local government

Update on the Knowledge Hub

Knowledge Hub

I spent an enjoyable afternoon at the advisory group for the Knowledge Hub (KHub) last Tuesday (sorry for the delay in writing this up…). Steve Dale chaired the day which featured a number of updates about the project, in terms of procurement and project management; technology platform and supplier; and communications and engagement.

Remember – the Knowledge Hub is the next generation of the Communities of Practice. Think of it as CoPs with an open API, plus some extra functionality.

The Knowledge Hub is going to be built by an outfit called PFIKS – who I must admit I had never heard of before. Their approach is heavily open source based and apparently they have about 80% of the Knowledge Hub requirements already working within their platform.

I’ve come away with a load of thoughts about this, most of which I have managed to summarise below.

1. Open platform

One of the strongest improvements that the Knowledge Hub will bring as compared to the current Communities of Practice platform is the fact that is will be open. This means that developers will be able to make use of APIs to use Knowledge Hub content and data to power other services and sites.

One compelling example is that of intranets – a suggestion was made that it would be possible to embed Knowledge Hub content in a council intranet – without the user knowing where the information came from originally. Later in this post I’ll talk about the engagement challenges on this project, but perhaps creative use of the API will enable some of these issues to be sidestepped.

Another aspect of this is the Knowledge Hub app store. I’m not quite sure whether this will be available within the first release, but it should come along pretty soon afterwards – it’s something Steve Dale seems pretty excited about. Developers will be able to create apps which make use of content and data stored within the Knowledge Hub to do cool stuff. I’m guessing it will be a two way thing, so content etc externally stored can be pulled into the Knowledge Hub and mashed up with other content.

It’s certainly something for Learning Pool, and I guess other suppliers to local gov, to consider – how can our tools and content interact with the Knowledge Hub?

2. Open source

The open source approach is to integrate various components into a stable, cohesive platform. This appears to be based on the Liferay publishing platform, with others bits added in to provide extra functionality – such as DimDim, for example, for online meetings and webinars; and Flowplayer for embedding video.

On the backend, the open source technology being used includes the Apache Solr search platform which is then extended with Nutch; and Carrot2, which clusters collections of documents – such as the results of a search query – into thematic categories. I think it is fair to say that the search bit of the KHub should be awesome.

What is also cool is that PFIKS publish their code to integrate all this stuff as open source as well – so not only are they using open source, they are also contributing back into the community. This is good.

Open Source, as I have written earlier, is not as simple a thing to understand as it might first appear. There are numerous complications around licensing and business models that have to be considered before a project commences. It certainly isn’t the case that by using open source tools that you can just rely on the community to do stuff for you for free – which seems a common misunderstanding.

Still, from the early exchanges, it appears that PFIKS get open source and are taking an active involvement in the developer communities that contribute to their platform. Hopefully the Knowledge Hub will end up as being a great example of collaboration between government, a supplier, and the open source community.

3. Data

One of the original purposes of the Knowledge Hub was that it would be a tool to help local authorities share their data. This was a couple of years ago, when Steve first started talking about the project, when data.gov.uk didn’t exist and the thought of publishing all purchases over £500 would have been anathema.

It would appear that the data side of things is taking a bit of a back seat at the moment, with the revamp of the communities taking centre stage. My understanding up until this point was that the Knowledge Hub would act as a repository for local government data to be stored and published. It would appear from some of the responses at the meeting that isn’t going to be the case now.

This is, in many ways, probably a good thing, as authorities like Lincoln, Warwickshire and Lichfield (amongst others) are proving that publishing data isn’t actually that hard.

However, all those authorities are those with really talented, and data-savvy people working on their web and ICT stuff. Are all councils that lucky? Perhaps not.

Hadley Beeman’s proposed project seems to be one that pretty much does what I thought the Knowledge Hub might do, and so again, maybe a good reason for the KHub not to do it.

When a question was asked about data hosting on KHub, the response was that it could be possible on a time-limited basis. In other words (I think), you could upload some data, mash it up with something else on the KHub, then pull it out again. Does that make sense? I thought it did, but now I have typed it up it seems kind of stupid. I must have got it wrong.

4. Engagement

You could count the number of people who actually came from real local authorities on one hand at the meeting, which for an advisory group is slightly worrying – not least because this was the big ‘reveal’ when we found out what the solution was going to be and who the supplier was. Actually – maybe that’s not of huge interest to the sector?

Anyway, it’s fair to say that there hasn’t been a huge level of interest from the user side of things throughout this project. Again, maybe that’s fair enough – perhaps in this age of austerity, folk at the coal face need to be concentrating on less abstract things. But now the KHub is becoming a reality I think it will become increasingly important to get people from the sector involved in what is going on to ensure it meets their needs and suits the way they work. By the sound of the work around the ‘knowledge ecology’ that Ingrid is working on, plenty of effort is going to be put in this direction.

It will also be vital for the Knowledge Hub to have some high quality content to attract people into the site when it first launches, to encourage engagement across the sector.

For all the talk of open APIs and the Knowledge Hub being a platform as much as a website, it still figures that for it to work, people need to actually take a look at it now and again. To drag eyeballs in, there needs to be some great content sat there waiting for people to find and be delighted by.

Much of this could be achieved by the transfer of the vast majority of the existing content on the Communities of Practice. There’s an absolute tonne of great content on there, and because of the way the CoPs are designed, quite a lot of it is locked away in communities that a lot of people don’t have access to. By transferring all the content across and making it more findable, the whole platform will be refreshed.

5. Fragmentation

The issue of fragmentation occurred to me as the day went on, and in many ways it touches on all of the points above. For while the Knowledge Hub both pulls in content from elsewhere and makes its own content available for other sites, there are still going to be outposts here and there which just don’t talk a language the KHub understands or indeed any language at all.

It’ll be great for dorks like me to automatically ping my stuff into Knowledge Hub, whether posts from this blog, or my Delicious bookmarks, shared Google Reader items, or videos I like. But those sites which publish stuff without

One striking example of this are the Knowledge Forums on the LG Improvement and Development website, which have continued despite the existence of the functionally richer Communities of Practice. My instinct would always to have been to close these forums and port them to the CoPs to both reduce the fragmentation of content and the confusion to potential users.

What about the content and resources on the rest of the LG Improvement and Development website – will that continue to exist outside of the rest of the platform, or will it be brought inside the KHub?

There are plenty of other examples of good content existing in formats which can’t easily be resused in the KHub, and for it to be the window on local government improvement, it’s going to need to drag this stuff in. Maybe a technology like ScraperWiki could help?

Innovation in Public Services: Small is Beautiful

An interesting item on NESTA’s website, with some accompanying useful resources, summarising the recent launch of the ‘Small is Beautiful’ paper on innovation in local government.

NESTA supported the Local Government Information Unit to analyse the entries to its ‘Small is Beautiful’ competition, which asked local authorities to submit examples of innovation they had implemented in non-statutory services.

Glyn Gaskarth from the LGIU described the entries received and what they suggest about the state of innovation in local government. Glyn noted the number and diversity of the entries received, but also that the key to their success was that they were often led by small teams with small budgets. While some of the examples might seem quite marginal from a national perspective, they have made a decisive difference to their local area (for example, in reducing offending or improving social cohesion), and some of them could be seen as the ‘Big Society’ in action. Glyn outlined the main proposal from the report – that local authorities could establish a new way to encourage and support these types of activities by creating innovation funds drawn from their own discretionary spending.

The Small is Beautiful paper is here (PDF warning).

At the event, Rochford District Council provided a case study of the work they have been doing to support local retailers, called ‘Shop at My Local’. Here’s the slides (again, PDF warning).

In the following discussion several barriers were identified:

  • While there was a shared recognition of the barriers (such as funding, risk-aversion and evaluating the benefits), there was some concern about the risk of painting too negative a picture of the ability of local government to innovate, and so this becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was also noted the many large private sector organisations face similar challenges in establishing a pro-innovation culture.
  • Many in the audience pointed out that local government could make more use of the resources and organisations that already exist in order to innovate, from volunteers and the third sector, to funders such as NESTA, in lieu of establishing their own funds.
  • Similarly, there was a lot of discussion about existing mechanisms used by local authorities to support innovation, for example the Innovation Unit described the innovation lab they are helping Knowsley to establish, and another member of the audience highlighted the Local Strategic Partnerships that have innovation boards and funds.
  • There was, however, shared concern that time was against us, and that many of the innovative approaches such as those highlighted in the report, and the mechanisms that can support them (such as local invest-to-save budgets), are now at risk of being cut in the current age of austerity.

There’s more on NESTA’s website – including a whole load of resources for innovation in public services.

Thanks to Dom for highlighting this in his link round up.

What is the Knowledge Hub?

The Knowledge Hub is an ambitious project by Local Government Improvement and Development (what was the IDeA) to provide two main things: a new platform for the Communities of Practice to replace the rather clunky current one; and to provide a service for data sharing and hosting – a little like data.gov.uk but for local stuff.

Steve Dale, the architect of the incredibly successful Communities of Practice, is the guy behind the Knowledge Hub, ably assisted by luminaries of local gov 2.0 like Ingrid Koehler. It should be great.

I’ve embedded a video below which explains the Knowledge Hub in a practical sort of way.

The procurement process for the technology bit of the Knowledge Hub was recently completed and at a meeting of the steering group on Tuesday (27th July) we’ll get to find out who the winner is and what the finished thing might look like. My understanding is that the Knowledge Hub will then launch in the new year.

Learning Pool were delighted to be asked to produce the animation for the video above, and we think it has come out pretty well. If you think you have a use for something similar, do get in touch!

Enhancing Local Democracy

Today Learning Pool are exhibiting at the Enchancing Local Democracy conference, organised by South East Employers. There are some interesting speakers on the agenda, and the workshops look good too – especially the one in the morning run by Catherine Howe and in the afternoon with the guys from the Centre for Public Scrutiny.

I’ll live blog interesting bits as they occur, and will keep updating this post during the day, rather than do a new post for each session. Hope it’s useful!

Hit refresh to get the latest.

First session is ‘Driving the Next Public Service Revolution’ presented by Tony Bovaird, Professor of Public Management and Policy, INLOGOV, University of Birmingham. Should be good!

  • So much change going on at the moment – some welcome, some ‘surprising’. Who have predicted the proposed health reforms?
  • Tony will cover: decentralisation, Big Society, VfM in local gov, driving public sector improvement through innovation, co-production, self-organising
  • People have been served well by the ‘big state’ – but perhaps not as well as we would have liked
  • Half a million people involved in inspection, regulation etc in the UK
  • Big Society move to citizen involvement and rolling back the state. Won’t happen for 10 year or more but we can and should prepare
  • Self help and self organising are big and powerful, as are public agencies – but co-production is a thin interface
  • Usual process of input > activity > output > outcome is getting more complicated with more and more people involved in different roles. EG partnership working between multiple agencies, and also citizen input. More complex but can provide better value for money
  • Big Society ides not a new one, and society is not broken. Social action already happening but could be more effective. State can help by keeping out where it is working, shaping where it partly works
  • The state just doesn’t know what is already happening in society
  • 35% of people have help once a month to non relatives during the last year
  • 4% people involved in local services, 5% want more involvement, 24% want to have more say, 47% want to be more informed
  • Self organising sometimes doesn’t work, eg where arbitration is needed, regulation of people that do things which harm themselves and others, where people would naturally try to be free riders (nobody sweeps the street) or activity doesn’t pay for itself
  • Local gov needs to learn how self organising is currently working, eg from third sector – government really doesn’t understand what is going on. Local gov needs to learn how self organising could be made to work better too.
  • After 10 years of best value and transformation people are much less certain that things are being done the best way. Also little clarity about what better looks like – lots of attractive options, which is best?
  • Local gov knows that service users know stuff that professionals don’t. They also have time and energy to put into helping others and can make services more effective
  • Co-production includes: planning, design, commissioning, financing, managing, delivery, monitoring and evaluation (stick ‘co-‘ in from of all those)
  • Principles of co-production: users are active asset-holders not passive consumers. Collaboration rather than paternalism. Delivery of outcomes, not services.
  • Most doctors appreciate better informed patients, but 1/3 prefer to be the only ‘clever’ participant in the process (Czech survey)
  • How important is role of citizen in service delivery? Public official: not very. Citizen: Very!
  • Levels of co-production differ greatly between activities.
  • Great user involvement in UK than rest of Europe?
  • Many citizens in a survey said they are willing to do more, get more involved. But it has to be on an issue they are interested in!
  • South Somerset – local residents work with police to fight speeding motorists
  • Realtime customer service using Twitter etc – example of Camden parks closing – nice!
  • What local gov did 20 years ago was red hot and interesting but now is dull and unimaginative. That’s how we now will look in the future
  • Send citizens and the media out of the authority area – even abroad – to learn about what is being done elsewhere
  • All change involves risk – and fast change such as we are now facing is even bigger. But we are already taking huge risks – we just don’t acknowledge it.
  • Time to accept different risk to cost payoff.
  • If citizens play a great role in self help, self org and co-production of services in the future then should their decisions making role in public services be revised?
  • We must acknowledge that those who get involved in co-production are not and do not need to be “representative” – and that’s fine
  • Local gov must get comfortable about trusting people.
  • Society and community are not free!

Good stuff from Tony. Workshops now, will take a break from blogging – back later.

Well, that was fun. Now up is Bob Neill, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Communities and Local Government. He is sufficiently important not to have a title for his talk.

  • Localism is a key priority for and the government and CLG.
  • Shifting the balance of the way society operates from centralised state to trusting communities
  • Over centralisation not healthy for local democracy. Need for discretion at a local level
  • Need for new and imaginative thinking and ways of doing things.
  • Accountability must stay local, but sharing services over a wider area (DB: is this feasible?)
  • Greater flexibility needed for local authorities, but also genuine voice and choice for local residents. Need to citizens to take responsibility.
  • CLG will also publish everything they spend over £500. Need for openness and transparency
  • Choice over local government structure – ie cabinets or committees, mayor etc. Local structures that meet the needs of the residents of the area.
  • Growth incentives – councils can keep revenue from local developments

Sorry everyone, I fell asleep a bit there. Lunch now!

Whilst Dave attended Catherine Howe’s, Social Media session I (Breda, Dave’s Learning pal at Learning Pool) decided to go along to the Innovative Member Development workshop led by Mark Palmer, SEE and Cllr Bill Chapple, Deputy Leader of Buckinghamshire County Council and Cabinet Member for member development.

The workshop covered the importance of Local Government organizations to provide elected members with necessary knowledge to complete their role more effectively. The sense of empowerment this provides also ensures Councillors gain enjoyment from their role. Cllr Chapple shared his story about becoming an elected member in 1977 when his induction consisted of one short-line by his council chairman who advised him to ‘Settle down and you will gradually see what you have to do.’ Not the most encouraging induction for a young councillor starting out. Presumably this lack of guidance is the reason behind Cllr Chapple’s own emphasis on ensuring that elected members within Buckinghamshire County Council receive the development and support they need to engage with the public and become valuable community leaders.

The approach of Buckinghamshire Council to member development includes:

  • Training designed by members for members
  • One to one sessions to determine a Councillor’s individual needs
  • Training doesn’t end at induction but is available throughout a member’s full term in office
  • Elected members have access to the Council’s online learning zone

One important area the session didn’t really cover (partly due to time constraints) was looking at the innovative ways member development could be delivered. Not only is member development essential but it should be provided in a way which considers a Councillor’s other commitments such as work and family whilst also making any training given an engaging and interactive experience. The increased time and cost of classroom based training over online which gives member have control when they complete their training in an environment where they must interact with the learning material if they are to complete it, surely the more innovative option?

Learning Pool certainly thinks so, and their Modern Councillor service provides online learning for elected members in the form of e-learning modules and an online community where members can seek advice from other councillors, share their stories learning resources and collaborate on new learning.

Right, time to join Dave at lunch!

Dave here again. Gah, lunch still hasn’t started. Instead, here’s Ipsos-MORI’s ten top tips for priority setting with the public.

  1. Make the case for change (why involve public? What’s the context? When will impact be felt?)
  2. Use existing insight (what aspects of service do people rate poorly? What’s important? Have issues changed over time? How do they compare to benchmarks? Might issues change when talking about money?)
  3. Get the information balance right (How much detail is required? How might info be presented to participants? Do public understand why the service exists? Who will present the information?)
  4. Be clear about your question (what do you want to discuss? Have you already made a decision – if so, why consult? What will you do as a result of the consultation? Citizens or service users?
  5. How do you involve wider stakeholders? (Define roles. Expert witnesses or participant guides? Personal or organisational perspective?)
  6. Use skilled and independent facilitation (context for decision making not rubber stamping, need for neutrality, facilitators must be able to deal with tricky questions)
  7. Choose methods and techniques with care (what service are you discussing? who are you speaking to? the need to be cost effective, understanding the decisions that are made and why)
  8. Understand why people make the decisions that they do (do you understand the principles behind decisions? exercise has the potential to help shape future decision making and allows you to generalise beyond specifics)
  9. Tell people what you do (tackle scepticism head on, if you don’t agree say why, difference between outputs and outcomes)
  10. This is not the end – keep the dialogue going (what next? what are options for keeping things going?)

Right – surely it’s lunchtime now? I don’t think I have ever been so desperate for a sandwich.

Lunch was good – but no cake! WTF?

Let’s crack on. Now up is a session called “Total Place – a blueprint for Localism?” by Roger Gough and Tanya Oliver, Kent County Council.

  • Total place pilot ended March 2010
  • Brand will not continue, principles will
  • New focus on transparency
  • “Sponsored disruptive redesign” – ooooh!
  • Up to local gov to make this happen – no template forthcoming from gov’t
  • TP pilot has transformed relationship between the council and job centre plus
  • £8.25 billion spend public sector in kent
  • More than £5 billion in capital assets
  • Gateway – access to public and third sector services
  • Barriers: data ownership, storage, confidentiality and sharing, existing outsourced contracts, national performance frameworks, local cultural issues, brand identity, inconsistency of partner risk appetite, invest to save and budget alignment
  • Margate problems – disproportionate spending on small number of people in disadvantaged communities, high rates of transience and vulnerable families. History of public policy failure.
  • Margate solution – solution housing vehicle, stop placement of vulnerable people in the area. Map assets across Kent. Analysis of quality and purpose of the estate. Targeted delivery using Mosaic.
  • Map of assets shows alomst random clusters of properties
  • More barriers: politics, governance arrangements, poor data, control of assets, leasing arrangements.
  • Analysis shows that savings possible through redundancy is £2.2m. Predicted savings through the Gateway process are in the 10s of millions.
  • Relationships are vital – “partnership of the willing”. Democratic ownership is critical.
  • Window of opportunity ahead of CSR to make propositions to government.

Reflecting on Local by Social

I wrote up quite a bit of what was said at the Local by Social event yesterday, but didn’t add much in the way of comment or analysis. This post makes up for that. I’ll try and sum up what the themes were for me which really stood out.

First of all, of course, great work FutureGov and IDeA!

Local by Social

Me, Steve Bridger and Lloyd Davis, by Paul Clarke

1. We probably are moving on from talking about social media

I did think just how far things have moved on in the last few years. I remember conversations had with Steve Dale back in 2006 when it seemed like nobody else in local government was remotely interested. Now it seems like most authorities are at least aware of the developments in the web and how citizens are using it – and are starting to think how they might engage with it.

I think that ‘social media’ as being seen as a distinct element of activity is starting to disappear, with some bits heading into comms, other bits into web teams and so on. Our project with Central Bedfordshire, Let’s Talk Central, was delivered through the consultation team, for example.

In other words, using social media tools is becoming less of a thing, and more just a set of skills for delivering tasks and activity, which is almost certainly the right thing to do.

However, it still seems to be that comms and marketing folk are those most often attracted to events like this, which is a shame as service managers and policy types need to be a part of this conversation too.

2. Rethinking relationships

Much of the discussion at Local by Social was not about using social media but what was made possible by social media – which is a healthy way of looking at things. Much of this is focused on relationships – between government and governed, service designers and users, between individuals living in an area.

If anything local government should be looking to foster relationships and take an active part whenever it can. Reinventing relationships too, where necessary – giving people power to organise stuff for themselves where they want to, only stepping in when needed.

Another relationship to be rethought is between government and supplier, of course. All the presentations from social innovators were from small organisations which may not fit in too well with existing procurement systems and whatnot. To tap into these great ideas and enthusiastic people, process might need to give way.

3. Focus on outcomes

Following on from this, councils must think strategically about what it is they are trying to achieve rather than what is being done and who is doing it. It may well be that patchworks of service delivery models are required – some areas may have residents who can organise themselves, others may not.

It looks like a lot of the discussion around efficiency savings in local government is focusing on reducing staff numbers, restructuring and cutting services. In other words, doing the same things, only cheaper. This means councils could fall into the trap of doing the wrong things righter as opposed to taking the opportunity to really rethink who delivers what and how.

4. Be bold

Another key message from the day was that this is exactly the time for local government to throw off its shackles, rethink approaches to risk, and embrace innovative ways of working. I guess this comes down to attitude – is innovation a costly luxury, or a vital part of meeting demand in a time of cost cuts?

For a forward thinking person, the latter is obviously preferable, but is it likely to be the route taken by most local government managers? I’m not sure. But those that do will find themselves getting ahead of the rest.

Of course, who actually does the innovation is an interesting question. As I have mentioned above, the council’s role in this innovation might just be to pass the work onto someone who can actually do the innovating…

5. Don’t be boring

More and more I’m drawn back to what I posted about 18 months ago – that government should get away from the idea that for something to be useful it has to be very serious and dare I say it, boring. The greatest example of this at Local by Social was from Do the Green Thing, a wonderful campaign about getting people engaged in being a bit more environmentally aware. Take their videos for example, simple, funny and memorable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaY9aauk3eE

Again, this is exactly what Let’s Talk Central is about – we don’t want to force people to read huge documents, or fill in surveys with hundreds of questions, or make them send emails into black holes from which they never get a response. We wanted to get people to talk about what they are interested in, using a medium they are comfortable with, in the space where they like to go.

Communications from councils are too boring. Consultation with councils is too boring. Decision making processes in councils are too boring. Selling to councils is too boring. I’m not talking dumbing down, I’m talking making things attractive to people, to encourage them to get involved.

For me, this is the most important thing to fix, and it’s probably the easiest of them all as well.

Further coverage of Local by Social:

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