Designing for Civil Society

Insider gets Innovation Exchange job

I'm really pleased to hear that John Craig has been appointed to head up the Government-funded Innovation Exchange that "will find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".
Until recently John was head of innovation at the Cabinet Office, and handled the tendering procedure for the Innovation Exchange ... where he's now got the job. I was part of a group that made a fairly innovative bid, produced by writing everything except the budgets on an open web site, inviting anyone interested to join in. We were short listed, but didn't win. Instead it went to a consortium centred around the Government-funded Innovation Unit.  We thought that was a bit inward-looking, and I wrote at the time:

I don't want to sound a note of sour grapes here. This is clearly a very strong and competent consortium. However,  I feel that innovation among nonprofit organisations (and elsewhere, as I wrote here) is most likely to come from open, collaborative processes, not just from inside. Of course, the innovation unit may well be planning something really innovative here. Maybe they could now post their winning bid.

Public sector Forums reported the story as Whitehall innovation: Proving the oxymoron.
It would be easy to see John's appointment as another inward-facing step.  However ... one of the best things about dealing with Cabinet Office during the tendering process was the great encouragement we got from John. He wasn't a career civil servant, having previously worked at the think tank Demos. While being scrupulously fair he gave us every encouragement and help in what must have seemed a pretty whacky bid to his colleagues. We felt he really saw us having a chance, and I guess the short-listing reflected that.
So my overwhelming feeling is delight that someone with real sympathy for innovative processes has got the job. Parent, midwife and now a good start in life thanks to the initial work on the exchange that's been guided by interim executive director Jonathan Robinson.
Here's the standard stuff from the press release:

The Chair of the Innovation Exchange, Baroness Thornton, said that John Craig’s appointment was “excellent news. John’s blend of skills will ensure that the Innovation Exchange gets the best possible start.”
Valerie Hannon, Director of Strategy at The Innovation Unit, said the role was a challenging one. She went on to say: “The Exchange is in uncharted territory. It is seeking to create new forms of collaboration across the sector. John Craig is returning to his roots in the third sector, but his experience in policy and government will be invaluable in ensuring that the lessons from the Exchange reach the widest possible audience.

John starts on January 1, and says:

I am delighted to be leading the Innovation Exchange and relish the chance to help the collective wisdom of the third sector to tackle social injustice in England. Between us I believe we can make a real difference for excluded young people and for those struggling to live independent lives – charities and social enterprises have the insight and the commitment to help make radical improvements in the services they receive.

The second-phase Innovation Exchange web site is being developed by Headshift, who won an award for their development of the Demos web site as a very conversational blog-based affair ... so we can hope that Innovation Exchange language will become a bit more, well, innovative. Here's John's posts on the Demos site.
There's already some discussion on the Innovation Exchange temporary site around the key themes of Supporting independent living, and Young people: the excluded, marginalised and the at-risk.
Previously: Innovation Exchange and the RSA develop networks for social change

Technorati Tags: innovation, knowledgesharing, open, openinex

After the event - YOU produce the slides

One of the challenges of buzzy events is how to capture some of the conversation in a way that adds to the experience of those involved, rather than becoming a chore, and spreads the words.  Matt O'Neill and I ran a workshop - well, more of a group conversation - at the recent NESTA Uploading Innovation conference, which was captured here on video by Lloyd Davis. No effort on our part ... but I didn't recall much immediately after. I wondered later if this might generally be a problem for unconferencing in some circumstances. My post led to some further discussion about expectations, preparation, even moving it all into Second Life.
Matt has just got in touch again to show me the results of a half day workshop that his outfit  Activ-Media ran for the 'KIN' network, a 'subsidiary' of Warwick Business School.
Participants split into four groups and addressed issues around building communities of practice, transferring tacit knowledge, the benefits of knowledge management, and the ways that people learn. You can see the results in Matt's blog post - Knowledge and Innovation Workshop: Outcomes.
However, Matt didn't leave the session with the equivalent of a set of bullet points on flip-charts - he asked the participants to produce a set of slides, with voice-over, which you can see here. Matt says it's an experiment to test his theory that if people produce something tangible together, that can be referred back to and shared with their peers, it's going to be a much better learning experience as well as a way of sharing the knowledge.
Update: Matt has more here from the Corporate Podcast Summit.

Technorati Tags: knowledgemanagement

Gossiping seriously about Google tools

This evening's Gurteen Knowledge Cafe produced the usual rich mix of conversations, this time around social media. The most memorable for me went something like this (condensed version):

Me: Hi - I'm a freelance doing some work on communities of practice... setting up a system for people in different countries to share information and ideas about their projects. What are you working on?
John: well, my company has just been taken over, and I'm one of the casualties. Don't mind though, it's going to be messy. One group uses Notes, and one uses Exchange, and there's no way to get them to integrate.
Me: well, I spent a lot of time last year working on open source systems like Drupal which developers say can do pretty much anything you want ... blogs, forums, file libraries, profiles  ... you just add another module. But .... now I'm not so sure it is the all-in-one solution we need. It requires quite a bit of customising and maintenance, and people have to learn something very different from their day-to-day tools. I'm impressed by all the free or low cost tools coming out ...
John: Ahh! Google! We've been trying the enterprise solutions that tie together a start page, Gmail, instant messaging, calendars, web page creation and so on. It's going to take my company a year to decide which way to go on their systems, and by that time Google will have a suite of tools that will do the job. We have been looking seriously at just going the Google route.
Me: Seriously? In a large company? This isn't just for individuals and nonprofits....?

Disclosure: I'm have no relationship with Google or any other supplier, but I do have a hunch that things are changing fast when it comes to setting up online systems for collaboration. The conversation gave me another nudge. The reasons are two-fold (at least):
First, it takes a lot of planning, time and expenditure to  develop a customised system - particularly if you are working across different organisations or groups. To do it properly you need to do user profiles, use scenarios, wireframes (paper mock-ups), test sites and so on before you build the system. Then you have to get everyone engaged, trained, facilitated, stewarded, maintained. The time and money you should spend on the people gets eaten up by the technology ... and it may not work.
Secondly, a lot of smart knowledge management people advise a more organic process of developing communities online. Enlist the champions, work with them, spot enthusiasms and opportunities, evolve as you go. That's much easier when you have a suite of tools like those offered by Google (and others). You can start with one thing ... maybe the calendar and groups ... then bring in others. You can offer everyone a Home page to bring things together. You still need to look at the different users, scenarios and so on, but it is potentially much more flexible.
Thirdly, helping people use Google tools, or Yahoo, and other free or low cost web apps is going to be useful outside the specific project. They can start to develop mini-systems for themselves.
What I wasn't sure about was whether it might be a serious proposition that could be scaled up. My conversation this evening made me think it worth investigation on at least one of my projects. We may need a Drupal site in the middle to provide a framework, but I don't think it is where we should start. It would be interesting to see how far we could go with Google, then what extra is needed. OK, this needs a lot more thinking through, but often it is the bit of gossip that offers the big insight. Isn't that what social media is about? Including face-to-face, of course.
What are the pros and cons?
Here's a discussion group on Google Powered Office Tools, and the Wikipedia entry on Google tools.
Previously: The Great (almost free) Web Office Experiment

Update: Google has just announced a Premier edition of Google Apps - reviewed at Read/WriteWeb. It costs $50 a year per user account. Comparison of free and paid-for is here and here.

Intellipedia tests the shadow side of wikis

Last year I got an email from someone working in a US intelligence agency, saying that their centralised knowledge systems were hopeless for sharing intelligence about global terrorist threats, and that what was needed were internal blogs and wikis.
I wondered if it was for real, but my correspondent Matthew Burton turned out to be serious enough to get his ideas published in the CIA's journal. Now Matthew alerts me to a lengthy article on Open Source Spying in the New York Times citing his work and that of others promoting decentralised intelligence gathering. Apparently there's now an Intellipedia, a wiki that any intelligence employee with classified clearance can read and contribute to, and serious talk about blogs.
The article is fascinating in exploring the challenges of sharing sensitive data, and who in management is likely to be resistant or supportive. It has particular resonance with Lloyd Davis's observation that social media may work best in the shadow side of organisations. How much more shadowy can you get?
Understandably some people are now getting worried about their personal information floating around spy blogs or wikis. David Weinberger, fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, is quoted as saying:

I don’t want the N.S.A. passing on information about innocent Americans to local cops in San Diego. Those laws exist for good reasons.

I think this is a good one to toss into the Gurteen Forum where knowledge management experts are currently discussing the uses of blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 tools inside organisations, proactively facilitated by Ed Mitchell. As an aside, it is reminding me how well the old email list can work with this kind of care and attention.
Ed wrote recently on the issue of gaining acceptance of new tools:

Also along this line - one way of convincing management that it is worth adopting blogs/wikis is to find some clear case studies - successful and not - new technlogy isn't always worth adopting if it isn't right for the problem... so it's a case of identifying what types of problem a blog or a wiki or an RSS agregator would help solve perhaps?

Clearly worth taking a look a look across the pond.
Update: In a comment below Paul Diperna points to an article where he relates Intellipedia to the development of Wikipedia.

Need some knowledge sharing? Bring on the reintermediators!

I think everyone who works inside organisations - or across them - has knowledge management problems, but maybe don't call them that. They may be about how to find the information you need, get other people to tell you what they are doing, not re-invent the wheel because you know someone has tackled that tough issue before.
Maybe you say: if only we had a good database and information officer! If only the management would install a proper intranet and get everyone to use it! If only the systems in different organisation linked up with each other! If only we could collect and organise our information better! If only there was one place I could go!
Tonight another of David Gurteen's excellent Knowledge Cafes addressed just those issues, with a gathering at Ernst and Young of people whose day job it is to ... well, manage knowledge. We were privileged to have as guest Dave Pollard, whose blog How to Save the World I have long admired for wisdom across a wide range of topics, not just KM. His blog posts are longish, his arguments highly reasoned, his tables and flow charts are everything you might hope for. It's the sort of stuff you bookmark, and feel a little guilty you don't spend more time on.
Dave in person was even better, because he managed to give us the essence of his thinking on KM in about 15 minutes. By the end he had, I think, convinced - or maybe confirmed - us in the view that top-down approaches aren't likely to work. We may need databases, information workers, systems .... but the real solutions are personal rather than central.
Dave started by setting out three principles: things happen in organisations for a reason; people will generally find the best way to do their jobs; and the best way to share knowledge has always been by conversations. From that he explained the importance of peer-to-peer networking for exchange of knowledge and problem-solving, and understanding how people really do things in practice. Instead of thinking just about finding, gathering, collating, tagging information, think about how to find the people you need. It's about connection, rather than collection. The old adage about it's not so much what you know as who you know still holds true. Maybe we just forgot in the fascination with big data-driven KM systems.
So... goodbye centralised KM, hello personal KM. We need to get better at managing our own knowledge, and sharing it with others ... using tools like blogs and wikis. Enter also the idea of reintermediation. In the first IT wave we got excited by disintermediation - cutting out the intermediaries so customers and suppliers, producers and users, creators and audiences could deal direct. However, in the networky environment of personal KM some management is needed to observe, support, facilitate, add value by helping make sense. We need some reintermediation.
At this point I saw connection with discussions among a group of us bloggers talking about technology stewards in communities of practice, buzz directors in organisations, and social reporters in networks. Wow, we are in the right business! We are reintermediators!
At this point Dave encouraged us to turn theory into practice, and share some knowledge by talking to each other ... which is just what the knowledge cafes are all about. Dave gave us a few questions for starters, and our table talked a lot about the difficulty of making the case within an organisation to senior execs about the value of this bottom up approach. At it's (apparent) simplest, it could be "why we need a blog". But behind that lies the issue of who wants to talk, who wants to listen ... and who is allowed to have a voice in the style they wish. We also shared some insights about when wikis work (clear shared tasks) the differences between blogging inside an organisation, and "in the wild".
It all went very well, although I find feedback within the cafe format is always a bit of a problem. One person can't really summarise the views of a table: you either get a boring list of bullet points, or one person's perspective ... which is OK as long as they don't hog the microphone. It showed that eight people can have a conversation, but when you try and share that across 60 or so you probably need ummm, some reintermediation?
At the end Dave graciously delayed a trip to the pub to give me a few minutes of video. I managed to mess up the tape in my DV camera and run out of space on my other Nikon S1. Sigh. This reintermediation is just as hard as it sounds. Fortunately Dave managed to condense the key points to 90 seconds. That's what I call personal knowledge management.

Demos wins whizzy web site award: guide needed

Congratulations to Molly Webb and the team at Demos for winning best think tank website at the annual Prospect Magazine awards, by developing a place for "transparency and discussion" with social software consultancy Headshift.
Demos has been leading the way for a year or two with blogging and free downloads of publications. The new site ties everything together in a spectacular mix ... as Livio Hughes says on the Headshift blog:

Corporate, project and individual blogs; social tagging; RSS; wiki-based collaboration; podcasting... They're all in there somewhere - with good reason!

I'm a bit partial because I've worked with Livio and Lee Bryant, and it was Lee's talk on blogs and bottom-up knowledge management a few years back that really got me started in this field.
The site is clever because it is new-style item-centric rather than old-style page-centric, with each item (project, person, theme, event, publication, blog item etc) tagged so they can be mixed and matched just about anywhere.
If you go to the projects section, for example, you'll see under each one something like 13 blog posts, 19 bookmarks, 21 themes. Click through to Atlas of Ideas and you will find who are the researchers, and what themes are covered. Click on one of those - China - and you can find everything on the site tagged with China. If you click for example on Kirsten Bound - who is working on the Atlas - you can find the other projects Kirsten is working on, and her key themes. Click on bookmarks and you find other sites Kirsten and colleagues have found in their researches

You really do feel you are getting into the knowledge undergrowth of Demos (well, the stuff they are tagging us about anyway!). It's easy to bandy about terms like open and transparent, in celebration of the collaborative approaches that the Net offers - but it is really difficult to make it work in the way that Demos and Headshift are demonstrating. They certainly deserve the award.

It seems churlish to enter some reservation, but I confess that I did at first glance find the site a bit challenging. I'm pretty familiar with blogs, tagging and the rest of it, and don't feel smothered by a tag cloud (right). However, it is a touch overwhelming to find everything so Web 2.0. It's such a gormet tech delight it can be difficult to know which way to turn, and I wonder whether it may be rather challenging for people more used to traditional navigation.
I think it is a problem easily solved. The one element so far absent (unless I missed it) is video on the site. What we need is a guided tour from Molly - or perhaps an avatar to guard against staff changes. It would then a short step to Demos in Second Life. I bet there's an award for think tanks in virtual reality under consideration somewhere.

DIY video clips get KM endorsement

Knowledge networker David Gurteen devotes a lot of his latest newsletter to the importance of audio and video clips in knowledge sharing, with a generous and surprising acknowledgement that his interest was partly awakened by the way in which I did a couple of short interviews with him (here and here) using a fairly simple digital camera. He says he is now using his girlfriend's Casio to do interviews at knowledge management conferences. David's website has a rather clever media player to show these and other content.
As David says, the combination of excellent short video clips available online, together with an "I could do that" feeling, means we are going to see more and more attention paid to mixed media in knowledge sharing. Alexandra Samuel also picks up the theme following my post, this time using the term blending, perhaps with a nod to e-learning where it is used.
What struck me about David's acknowledgement was first, how generous, he didn't need to do that. Second, interesting that it was my interviews that gave an extra nudge, rather than something at one of the major conferences that he attends and organises. I can't really take a lot of credit for my videos, because it's my son Dan who understands the tech side, and helped me get started. Still, it shows that it is worth experimenting.
Having said all that, it still isn't easy. David emailed me yesterday to alert me to two problems. First, videos had disappeared from this blog because they were hosted on another server that was down. I had to shift them across and juggle with code in the blog posts to make the pop-ups work. Second, videos I had put up on Google video weren't working properly either: could I delete and re-post? Well, yes in theory, but since I had changed the email address in my Google account I couldn't get back to them ... even if I changed the address again. And there are lots more pains.
Still, the main point - as Beth Kanter pointed out - is that a lot more nonprofits and other groups are following the path carved out by people who are just enthusiastic to have fun with their cameras and post to Google, YouTube or elsewhere. Nice when the professionals follow. First citizen journalism, now citizen knowledge management, as Jo Twist flagged up earlier in the year.
You can subscribe to David Gurteen's newsletter here, and also find out about his excellent free knowledge cafes here.

KM embraces video

Knowledge consultant David Gurteen's useful website is now enhanced with the Gurteen media player . This demonstrates a particularly neat use of the facilities offered by Google video and other services, by which you can upload your videos and join the marketplace of free and paid-for media content. Where people give permission, you can also display their content on your website.... and David has trawled the content on offer to find videos related to knowledge management and a few other things that take his fancy.

Honda's humanoid robot Asimo is a particular favourite of David's as he told me when we met at today's Contactivity conference. On a slightly more serious note I asked him why he thought video clips were important to knowledge management. The thumbnail gives you a Quicktime movie ... and when Google approve my upload it'll be available there too.

Learning how we all learn differently

I'm more used to running workshop games and simulations than participating, and the opening session of today's Contactivity knowledge management event was quite a learning experience. The aim of the simulation, led by Martin Laycock, was to take us through the challenges of an organisation upgrading its business support IT system.
We worked in teams making choices on what to do about poor teamwork, management refusal of support, lack of employee commitment and limited levels of commitment. We had cards, counters, calculators and worksheets. Once we had made decisions we could work out whether we were improving the project or not through some simple formulae. Supporting software produced impressive graphs. In the hour and a half available we could only get a taster of the full Cayenne simulation designed by Celemi. It was pretty heavy-duty kit compared with some of the stuff Drew Mackie and I use in our games.
People I talked to agreed that the challenges were realistic - just the sort of thing they had struggled with in real projects. However, I felt uncomfortable about the exercise, and I don't think it was just misplaced professional jealousy. I had the sense that there was a box of 'correct' answers in the background ... a manual for project management that we were being tested on.
As Drew and I tried to emphasise in our recent engagement game, there is seldom a right answer about 'what works' - it depends very much on the context, the purpose of the project, and overwhelmingly the people involved. In the Cayenne simulation I felt there was an over-emphasis on methods and too little scope for creative strategies.
Still, I'm not sure I'm right. Maybe the type of project being simulated doesn't have much room for manoeuvre. Most people seemed to enjoy the exercise and find it useful. Celemi have a strong reputation for careful research in designing their simulations.
Talking at lunch to one of the facilitators who does a lot of work using this type of simulation, I asked how he found people responded. The message I got was that in many organisations people often expect to be talked at - and told what to do. Learning through simulation can be unusually liberating ... but there is still a demand for structure and delivery of 'content'. Conversation and insights from other participants isn't enough.
Conversely I found I learned more from the informal chats I had after the simulation, than from my workbook and worksheets. That reminded me how different we all are in the ways we prefer to communicate and learn.As George Bernard Shaw put it: "Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

In future I'll pay more attention to people at my sessions if they say it didn't work for them.
I can't unfortunately make it to tomorrow's conference sessions, where organiser Ed Mitchell has laid on a range of different approaches with knowledge cafe from David Gurteen and open space from Martin Leith. Diversity is all.