It isn’t just government…

…that is struggling with some of this stuff.

Take a look at Phil Bradley’s marvellous post, railing against the attitudes of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals):

The next section really did make my jaw drop. “In terms of “official” activity, cyber life is just like real like (sic) – if it happens in a CILIP-sanctioned space, it’s official; if it happens down the pub or in someone else’s space, it isn’t.” This is a classic ‘ownership’ issue – if we say it’s real then it’s real, and if we say it isn’t real, then it’s not. If I’m in a CILIP sanctioned space (whatever that is!) do my words and arguments take on more meaning than if I’m not? Or perhaps I need to have an official CILIP representative to add some gravitas to my comments? We don’t live in a world when the organization or PR department can control the message any longer – things have moved on, and the webpage/site, while important, is no longer the sole place in which activity can take place.

Looks like another good example for David’s (and others) membership project.

Disposable online chat

TinyChat is a really cool new service that lets you create simple chatrooms on the fly within your browser.

Why is this useful? Well, say you want to get a bunch of people together for a chat, but you don’t know what technology they all have available. Some are on Skype, some not; some are IRC fans, others not; some have access to internet instant messaging, but not all.

Tony chat uses a really simple web interface to allow you to create your chatroom with a couple of clicks. You can then send the URL to the people you want involved, and you’re away.

Afterwards, your room and its contents disappear, so it really is disposable! It might be an idea for someone to copy and paste the contents of the chat before closing it down in case you want a record.

Another cool feature is to assign your Twitter account to your idenitity within your chat and which pings your followers with a link to the chatroom you have just created.

I like the idea of having impromptu online discussions using this, inviting people in via Twitter, to discuss an issue in a more ‘live’ environment that Twitter normally allows.

What other applications can you think of for TinyChat?

Working better together

Working better togetherAn awful lot of the posts I write here on DavePress are focused on external communication and collaboration – how organisations can engage and consult better with other people using the web.

But there is massive potential in using social web technology internally as well, though it isn’t something I talk about an awful lot. A project I am working on at the moment with a government organisation, though, is all about how making internal systems, like intranets, a lot more social.

Why might this help? Well, having a social approach to internal systems will make a significant positive difference to the way knowledge and information is managed throughout your organisation.

Just think – if you find something interesting on the web, how do you share it with colleagues? For the vast majority of people, that will mean emailing it round to those you think might also find it useful. There are obvious problems with this:

  • What about the people you don’t know who might find it useful?
  • What happens when someone has a use for that link six months down the line? Will they be able to find it?
  • What about other, related information that others find? How can it be drawn together?

So, even by just taking the simple example of sharing a weblink with colleagues, we can see that not having social software available can reduce the effectiveness of the use of knowledge and information within an organisation.

There are lots of other examples, though, including:

  • Communicating between teams – how does one team know what the other does? Having a static page describing general activities doesn’t really help.
  • Collaborating across teams and departments – if you aren’t sat near the people you are working with, it’s hard to work together effectively without using social tools
  • Finding people you need – ‘yellow pages’ style people finders suck. How do you find people based on their skills, abilities and talents, not by their job description? How can you locate colleagues who are interested in something?
  • Group editing of documents – how many times have you emailed a document round for review, then faced the unenviable task of updating it in line with everyone’s edits? It’s a nightmare and a better form of collaborative authoring is needed.
  • Sharing personal learning, and making it social – I’ve written a fair bit about social learning spaces here. Most organisations now encourage employees to have personal development plans and to seek out the learning they need to to do their jobs better. What happens to the learning from a course though after someone has attended it? It stays in the head of the individual.
  • Creating a sense of community in an organisation – while face to face events are vital, what could be done online to foster a common sense of purpose and culture?

It seems pretty obvious to me that just as external facing websites should no longer be seen as a medium for pushing content out to an audience, the same is also true of intranets. Actually, it’s probably even more important to ensure that internal systems are as social as possible.

There are a number of ways in which social software can work for better internal communication and collaboration, and a number of different routes to take.

I’ll be looking at some of these over a few posts this week, all categorised together as Working Better Together. I hope they are useful and do please contribute via the comments, especially with examples of good stuff already happening!

Web 2.0 North of the Border

Duncan Stephan and Alex Stobart are building up an online resource for public bodies in Scotland to help them make the most of social web technology, with a blog called ScotWeb2.

Building on the momentum of the successful barcamp-style event held last autumn, they are writing plenty of great content, pointing out good examples of good use of the web and how this stuff might help those organisations that aren’t quite there yet.

Alex also recently posted asking if public sector folk in Scotland would appreciate a ReadWriteGov style event. Hopefully they do!

STOP BLOCKING

Steph has released some details of his short survey of the blocking of useful websites within the public sector. The following figures show the percentages of organisations which allow access to each type of site:

Google 100%
LinkedIn 100%
NetMums 100%
Wikipedia 97%
Digg 97%
Google Reader 91%
WordPress.com 89%
Yahoo account 86%
Flickr 83%
Twitter 83%
Bebo 69%
YouTube (able to see well) 63%
Gmail 60%
Facebook 54%

The worst offending organisations seem to be:

  • DWP
  • Directgov (DWP)
  • Surrey County Council
  • ‘A north east council’
  • Environment Agency
  • MOD
  • FCO
  • Home Office

And Steph concludes by saying:

Does DIUS or Cabinet Office have staff any more or less likely to waste time than the Home Office or DWP? Is ’security’ more important in Surrey than Devon? Might the good burghers of Directgov benefit from a bit more exposure to the social web? Would people at FCO tasked with engaging around the world be helped by being able to view more of the World Wide Web?

You decide. Or you could always pop your CV on LinkedIn to find an opening somewhere that actually lets you do your job?

I have spoken to a number of people about this issue. The reasons giving for blocking that are given by IT departments are quite often laughable: network overload? Increased risk of viruses? The truth is that the reason why these tools are blocked is because organisations don’t trust their staff not to abuse them. It sucks.