A while ago, I posted about a brief meeting I had with Sean O'Driscoll, the person in Microsoft responsible for the MVP Program; at that time Sean agreed to do an interview with me where we would dig into some thoughts on what made for successful communities.  Sean is a very passionate and articulate guy, and I would highly recommend listening in.

We covered a lot of ground, and I hope some of Sean's experiences will prove useful to those of you that are also trying to kick off a community of your own.  Some of the topics we drilled into included:

• what is Sean's definition of 'community' 
• supporting community volunteers to foster better community results
• do communities make an organization cool? 
• aligning organizational goals with community outputs
• who should 'own' community in an organization
• techology trends that assist in the success of online communities 
• measuring the success of a community
• tag-drafting as a way to follow the thinking of the great information mavens

You can keep track of Sean's latest thinking at www.communitygrouptherapy.com.

I was talking with Sean O'Driscoll the other day...Sean runs one of Microsoft's most important communities, the MVPs or to give the full title, the Most Valuable Professionals.  MVPs generally do not work for Microsoft, rather they are recognised as the independent field experts in our different products and technologies.  You will find them participating in discussion boards, presenting at events, or even working on a server near you.

Sean has agreed to do a video interview with me at some point soon so that we can discuss online communities in some more detail, but for now I will leave you with a new resource that he has just created to indulge his passion:  Community Group Therapy.

If you have any questions you would like me to ask Sean, send them onto me at jonncha@microsoft.com or by replying to this post.

Jonny Chambers

The London Borough of Newham is an organization with big plans, as I discovered when I spoke with Geoff Connell; and with the help of some of their equally proactive Local Authority counterparts in the UK they are making big strides to realize them.

The concept of sharing and collaboration between local authorities is nothing new, organizations like SOCITM have been promoting this for some time now, however the missing link has always been filling the gaps between the many get togethers with effective action that ultimately raises the service delivery bar for everyone.  Newham, in conjunction with 10 other Local Authorities is currently addressing this.

The foundations of a plan started when Microsoft UK partnered with Newham on the SSN Program over 2 years ago now.  Newham had written an in-house CRM application back in 1998 that they used as a front of house system to deal with citizen inquiries, complaints and the like.  They reckoned that this application was costing in the region of hundreds of thousands to build and maintain, and so they decided to see if they could offload the on-going development and support costs.  It was agreed that Belfast City Council would be the ones to productize the offering and that they would act as systems integrators for new deployments if required.  Part of the deal was that a portion of the funds received form the work Belfast did would go to Newham, and a portion would go to supporting on-going product development.  Newham were prepared to give the code away as well to anyone that wanted it...this was achieved through their SSN Site.  The model, with some tweaking along the way, worked to the satisfaction of everyone.

• Newham now have the benefit of updates to the CRM solution at a reduced or no cost.
• Belfast are making services revenue that is to the benefit of their local rates payers.
• New 'customers' do not have to pay a lot of money to build their own solution - and spend more rate payers money than they have to.  There are currently 18 Authorities using the application today.

The foundation had been built - where to next?

If you look at the context of what is happening more widely in the UK, you will see a lot of forces combining that are driving an agenda of change: The Gershon Review on Public Sector Efficiency; the drive for Shared Services through a Transformational Government Enabled by Technology; and of course the new possibilities open by new technologies that emerge at an alarming rate which citizens demand.  The ability to maintain a delivery rate that keeps up with all of this is becoming impossible to do in isolation.

Enter the Shared Learning Group.

The SLG is much like any other group in that they regularly come together to discuss their thoughts and ideas; but there is a key difference.  Recognising the fact that ideas and other best intentions at get togethers often disappear once attendees get into their cars to drive home for dinner, the SLG clubbed together to fund a full time Program Manager; someone that would facilitate, nominate action owners, and drive accountability for their completion.  Couple this with the fact that the SLG members are a compact bunch that are hand picked based on their ability to deliver excellent service in key areas, and that they are prepared to contribute a dedicated project manager who will work towards the success of the SLG you would think that something positive would happen.  Results have demonstrated that it has started to bear fruit.

Their current workstreams are as follows:

• Performance Management Capability
• Collaborative Working
• Information Sharing Index (ISI)
• Identity Management Framework
• Integration
• Flexible Working                                      
• Technology in the Home/Assistive Technology

These workstreams were voted for by the SLG participants, and represent the most important issues facing IT in local government in the UK.  The ultimate delivered solutions will either be built in-house or more usually in conjunction with a Systems Integrator; the deal with all of the solutions is that they should be suitable and available for any other local authority to use.  The likelihood that solutions will be reused is high, Geoff reckons, given that their original specification was decided by consensus rather than in isolation.

Sustainability is an unaddressed issue, however.  This is something that they are currently trying to agree an approach on.  Do they simply give everything away for free and rely on an unmanaged and unmanageable community to evolve their solutions?  Do they charge a nominal fee for use, and pump this back into development? Do they barter the solutions for others they don't currently have? Do they want to get into the software business in the long term?  A lot of questions...They hope that this will be worked out over time.

Perhaps when some more thinking is done around what the implications of Shared Services might mean, the ultimate solution may be the centralization and management of such functions such as Collaborative Working or CRM into centres of excellence that host services on behalf of whole sectors.  Technology is starting to enable this in a disparate environment through things like Identity Federation through Web Services.  Geoff suggested that this may be a follow on workstream for the SLG to tackle.  It will also be the topic of a future post from me.

I'll keep in with Newham to see how things progress.  For reference, other SLG members are:

• Bromley
• Derby
• Isle of Man
• Kent CC
• Lewisham
• London Borough of Newham
• Rotherham MBC
• Sunderland CC
• Wakefield MDC
• Warwick DC
• Derby CC
• Hampshire

Geoff presented at our SSN Summit in May...his ppt is here.

I caught up with Adam Jansen, Digital Archivist, from the Washington State Digital Archives last week.  Adam is heading up a drive to support a community of individuals that are interested in the issues of the long term storage of digital records - enter stage left, the Digital Preservation Network.

"The Digital Preservation Network is dedicated to forging a community of practitioners who are focused on the issues of preserving the digital records and publications of government.  This online forum will be a repository for the exchange and discussion of ideas, research, strategy and documents that can be used by other practitioners in their organization.  Membership into this community will be open to any practitioner employed in a government funded institution that is currently researching or participating in appraisal, acquisition, preservation or access of government records or publications."

Unfortunately the answer does not come in the form of buying a few more disk drives to solve problems; even big ones!  All sorts of things need to be considered including ensuring the integrity of data for the long term, agreement on standards for the classification of digital records, file formats - and their futures, indexing, retrieval, presentation, and so on.  This is a big debate, and not one that can happen in a vacuum at a state, or even US level.  Adam has currently got over 250 members on the site that are made up from the primary libraries in the US, and more recently international members from the likes of the British Library - an organization we have also been working with to assist them in scanning their 25,000,000 pages of content.

What is interesting about this particular community is the speed at which it has become established, and the amount of activity in it despite the fact that it must appear a niche area to the casual observer...far from it.  The site launched earlier this year, and the rate of new membership growth has exceeded Adam's expectations.  Digital Preservation is something that is increasingly on the agenda of many public sector organizations across the world.  So much of what we do and governments produce now is captured on some form of digital medium; whether it is a document, a picture, a video, an audio recording or something else.  In connection with that, so many new systems that are procured now to service the needs of countries will create even more data, so the issue needs a healthy dose of shared thinking

According to a study that Berkeley did in 2003:

Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

• How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.
• Hard disks store most new information. Ninety-two percent of new information is stored on magnetic media, primarily hard disks. Film represents 7% of the total, paper 0.01%, and optical media 0.002%.

This is a mind-boggling amount, but you can appreciate the challenge.  Berkeley concluded their report by saying they had started to train a new breed of professional called 'information managers'...perhaps some of them are even now contributing to the DPN...

Pay DPN a visit.