Community spirit: supporting CoP facilitators

IDeA

You can read some of my words of wisdom about IDeA’s Communities of Practice platform and the CoP Facilitator’s day out at IDeA Knowledge. The interviews and articles were done by Ray Khan.

While Briggs found the fact that he now knew he was “not alone” a simple but valuable outcome of the day, he also felt he had more of a grip on what CoPs mean for local government.

“We’re trying to sell two very ambitious concepts with this platform. Firstly, we are asking people to tear down silos and start working together and sharing our knowledge – something that is an anathema to some elements of local government culture. Secondly, we are asking them to do so using the web, with blogs, wikis and forums!”

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BookZilla

BookZilla

BookZilla is another customised search site, like LGSearch, that I knocked together this afternoon.

I think it is pretty obvious what it does. I’m running it through Palimpsest, the books discussion site I facilitate, with any ad revenue going towards the maintenance of the forum.

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BookZilla

BookZilla

BookZilla is another customised search site, like LGSearch, that I knocked together this afternoon.

I think it is pretty obvious what it does. I’m running it through Palimpsest, the books discussion site I facilitate, with any ad revenue going towards the maintenance of the forum.

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Hospital Waiting Room Blogging?

Iain Dale points to something which I thought would be very interesting:

If you want to know why the NHS is in an administrative mess read THIS post on the 2020health.org site. It is a live ‘waiting room’ blog.

Although, it’s not quite that, rather a what appears to be a static news article at 2020health.org.

It certainly brings home the utter hopelessness of hanging around, waiting in hospitals:

It seems that in order not to breach the waiting time target, clinics like these are quadruple booked. 200 patients were booked in this afternoon with no increase in the four doctors usually on duty as when there are 50 patients. I’ve been handed a copy of the complaint form to fill in – they have a ready supply. Yet most people around me declined the form, preferring to moan rather than write.

Now here’s a thought, though. Rather than feedback or complaint forms, what if hospitals, and other public sector service deliverers, provided a platform for views to be provided, whether through a blog or some other medium, allowing for instant airing of views but also the opportunity for others to respond in real time?

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Movable Type now Open Source

Movable Type

Movable Type is the blogging engine used by TypePad blogs, and is available for download and installation on your own server. Think of the relationship between the two being like WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Movable Type and TypePad (as well as LiveJournal and Vox) are owned by Six Apart, which was a pioneer in blogging platforms – TypePad was for a long time the ‘serious’ bloggers’ choice of system. That was until Six Apart introduced a licensing agreement which turned many bloggers off (check out some of the comments to this post) – and helped WordPress become the major player it is now.

Anyhow, Six Apart have now backtracked a little bit on this, and are opening up the Movable Type platform for version 4 of the software, launching a new site in the process. Their claim is that the position of the other Six Apart products means that this is now a viable proposition:

Six Apart

It will still be possible to buy Movable Type – a professionally supported version can be purchased.

MT4 has some extremely interesting features, including social networking elements, as discussed at TechCrunch:

MT4 as social media platform allows users to turn their readers into communities through Movable Type’s new community management features, with the ability to give users the right to post, add and share rich text and media posts with photos, videos, and audio. MT4 also includes a new ratings framework that enables a variety of recommendation features.

These are interesting times, and while I have never been tempted by MT (it runs on PERL, which I don’t understand) it opens up the possibilities for either individual bloggers, or those wanting to create blog communities.

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