I’ve recently started my own Community of Practice over on the I&DeA communities platform, entitled ‘Social Media and Online Collaboration’. It will be a good way of getting the message across to people who work in local government that the internet isn’t just a distraction, it’s a tool that can have tremendous benefits in terms of sharing information, experience and best practice.

The CoP is a pretty nice platform. Using a bespoke system built by a firm called Conseq, it provides simple wikis, forums and blogs as well as a calendar and a space for uploading documents for sharing.

Of course, the issue is getting people involved. With a pretty minimal amount of effort, the Social Media CoP is one of the most active. I’ve created a few wiki pages detailing some of the stuff the CoP can do, my top ten blogging tips and a few other things on starting blogging and a Web2.0 site directory. It will be interesting to see how many others jump in.

The CoP platform is pretty similar to the site I have been working on, expanding the remit of my original LGSearch site, which is called LGNewMedia. It too has a blog, a wiki and a forum, along with LGSearch and the latest effort, which is a del.ico.us clone called LGKnowledge. Again, will anyone ever use this stuff? I don’t know. I know that they are already using LGSearch, which is cool, if unsurprising as it doesn’t need much effort to do so. The wiki serves a purpose as a documentation library, if nothing else, and the blog has a few subscribers, probably for news on LGSearch.

But I do think that LGKnowledge could be hugely helpful to people as a kind of simple knowledge management system, with appropriate tagging people could point stuff out to people in a really useful way. But it needs the committment from users to actually put the content in there in the first place, and I am not sure how they can be convinced that it’s worth it.

[tags]idea, communities of practice, social media, local government, lgsearch, lgnewmedia[/tags]

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Simon Dickson, a consultant ‘bringing new media thinking to UK news and government’, has launched Findless (pronounced Find-less, rather than Findluss, which was my original reading!):

a new editorialised search engine network. Why ‘findless’? Well, aside from hopefully being memorable, it sums up our philosophy that ‘less is more’ when it comes to search results. We’ve all seen the heatmaps: startling numbers of people instinctively click on the first search result in the list. All the more important, then, to strip out all the sites whose SEO may be great, but whose content may be lacking. Most people we’ve asked immediately think it’s an odd choice of name… but pretty soon, they get it.

We’re starting with two areas, chosen because we (my wife and I) have worked in the fields in question, and know the good sites without having to think too hard. One is health and safety, the other is education. Coincidentally, in both cases, the quality information is spread very widely, and you may not instinctively know where to look.

Very similar, then, to LGSearch. I’ve left a comment on Simon’s blog for him to get in touch. It’d be cool to figure out a way to link all this stuff up.

[tags]Google Coop, CSE, Simon Dickson, Findless, LGSearch[/tags]

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LGSearch, my local government Google Coop effort, has proven pretty popular amongst people working in the sector – on the blog I’ve stuck up some of the nice things people have been saying.

I’ve had some interesting discussions with Steve Dale, who works as a knowledge management consultant for I&DeA. Sounds like some of the plans I’ve got for the site link up with some of the work he is doing. It’ll be interesting to see how things work out.

Here’s an extract from an email I sent to Steve:

I’ll quickly jot down my plans for where I think LGSearch might be headed. My first task is to integrate a search for other authorities (Police, Fire, Health), then to have national government departments and agencies in there too. Google Coop does allow you to filter searches down by tagging the sites being searched – so it will be easy enough for people to drill down into results to find what they are after.

I initially started the LGSearch blog literally as a way of getting information on the web without having to code much HTML. However, I have found myself having to resist the urge to post on non-LGSearch related matters, largely on topics of social media and local government. This has made me consider the prospect of starting a new site (LGNewMedia?) of which the search would just be a part, with the aim of the site being to promote the use of social media, with guides and how-tos, lists of resources etc, running from a blog.

I’ve also been developing a wiki, which is currently hosted alongside, and branded as, LGSearch. Feel free to have a look, though it isn’t public yet – it runs on PMWiki, which seems pretty good. This was to be in answer to those people who wanted to set up their own searches. So, I’d have some wiki pages on how to use Google Coop, as well as an updated list of what sites were being used within LGSearch. Another possibility would be to use the wiki to house a list of sites and resources identified as being useful – so providing a directory approach as well as the search based one, if that makes sense.

Of course, the more I thought about the wiki, the more applications I have thought of for it, i.e. providing space for social media projects, sharing best practice etc, the more it became clear that it belonged under the putative umbrella of LGNewMedia.

Other ideas for LGNewMedia included the ubiquitous forum – though these can become barren wastelands of inactivity, of course – and even a Digg style system of people sharing useful links. Again, the lack of traffic might be an issue here. But the main parts of the site will be the blog for communicating and the wiki for collaboration.

The other key aim for the LGNewMedia site would be that it runs on freely available and easily obtainable open source software: WordPress for the main blog, PMWiki for the wiki, probably phpBB for the forum and Pligg for the Digg-link thing.

Rather than using several different systems, I’ve been thinking about using Drupal, which is pretty extensible, as the CMS for the whole thing. But, in conversation with Ben, it sounds like Drupal is not wiki-friendly, and the wiki will hopefully be the most important part of the whole arrangment. So it looks like I need to learn some better CSS to get a common template sorted out.

[tags]lgsearch, pmwiki, wordpress, drupal, pligg, phpbb, wiki, social media[/tags]

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One of the frustrations of my job is when I am searching the web for information on what other councils are up to in my field. The trouble is that, by and large, I only really want to find results from the websites of local authorities in the UK.

So, using Google Coop, I’ve created my own. The main difficulty I had was tracking down the websites of every council in the country, but once that was done (and I have saved the list in about five different locations, just in case), it was all downhill.

I’ve called it LGSearch. Hopefully others will find it useful too.

[tags]local government, search, lgsearch, google coop, cse[/tags]

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The report I wrote about the Norfolk Scrutiny Conference last week can be found on the Centre for Public Scrutiny website here.

Next stop for it will be the Local Government Chronicle and the Scrutiny Champions’ Bullettin. How exciting!

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