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]