practice platform.

To support local authorities and their partners, OTS and IDeA will be establishing an on-line Community of Practice and linking with work of the Government Offices in the regions and Regional Improvement & Efficiency Partnerships. The on-line Community of Practice will allow members to share good practice and ideas, discuss challenges and solutions, and to identify and explore ways of working together.

The online Communities of Practice (CoP) environment forms a key part of the knowledge and learning strategy that Semantix (UK) Ltd was commissioned to develop for the IDeA back in 2005, and which was formally launched in September 2006. Since then it has attracted over 15,000 registered users across local and central government and supports over 430 CoPs, with regional, cross-regional and national representation for improving and innovating in council/public services.

There is clear evidence from many of the existant CoPs that collaboration between local authoriries is leading to better/smarter use of resources, and encouraging more effective partnerships with private sector providers.

The CoP Platform is an example of how Web 2.0 technology, social networking and social media tools can be used in a professional working environment - sometimes referred to as ‘Enterprise 2.0‘.

Further details of the CoP for Third Sector Indicators in the CoP for Third Sector Indicators.

I will be facilitating one of the sessions at the Public Sector ICT 2008 event scheduled for 4-5 November 2008. Details of the event from the organiser’s flyer:

A two-day retreat dedicated to powering government modernisation through technology.

Public Sector ICT (PSICT 2008) is an exclusive event designed to help government decision-makers harness technology to generate cost and carbon efficiencies while improving citizen service levels.

This two day event has been produced specifically to help you:

� Meet and learn from the heads of ICT of organisations that are at the leading edge of government modernisation
� Hear first-hand accounts of successful ICT implementations in the public sector
� Understand the latest services and solutions
� Gain an insight into the most effective management strategies
� Network in relaxing surroundings

I will be facilitating a session on the second day of the conference on the topic:

Examining the role of web 2.0 technology and social networking tools in public administration

• Incorporating social networking tools into citizen-facing websites

• Managing identification and authentication for access to secure personal information on government websites

• Determining your approach to the use of social networking by your employees; can social computing be managed computing?

• Corporatising Facebook; creating internal expertise locators

• Overcoming the digital divide: engaging the mature staff demographic

More details on the website, or you can register here.