These are the notes from a meeting of the Knowledge Hub Advisory Group, which meets to steer the work of the IDeA as it develops a 'Knowledge Hub' for UK local government.
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Knowledge Hub Advisory Group Notes 7 Dec 09
1. Knowledge Hub Advisory Group
Report of Meeting held 7th December 2009
By: Steve Dale
Date: 27 January 2010
The second meeting of the Knowledge Hub Advisory Group took place on 7th
December at CCT Venues, the Barbican. The meeting has been reported via a number
of social media channels, including:
http://socialreporter.com/?p=659
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC0HCotLDxQ
http://friendfeed.com/khub
http://ideapolicy.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-knowledge-hub/
http://www.slideshare.net/stephendale/knowledge-hub-advisory-group-17-sep09
http://www.slideshare.net/ingrid_k/draft-idea-social-media-strategy
http://steve-dale.net/2009/12/08/knowledge-hub-advisory-group/
This report is a permanent record of the meeting and provides a medium to collect and
disseminate the key outcomes to members of the Advisory Group.
The meeting was organised as a collaborative workshop with the objective of getting
participants to work through a number of typical local government business scenarios
that will require the interrogation of many and disparate information sources, the
collation, interpretation and analysis of different datasets and the identification and
access to online and offline networks for knowledge sharing. Two scenarios were
used, as follows:
SCENARIO 1
You work with Hubville City Council. You are new to the Youth Offending Team.
In a meeting with the Performance Officer in charge of LAA (Local Area
Agreement) monitoring and another officer from the Crime and Disorder Reduction
Partnership you discover that councillors are concerned that your area doesn’t look
on track to meet a key monitoring figure for its LAA : NI 111 (national indicator)
- First time entrants to the Youth Justice System aged 10-17.
It’s a single measure, but part of a wider set of priorities about reducing youth crime
and anti-social behaviour among youth in general – and in some ‘blighted’
communities in particular. You are going to conduct a snapshot review of your
current programme and try to identify a network of people who can help you.
How will Knowledge Hub help you to:
1. Identify your current performance and compare it with others
2. Knowledge Hub Advisory Group – Reports of Meeting 17 December 2010
2. Understand how you can track and monitor information which might be related
to or influence NI 111 (for example – reported crimes, prosecution rates, NI
117 the number of 16-18 year olds who are not in education, employment or
training (NEETs))
3. Know what ‘best in class’ are doing
4. Identify people locally who are working on similar issues
5. Identify people across the country who are at the same stage in your
improvement journey
6. Find resources to help you deliver improvement against NI 111
7. Share your story and help others find the resources that worked for you.
Map your journey using the paper and materials provided. How will you interface
with the hub? What will it look like? How will you navigate through it? How will
others be able to see and learn from what you are doing?
SCENARIO 2
You work for Hubville Primary Care Trust. You've never worked for local
government, but now you're looking at working with Hubville City Council on a
partnership target of reducing:
NI 39 Rate of hospital admission for 100,000 population for alcohol related
harm.
As well as a serious problem with binge drinking among young people, there is an
older workless population with a high incidence of alcohol related illness. The
problem has worsened since the Hubville Automated Industries closed down last
year.
How will Knowledge Hub help you to:
1. Identify your current performance and compare it with others
2. Understand how you can track and monitor information which might be related to
or influence NI 39 (for example NI 20: Assault with injury crime rate NI
21: Dealing with local concerns about anti-social behaviour and crime issues
by the local council and police)
3. Know what ‘best in class’ are doing
4. Identify people locally who are working on similar issues
5. Identify people across the country who are at the same stage in your improvement
journey
6. Find resources to help you deliver improvement against NI 39
7. Share your story and help others find the resources that worked for you.
Map your journey using the paper and materials provided. How will you interface
with the hub? What will it look like? How will you navigate through it? How will
others be able to see and learn from what you are doing?
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3. Knowledge Hub Advisory Group – Reports of Meeting 17 December 2010
Outcomes
The scenarios brought home to participants the difficulties in (a) knowing where to
find the information required, (b) the lack of any consistency between different
information sources, and (c) the barriers to finding and sharing relevant knowledge.
See photos in the Appendix for examples of the outputs from the two scenarios.
The scenarios are typical of the problems that will be addressed and resolved with the
implementation of the Knowledge Hub. It was very encouraging that on completion
of this exercise, many of the participants revealed that they now fully understood what
the Knowledge Hub was, and how it could benefit them as individuals and the sector
as a whole.
The workshop ended with a Knowledge Café, where participants were asked to
consider what they had learnt from the two business scenarios and discuss the
following questions:
Knowledge café
1. What is the best way of explaining what the Knowledge Hub has to offer? (i.e.
it’s not just another website)
2. What social media skills are required to navigate and share information and
stories of improvement?
3. What cultural changes will need to take place to help people share
information?
4. What’s the best way of building skill and culture change to achieve knowledge
sharing?
5. How can we incentivise early adopters to add to Knowledge Hub to its fullest
extent?
Due to lack of time, participants were unable to consider and respond to all of the
questions, but some useful points came out of the first question, as follows:
Feedback from the Knowledge Café
The Knowledge Hub will…
1. have a central dashboard function, allowing you to choose types of
information and subject areas – it would allow you to see what’s new, what’s
hot and what’s relevant to you
2. will support high levels of personalisation – you can choose your own
dashboard – the functions that you want, but at the same time it would help
you make links to things you didn’t know existed.
3. will allow you to make associations with ‘people like me’ – those who had
similar responsibilities in their work – as well as to identify ‘experts’ in
different specialised areas. Or be recognised as an expert yourself.
4. will make it easy to share your experience and your views – even if you didn’t
always know that you were doing so – that is – just the fact that 20
performance officers in a council had downloaded a document would have
more weight than if no one had – or that only external consultants had.
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4. Knowledge Hub Advisory Group – Reports of Meeting 17 December 2010
5. will help central and local government facilitate the development of a
community (of interest or practice) around a particular indicator, where the
community would define the performance parameters and measurement
criteria for the indicator.
Finally, the key benefits that were identified from both the scenarios and the
knowledge café have been listed below and will be incorporated into the Knowledge
Hub Benefits Realisation Plan, which will provide key indicators for measuring the
ultimate success of the project.
Benefits Realisation
Easier to access relevant information
Easier to share tools and techniques
Can find and follow people with same/similar interests, leading to
opportunities for collaboration coproduction and partnership working.
Can find or become a sector expert
Validates and support views and ideas
Efficient – time saved in getting to key information. Cost savings – less
research, more doing.
Reduced dependency on sector support/mediation from external agencies and
consultants
Sector-led improvement.
Not just central gov issues
Local/accountable
Citizens involved.
The Knowledge Hub Advisory Group participants are thanked for their valuable input
to the workshop, and more importantly to the project itself. The next meeting of the
Advisory Group is scheduled for 10th March 2010. Details to follow.
Regards,
Steve Dale
IDeA Associate Consultant
Knowledge Hub Project Lead.
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5. Knowledge Hub Advisory Group – Reports of Meeting 17 December 2010
APPENDIX – PHOTOS FROM THE WORKSHOP
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