Success!

Well, I was successful in my interview. So, from sometime in October, I will be a Change Manager at the Information Authority. My role is going to be a really exciting one:

Establishing, supporting and maintaining communities of providers and data users to support the development and management of information and data standards for the FE sector…

Provide online and face-to-face facilitation to enable and then manage the process of defining, assessing and agreeing changes to the information standards

It’s my first paid role in community facilitation, and probably the closest I have ever come to having a job about which I am truly passionate. Exciting times.

Of course, I’ll be leaving the local government sector, which raises a question about the future of LGNewMedia, which has always had an obvious lg focus – even down to the name and URL.

I’m going to be starting a new blog, with a focus on the further education sector. The content will still be quite similar to that here: the social media and web 2.0 news will still be popping up, for example, and much of the stuff about community building can be applied to any sector.

The new blog will be called FEconnect, which is already mostly built, though there are a few jobs still to do. The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/feconnect so please subscribe to receive updates as soon as the blog starts for real.

So where does that leave LGNewMedia? Well, I will certainly leave it up here until the domain expires, at which point I will probably archive all the posts at my personal and historical blog. That is unless there is someone out there in local government who fancies taking it over. I would be happy to continue to pay for the hosting and the domain in the future if there is someone who’ll take the time to regularly update the blog. You would be getting a well established blog with a number of regular readers by RSS and visitors to the site.

I’ll keep maintaining LGSearch myself, and will continue to coordinate the localgovglossary so it would only really be the blog that you would be responsible for.

If you are interested, please drop me a line at dave@change2.org. Thanks!

Success!

Well, I was successful in my interview. So, from sometime in October, I will be a Change Manager at the Information Authority. My role is going to be a really exciting one:

Establishing, supporting and maintaining communities of providers and data users to support the development and management of information and data standards for the FE sector…

Provide online and face-to-face facilitation to enable and then manage the process of defining, assessing and agreeing changes to the information standards

It’s my first paid role in community facilitation, and probably the closest I have ever come to having a job about which I am truly passionate. Exciting times.

Of course, I’ll be leaving the local government sector, which raises a question about the future of this blog, which has always had an obvious lg focus – even down to the name and URL.

I’m going to be starting a new blog, with a focus on the further education sector. The content will still be quite similar to that here: the social media and web 2.0 news will still be popping up, for example, and much of the stuff about community building can be applied to any sector.

The new blog will be called FEconnect, which is already mostly built, though there are a few jobs still to do. The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/feconnect so please subscribe to receive updates as soon as the blog starts for real.

So where does that leave LGNewMedia? Well, I will certainly leave it up here until the domain expires, at which point I will probably archive all the posts at my personal and historical blog. That is unless there is someone out there in local government who fancies taking it over. I would be happy to continue to pay for the hosting and the domain in the future if there is someone who’ll take the time to regularly update the blog. You would be getting a well established blog with a number of regular readers by RSS and visitors to the site.

I’ll keep maintaining LGSearch myself, and will continue to coordinate the localgovglossary so it would only really be the blog that you would be responsible for.

If you are interested, please drop me a line at dave@change2.org. Thanks!

Every community needs a killer app

Tomorrow is a big day for me – I have an interview for a new job outside of local government but still in the public sector which is going to make me heavily involved in community building, both on and offline. It seems pretty much perfectly suited to what I want to be doing and I hope that I’ll be perfectly suited to it to. We’ll see.

Anyway, because of the interview, I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about community building, especially the online side of things. One of the key challenges to establishing a community is attracting engagement – not just getting the numbers in of people signing up, but getting them to actively take part. One step to achieve this is through gradual culture change, helped by active and properly targetted facilitation. Another is to create a reason for people to come to the site on a regular basis, in fact to make them come.

What do the following have in common?

  • Lotus 1–2–3 and the PC
  • Email and the internet
  • Google search and the world wide web

Easy, of course, the former in each bullet being the ‘killer app’ of the latter item. Lotus was such a good spreadsheet that people bought PCs just to run it. Email was a key reason for the growth of home web connections through the ‘90s. Google has made the web accessible for the masses.

So, to provide that reason for people to visit your community, you need to find it a killer app – something that your site does better than anyone else’s. Preferably, to extol the virtues of social media and online knowledge sharing (generally the raison d’être of online communities), this killer app should be open and possible to manage through the community.

So, what sort of things could we have as our killer app? I can think of two, both of which I have developed myself for the local government sector but which I didn’t tie to a wider community. I’m kicking myself now that I didn’t.

Firstly, customised search. Every sector under the sun is screaming out for one of these. Google and the other search engines are great at finding specific terms, but they have little understanding of context. LGSearch has had a tremendous impact in local government circles, especially when one considers the lack of promotion it received (a couple of blogs posts, the odd forum entry).

One of the first things you should do when building a community is to create the search engine. Just use Google Coop to start with, it’s easy but powerful (and free) and you can always sort out something else in time if it isn’t up to the job. Make sure the search is both embedded in your community’s home page and available at (say) a sub-domain so it can exist in its own right. Include plenty of cross referenced content between the search page and the community, to make it easy to explore.

Make the list of sites searched open to suggestion (possibly through a wiki) from community members – in other words, give people a reason to engage.

The second killer app is the wiki glossary. Every sector has its own jargon, acronyms, abbreviations, terminology and no one understands it all. This was the reason for the creation of localgovglossary between myself and Steve Dale, inspired by David Wilcox’s social media wiki glossary. These are great, because they are easy to understand, perfect for the wiki medium and are instantly useful.

Here’s an example of why wiki glossaries just work in terms of online knowledge sharing. One of the more regular contributors to localgovglossary is Duncan Ford, and the material he is posting are culled from notes he has been making for himself for years, whether on paper or in word documents. He’s seen several attempts to create an online glossary in the past, but the wiki format is the first to make it a viable enterprise.

Make the glossary wiki a publicly accessible key part of your community site. Being able to add to the wiki is a good reason for people to sign up, and once they’re, and used to the idea of knowledge sharing online, they will be more likely to engage in other areas of the site.

So, create a reason why people can’t not join your community. They don’t have to be either of the tools I mention above, but they are a couple of things that can be got off the ground very quickly and have instant rewards.

Lee Hopkins on Social Media

Great video of Lee Hopkins pouring forth his spot-on views on how social media can be used within corporate communications. Everything he says can be applied to inter-organisation communication and collaboration too.

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