Month: September 2010

What community managers should know and do

CommunityFor an internal bit of work at Learning Pool, I was asked to contribute to a list of things that would need to be a part of the role description for a community manager – a position we might be recruiting for in the near future.

I quickly threw together a list and emailed it round, but then thought it might be something worth sharing here.

So here’s my list – this is in no particular order. What would you add?

  1. Network well online – either have or be able to build reach and influence online
  2. Has established online presence and regular use of online communities in either personal or professional capacity
  3. Ability to think strategically about the needs of the community, and of the products they support, and design the development of the community around those needs
  4. Draw up appropriate community guidelines and ensure adherence to them
  5. Encourage new members to join the community
  6. Write high quality, engaging online content
  7. Spread the reach of the community using a range of social tools
  8. Provide regular updates to community members through regular email newsletters etc
  9. Know and understand the community – be able to identify which members would be interested in, or have answers to, certain issues
  10. Good mediation skills and ability to defuse online arguments and tensions
  11. Ability to moderate content and manage difficult members an promoting good behaviour
  12. Has a good understanding of the technology and culture of the net
  13. Ability to measure and track analytics and membership stats and develop strategies to improve them
  14. Ability to identify technological improvements that would improve user experience and make the community useful for the company
  15. Proactive approach to interacting with the community – this is not a 9-5 Mon-Fri job
  16. Knowledge of the rest of the organisation and the ability to identify the people who need to be involved in responding to issues
  17. Good knowledge of the issues involved in the community and the ability to respond to topics in a knowledgeable fashion
  18. Ability to find and share useful related content to the community from elsewhere on the web
  19. Ability to identify key community members, and work with them to help promote and manage the community

Come work at Learning Pool!

I’ve had a great time since joining the team at Learning Pool. It’s a forward thinking company with lots of ideas, jokes and abuse bouncing around the whole time.

If you’re looking for a new job, why not consider taking a look at some of our current vacancies? They are all based in Derry, in Northern Ireland – the UK’s capital of culture in 2013!

All the links above are to PDFs with the details. If you fancy applying, bear in mind Mary’s helpful hints for people going for jobs at LP.

My main one piece of advice: it helps to love what you do when you work here.

10 rules to start innovating

Little Innovation BookJames Gardner‘s Little Innovation Book is a great read for anyone who has an interesting in getting their team, department or organisation doing things differently. Not only is it short, and very practical, it’s also cheap – you can read it online for free, or buy an ebook version for a few quid.

Innovation seems almost a dirty word at times. I lose count of the number of times I see people putting on their lists of words they cannot bear. I don’t understand why this is; maybe because most people and organisations are so bad at it? I should think that would mean we ought to be talking about it more, in that case!

It strikes me that we need good innovation now, in government, more than ever. After all, what with the budget cuts, things are going to have to change one way or another. The two ideas that seem to be emerging from local government are shared services and outsourcing. I’m sure we can do better than that?

Anyhow, James’ book is made up of 10 rules for innovating. Am sure he won’t mind me reproducing them here, with a quick description of each. If you want more (including some great case studies), you’ll have to read the book.

  1. Create an Innovation Strategy First – decide what your innovation aim is and how you can best get there: do nothing, play to win, or play not to lose
  2. Define What Innovation Means – “one has to have an understanding of what will be acceptable as outputs from innovators before one starts to be innovative”
  3. Make Sure the Role of Innovators is Clear – are those with responsibility for innovation actually involved in innovating, or in promoting a culture of innovation?
  4. Have a Connection to the Money – innovators must ensure they get some budget, although not too much – but have to justify it to the bean counters
  5. Address the 3 Big Myths – which are that 1) ideas are the most important thing; 2) innovation is all about big hits; and 3) innovation is risky, unpredictable and a luxury
  6. Manage the Technologists – “The key to co-operation is to find a trigger point which allows Information Technology to contribute within the boundaries of their prioritization framework without alienating them altogether”.
  7. Answer the 3 Key Questions – which are: ‘Can we do this?’, ‘Should we do this?’ and ‘When?’.
  8. Drown the Puppy – to keep returns on innovation projects high, get used to killing the ones which probably won’t work out.
  9. Share Everything – “innovators who talk about their work, share their knowledge, and network widely seem to be much more successful than those who don’t”.
  10. Manage the People – have you got the right group of people in the team to work on the innovation project and make it work?

Personal learning and technology

I blogged over on the Learning Pool site about the personalisation of learning and development in public sector (indeed, any) organisations, and the role of technology in it.

Thought DavePress readers might also be interested.

One of the interesting developments of web technology has been the increasing focus on individual, personal choices. Don’t like what’s on TV? Choose something for yourself to watch on YouTube. Nothing of interest in the newspaper? Use Google to find a blog that covers the issues you’re into. And so on.

Now this issue of personal choice isn’t limited to our personal tastes in media consumption. It applies to everything. Increasingly, it’s applying to learning and development – and that could have significant implications for workforce learning.

Read the rest of it here.

Quick thoughts on open government

I rather like using the phrase ‘open government’ to cover – if I’m honest – the stuff I’m interested in. Indeed, the eagle eyed among you may have spotted that the tagline for this blog is now the suitably pompous “Open government and everything else”.

In many ways I like it because it enables me to put the use of social software in government into a wider context – important given the age of austerity in which we find ourselves. I’ve never thought that social media usage was an end in itself, but perhaps sometimes the actual end was never articulated particularly well. ‘Open government’ does that nicely.

The O’Reilly book, Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice (which I would recommend) offers a useful definition of the three elements of Open Government:

  1. Transparency – open data and that sort of thing
  2. Collaboration – working together better within government (knowledge sharing, learning, enteprise 2.0 type stuff) and also collaborating with service providers, social innovators etc
  3. Participation – crowdsourcing, use of social media, co-production etc

My friend Dave Coplin posted up a video of a talk he gave outlining these principles, which is rather good and well worth watching all the way through.

So how are these things actually going to happen? I think the two main contributors are going to be:

  1. Technology – which I would break down further to include social technology, cloud computing and open source
  2. Culture – including sharing, learning and innovation – all of which government needs to get better at to make open government a reality.

Another thing that is vital to open government is a combination of the two things above, in other words, the culture of technology. This is something I have banged on about before, but the greatest recent example was the one I documented here. Technology provides the platforms and the infrastructure of open government, but open government itself is not predicated on technology. However, I do think it is key to take technology seriously, and not to dismiss it as the stuff of geeks and weirdos.

Here’s a good (if long) discussion about “government 2.0” – often used as a synonym for open government, but which for me has a slightly more technical bent. For me, ‘government 2.0’ means “what can technology and technologists do to improve government”. Open government is more “what can everyone do to improve government”.

Expect a bit more on this from me in the near future as I extrapolate in my usual half-baked way on the various threads involved in open government.

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