The large and growing network of collaborative tools that make up the ‘Communities of Practice’ (CoP) project, hosted by the local government Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA), is a rare ‘Web 2.0’ success story in the UK public sector.
CoP (http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk/) began in the autumn of 2006 as a pilot project testing around 100 discussion forums with 5,000 council managers. The bespoke technology used to run the networks was developed by Conseq and runs on the IDeA’s existing web publishing infrastructure using IBM WebSphere Application Server and DB2 Universal Database.
Its current incarnation, featuring forums, email newsletters, wikis, calendars and document exchange facilities launched in December 2007, and has now grown to serve more than 50,000 registered members in more than 1,000 communities.
The communities are aimed chiefly at local government workers but also at the broader public sector. Of the 50,000 people registered, about 30,000 are from local government, 10,000 from central government and 10,000 other including non-profit bodies and international members, from China to the Middle East. Not all members are active, but the IDeA estimates that around 80% of those registered read at least some materials and around 17% actively post to the forums, a relatively high proportion for such projects.
Lawrence Hall, a member of the IDeA’s five-strong knowledge management strategy team which runs CoP, says around 3,000 new people a month are registering for the service, and the number is still increasing. “We haven’t reached a plateau. There are 2.1 million people in UK local government, and the way the site is developed, it is more than capable of taking thousands and thousands more. It could just grow and grow and grow, and we hope it does.”
Hall’s team focuses much of its time on training people to facilitate communities, he said, and they also market the site across local government and the wider public sector.
Communities must be approved before they can start, with an online application process. Once live, they are free to run for those within or relating to local government, while agencies from central government, the NHS and the wider public sector are asked to make an annual £2,000 contribution towards costs (though they can run as many communities as they like).
Examples of successful communities vary widely in size and topic, Hall says, but the ones that work well have several features in common. “There’s a pattern – the most important thing is to have an effective and committed team of facilitators running the CoP – three or more people facilitating it, promoting it, just making it happen.
“There also needs to be a clear purpose for the community, and a demand for it. If you just say it would be a good idea to have a CoP without any demand from the sector, then it doesn’t work.”
Finally, it helps to have a sponsor organisation, Hall said, which can allocate resource to a facilitation team and promote it. “If you have got those things in place, the topic is secondary.”
Last week the IDeA announced the winners of the 2010 ‘CoP of the Year Awards’, citing the communities that had shown the most innovation and creativity; efficiency through collaboration; and effective facilitation.
Overall CoP of the year award went to the Project and Programme Management CoP. Richard Caton, project management support manager at the London Borough of Hackney and one of six facilitators for this community, said it had developed out of an earlier physical group.
“Our origins were in a London forum for anyone in a project management or programme management office role, set up four years ago by a group of London boroughs including Hillingdon and Harrow,” he says. “About 60 people came to the initial meeting, and we realised we were facing the same issues.
“When the CoP came available, a couple of us thought it would be a great way to continue the dialogue after face-to-face meetings, to enable the network to keep going. So we started in March 2007 and it has grown to 730-odd members, including people from around half of all UK councils and with international members as far afield as Australia.”
Members of the forum are quick to help each other, says Caton. “If you post a query, you very quickly get three or four answers. People are always looking for best practice – the CoP allows us to pool knowledge and hold templates, slides, tools, job descriptions – in the past we might have emailed these things to a few people.”
Ultimately, the group and communities like it can have a significant impact where it matters most – on an organisation’s efficiency, particularly in an area like project management which is linked to large amounts of local government capital spending, Caton says.
“There is efficiency through collaboration. Improving project management and programme management can have a huge impact on budgets, timings, delivery on time, and improved quality.”
The fact that the group’s core was formed from people who had met physically was one of its strengths, Caton says. “The advantage for us was that we had a face-to-face forum where we were coming from, people knew each other, so there was an element of trust.”
However this also meant that growth posed a challenge. “When we were smaller, a lot of people knew each other, so there was the trust element. As we become bigger, people may be more self-conscious – it may be a downside.”
One answer might be to start applying a level of quality control to the resources being exchanged, which are currently unmoderated, Caton says. “For next steps, we might look at what is absolute best practice in each area –so it would be slightly more moderated, ‘what we’re promoting’.”
Another community which featured in last week’s awards was the Web improvement and Usage Community, which was commended in the ‘Effective facilitation’ category.
Launched to engage and support users of the Society of IT Management (Socitm)’s web-related activities such as its annual council websites review ‘Better connected’, the community has grown to provide a general resource for all council and public sector web teams. Topics under discussion range from arguments for and against use of various web content management systems to consultation on government web guidelines.
Helen Williams, a web consultant for Socitm and one of three facilitators for the community, says active facilitation is vital for a thriving forum. As well as producing newsletters and promoting the work through traditional channels, the facilitators offer their own opinions on key topics of interest; highlight relevant threads to new members; contact members they know are interested in a topic and ask them to contribute; and look to cross-fertilise the group with external social media networks.
The community has grown to around 600 members, with around 140 active contributors. “It has reached critical mass, with enough members to have become self-sustaining,” Williams says. “It doesn’t need seeding any more.”
Membership sources are much more varied than she would have anticipated originally, she says. “There are quite a lot of different central government departments, and recently a lot of people from the police have joined, and I saw a head-teacher come in. We haven’t approached them.”
The influx is symptomatic of the different ways people are beginning to work across the public sector in the internet age, Williams says. “There has been quite a shift in the way people work, and CoP is just one example of it. Peers have more access to each other within and between authorities.
“This platform has become really useful to local government employees because they are able to share knowledge and support each other. It has been a really good place for people to discuss things in depth.”
NOTE: Article originally published in E-Government Bulletin issue 304.
Click here to visit/return to issue 304 index
You might like to know that the original concept and strategy for the IDeA CoP platform came from me as part of a 3-year knowledge management strategy I produced for the IDeA. Some bacground to the project can be found at http://semantix.co.uk/white-papers/case-study-communities-of-practice-in-local-government/
Stephen Dale
CEO
Semantix (UK) Ltd