Posted by Semantix

I will be presenting at the Knowledge and Information Management for the Public Sector - KIMPS 2009 - on Wednesday 30th September. My topic is the Knowledge Hub - a project currently being funded by the CLG and managed by the IDeA.  Ingrid Khoeler has previously blogged about the Knowledge Hub, and I’m not sure I could explain it any better, so to quote Ingrid:

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!