IDEA+Knowledge+Hub


 * Workshop / Topics arising / Knowledge Hub case study**

Steve made a presentation about the Improvement and Development Agency’s ambitions to create a Knowledge Hub, to aggregate and integrate knowledge across local government. The functionality they are envisaging challenges the boundaries of what can be achieved with a wiki.

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Introduction
The Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) is an agency of the Local Government Association, the membership organisation for local councils in England and Wales. IDeA is charged with best practice and knowledge-sharing between local councils, and in pursuit of this use Web 2.0 technologies to make links between people who have with similar work responsibilities and interests even though they may be based hundreds of miles apart.

Several people attending the KIDMM Knowledge Wiki Workshop (Marilyn Leask, Richard Millwood, Steve Dale and Adrian Barker) were involved in setting up the IDeA ‘Communities of Practice’ system (soon to be described elsewhere on this site), and Steve Dale gave a brief presentation to introduce and lead discussion on the latest evolution of these ideas — the establishment of a ‘Knowledge Hub’ to collect together what is being learned in the Communities of Practice and elsewhere in local government into one aggregated, easy to consult online system.

Steve introduced the Knowledge Hub project as ‘big, bold and ambitious’, and well funded (by Communities in Local Government). The aim is for the projected Hub to be a trusted learning and sharing environment for local government; and, in GovSpeak, ‘to liberate the innovation potential of the sector.’

The IDeA Communities of Practice is a lively online space, where people are organising around certain community topics or knowledge domains. A majority of the 700-plus communities are a stagnant, but a good 200 of them are really actively engaged in doing something.

The Knowledge Ecosystem
IDeA has an issue in that the CoPs were given a choice to set themselves up as either public or private, and 95% of them decided to be private. Therefore they don't know what is going on inside those communities unless they decide to let the outside world know what they are doing. There are some success stories that are coming out of those communities; for example the London councils have collaborated in coming up with one standard contract for taking on contractors, and they have done that through a wiki. So, we do hear about these success stories, but they are not well publicised.

Is it a feature of people who work in local government, that having achieved something quite good they don't want to tell anyone else about it? It seems so. So, Steve was hoping that it would be possible to engineer a conduit from that private environment to a more public one.

What would this be? Well, it doesn't have to be a wiki per se, but it does have to be something that makes it easy to publish stories. And he was interested and encouraged when Drew had put up a sticky note today about wanting to legitimise the telling of stores as a way of doing knowledge management, getting away from structured, highly mediated case studies and success stories, which at the moment seems to be the only genre that IDEA understands. They recruit consultants who gather information and produce case studies; and IDEA publishes these. It’s unclear how people learn from this.

So this wiki, or whatever the Knowledge Hub turns out to be, is to be a way in which IDEA will encourage these communities to start saying what they are doing – and in a fairly unstructured and unmediated way, a way in which there won’t be someone in the IDEA or Audit Commission or anybody else reorganising or restructuring their content. The story will be there as it is told.

Linking in local government
The diagram shows links up to the Hub direct from local government, and that is because not everyone who has something useful to say is in an IDEA Community of Practice. It's hoped that councils themselves can be encouraged to publish stuff themselves into the wiki environment. The way Steve envisages it, suppose a question arose at Prime Minister’s Question Time about what is being done to tackle knife crime, somebody could go in and interrogate this environment and come up with detailed information about what’s happening with knife crime. There would be data sets feeing into this as well, such that people could show mash-ups or ‘heat maps’ showing where the hot spots are across the country. And all based on content contributed by the local government sector, with additional data sets from national government.

Genevieve Hibbs asked whether instead of bringing in data from council Web sites there might not be links out to the local government sites. Steve envisaged a link based on RSS feeds, so that rather than a portal there would be a facility like a dashboard.

Aggregation, syndication
What might be pulled in from outsidde? Well, there are lots of people blogging; personal blogs and council blogs. People are twittering; again, this could be either personal or institutional tweets: lots of councils now use Twitter to draw attention to content. The vision is that it would be possible to aggregate themes or memes coming up from these various sources. And for someone using the Knowledge Hub, there would be mechanisms of personalisation, such that when you register on the site and tell the site about yourself, the way you do so will allow you to see the information that is relevant to your concerns – for example, if you were a social worker with an interest in child adoption issues. The system would be able to steer relevant stuff your way because it would know who you are, what work you do, who your friends and colleagues are.

Steve anticipates that the whole thing will be an open platform, with application, plug-ins and widgets; and perhaps these modules that provide extra services such as custom search could be developed by people in local government. You should be able to choose which widgets you want to add, rather like you can add to your iPhone functionality with software from the Apple Store.

That, then, is the concept of the Knowledge Hub; and now Steve and his colleagues are facing the question of what kind of technology could provide this functionality. All of this might be one piece of software, or could be various bits of software that work in conjunction with each other. And as if the technology questions were not difficult enough, there is also the issue of how you encourage and incentivise people and councils to contribute to this.

=Discussion=

Sustainability of the project
Genevieve Hibbs raised the question of what might be the life expectancy of this Hub; an issue that often arises with Government-funded projects. And what would follw after the project is dumped? True, replied Steve — he’s been promised funding for this year, and they say there’ll be money for next year; but soon there will be an election. It’s a valid point, and one to which he doesn’t have an answer.

John Alexander thought that if there were an emphasis on those topics where councils are being challenged to come up with solutions in short order, things that were very much in the public eye, there might be a greater incentive to share information and collaborate. Indeed, said Steve, and Efficiency and value for money are very high on councils’s agenda at the moment. The current London Efficiency Challenge is a good example. And whereas Steve had been thinking of that as an appendage of the Hub, it might be a good way to kick-start engagement.

Metrics; value for money
Graham Robertson wondered if there had been any metrics work done, any benchmarking so that after a year of Hub activity it might be possible to do a cost-benefit analysis? Well, there are metrics around what is happening in the IDeA Communities of Practice; but those metrics are all around things like the numbers of conversations taking place, the numbers of documents uploaded. Graham thought that the moment that somebody know that something has been enabled to happen in three months when it could either never have happened or taken a year, then the benefits become apparent. Conrad recalled that Marilyn Leask, when she had spoken at the September 2008 KIDMM event, had pointed out that if one local authority was able to pick up on a policy document that somebody else had drafted, and use it as the basis for their own, then just on the basis of the time (and therefore money) saved by avoiding drafting something from scratch, one could estimate a benefit, perhaps put a price on it. Later, someone else underscored the point that technology metrics count for very little; it’s metrics in the real world, metrics that affect people’s well-being, that you need to benchmark and monitor.

Graham asked Helen if it was true that in Lewisham they had had a system whereby people could upload photos of graffiti, which then gets cleaned up by the council team; and the council then can put up another photo showing the wall cleaned up. Helen confirmed this, and the system is well used. There is some efficiency, in that it’s a better way for people to report graffiti.

Adrian returned to Genevieve’s point about what Government tends to do with its Web sites. Not so long ago, he had bookmarked some very useful pages on the Web site of the ODPM, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Those links are now broken, and some of the information might have been taken off the Web. Government doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to maintaining access to Web assets, Conrad noted.

Personalising the user experience: ‘My Knowledge Hub’
Conrad pointed out that when Steve referred to the ability to personalise the user experience of the Knowledge Hub to return information of greater relevance to them, this had also been mooted as a goal for the BCS Web site, which is undergoing a comprehensive overhaul that will include being able to match BCS members’ interests to the information they see. For this to work, you need the entities on both sides of the equation to be tagged: the person has to be able to build their profile in a way which is precise, unambiguous and machine-readable, and the information materials in the system need similarly rigorous machine-readable metadata so that an automated match can be made.

Steve thought that there might be some hope in auto-categorisation to the information materials, and said that the MediaWiki platform (on which Wikipedia and many other wikis run) has an optional module for auto-categorisation which would be worth investigating.

Saying in a somewhat resigned and ironic voice, ‘I’ve been here…’, Mark Barratt referred to a presentation that he gave at the 2009 Information Design Conference which described a project that attempts just this through metadata tagging at both ends. Work on this tagging is still ongoing and ‘we’ve learned a lot… which I’ve heard is a great alternative way of saying that you’ve failed!’

The problem is partly one of scale, said Mark: you need lots of users and lots of content for such a system to start to meld. Also, the information has to be tagged in a reasonably consistent fashion. They chose to apply a hierarchical taxonomy combined with a synonym repository. But there was a bunch of problems. The first was with user-defined tagging by contributors: here the problem is not so much that contributors of information don’t know how to do it, it’s that they can’t be bothered. And if you force them to do it, then they cant be bothered to contribute at all.

Crossing the disciplines
Gill Robotham thought that there were some interesting issues around the social work agenda and multidisciplinary practice. The Government is trying to drive increased multidisciplinary practice in the social care sector, working with health and education as well, especially in children’s services. If this kind of Knowledge Hub could help deliver those objectives and meet those targets, that would be a good example of delivering benefits. One particular hurdle in multidisciplinary working is to overcome the differences in idea sets and terminologies between the disciplines, and if it were possible to build some kind of online dictionary analysis of what each particular agency means by a particular concept or word would be incredibly helpful.

Conrad mentioned the Kaleidoscope Centre in the London Borough of Lewisham, where the intention was to improve the delivery of services to children with special and complex needs by bringing practitioners from across the relevant disciplines into one purpose-built centre, and increasing the quality of cross disciplinary work between them. It has been much easier to co-locate the practitioners than to get them to work across their discipline boundaries, however; there are different mind-sets, different cultures, different information policies and yes, there are as Gill described different vocabularies too.

Gill also wanted to check with Steve whether the Knowledge Hub was taking on board the developing standards in metadata, such as the Systems Interoperability Framework which developed from the Schools Interoperability Framework, and is currently looked after by BECTA. Metadata frameworks of this sort should allow interworking between systems that serve different disciplines by mapping across from one discipline vocabulary to another — ‘when these people use this phrase for a concept, it maps across to this phrase used by this other discipline.’

Genevieve described the nearby world headquarters of Glaxo SmithKline Beecham, which is organised as an atrium with a ‘street’ down the middle where people from different parts of the business can meet, eat and mingle. When the HQ first opened, the Directors were on the top floor, but they have now been relocated to the ground floor: you can’t actually see through the plate glass to the Directors’ private offices, but their shared office space and where their PAs sit is visible from the ‘street’. Now — that is a physical arrangement between people; Genevieve wondered what electronic equivalent there might be for bringing people out of their silos and specialisms.

Engaging the innovators
Aboubakr Abdel-Moteleb asked to what extend peeople in the council are taking part in the Knowledge Hub system. Not at all yet, said Steve, except for the Communities of Practice, where all local authorities have people taking part. The rest of the ecosystem shown in the diagram is still notional, does not exist and has not even yet been piloted.

Steve has had the idea of trying to set up a network of ‘social innovators’, people who are already doing this kind of work but not necessarily engaged with IDeA; because it would be unwise of IDeA to imagine that it has within it all of the skills and knowledge requikred to take this project forward. There are lots of people, Steve knows, who are engaged with councils and involved with social networking and social media. If IDeA can use them as part of this knowledge ecosystem, it will help get things going, and hopefully those skills can then transfer into the IDeA and councils.