transactional analysis & social networking in business organisations

Listened in to a session on types of organisation and feasible social networking forms in these contexts, at the barcamp on Saturday. The message was rather a bleak one, if your own hope was that organisations will sooner rather than later take to SNS-related behaviour.

For example, I asked about the potential for developing support for social networking on the basis that, one week, you might look kindly on a request for advice/assistance with a problem someone else was facing, if you knew that you in turn could ask the network for help next week. But the view was that no project manager would entertain such a request in the first place unless it resulted in bottom line gain for his current project, because that’s what he’d be judged on.

I found this a bit depressing, partly because it’s not the basis I work upon (maybe I just need to be grateful I don’t work in that sort of organisation). But also because it seems not to give any credence or value to the sort of trade in small favours that it’s very hard to imagine not existing in any organisation. Can any organisation survive without allowing for this trade, I wonder. Without it, how does any one build up a network??

Perhaps one just has to be pretty granular about the size of transactions across enterprise (organisational) networks. Of course, you can’t run a project if loads of time is being spent doing favours for others (though constructs for managing this sort of trade are not entirely unavailable), but it’s hard to think of cutting it out entirely.

‘Transactional Analysis’? (well perhaps not quite – but it somehow fitted into the title of the post…;-)

how do barcamps work then?

Notwithstanding having read some of the received wisdom (here, here and here for example), I am a barcamp newbie (have only been to one other, beside barcamp scotland 2009 on Saturday). So I thought I’d reflect on things observed thus far – may as well try & learn as I go along. After all, the opportunity/risk of running one might arise…

A fair amount of what follows may involve comparing aspects of one event with the other. This shouldn’t be taken as any form of summative assessment at all. Rather it’s just a way of teasing out learning points.

What did I do on Saturday then? First did a v minor bit of lending a hand, then chatted a bit, while others finished getting things set up. Then listened to the general briefing on how it works, and signed up to kick off an early session. Gave my session, then grazed a bit at one on social networking in business environments. Then went to part of a session on something I knew nothing about (had heard sometime ago that one should absolutely do this at any conference you attend). Then spent most of the afternoon chatting in congenial company (You Know Who You Are – invidious to name names etc etc) – missed what counted for the day’s Keynote Presentation as a result. Later, participated in the first half of a discussion on how to recognise an online community if you meet one. Nearly finally, went to a session on managing multiple online personae. Then the last, plenary round-up. Missed the post-camp drinks, as other RL social networking commitments then took over…

Reflections (in no order of priority/logic):

• size of venue in relation to number of participants. The London event was relatively tightly packed in to its space, and perhaps as a result you couldn’t really move without inter-acting with someone. It felt buzzy (first timer experience?). Meanwhile we had plenty of room in Edinburgh. At times things felt a bit diffuse.
• Venue layout. In London the workshop rooms were all visible from the main space, and no sessions actually took place in the main space – this would have been impossible. The workshop rooms were all laid out in round table format – no raked rows of fixed seats as we had in the Edinburgh lecture theatres. Layout here obviously impacts on amount of inter-action and its characteristics (discussion vs Q&A)
• extent to which event was topic-focused. The London event had a relatively clear and specific focus (the Gov’t webby agenda) while the Edinburgh event catered for multiple & diverse topics. Associated with its limited focus the London event had (by chance) a clear delineated context (the Power of Information Task Force Report, along with gov’t & digital engagement).
• Use of social media before (and after) the event. The degree of focus in London was also accentuated a bit, via the use of the ning group to explore (but not set in stone) topics for discussion on the day. You could also begin to identify the possible sessions you’d want to look out for, ask a question about them online etc. The standard barcamp wiki that we used in Edinburgh doesn’t perhaps lend itself to this, much. So you’re starting from cold, on the day. On the other hand, there were criticisms of the London event that it was moving away from the classic democratic barcamp model towards a more traditional multi-stream conference, where most us were consumers rather than producer-consumers (prosumers?). After the event, the twitter stream continued across the railway network on the way home, and the ning group has been used to canvas the potential for more than one sub-group or spin-off initiative. It’s too early to reflect on this point, for the Edinburgh event.
• Assembling the agenda on the day. In London we were all given post-its to write our session offers on, while in Edinburgh we wrote directly onto the flip chart. The advantage of the post-its was that they allowed for easier re-grouping, where it emerged that more than one possible offering was available on any one topic or related-set of topics. This applied to timing within the day, too.
• Presenting a session. We stood round in a gaggle, for the one I started, while later on people tended to sit down more (fatigue setting in?). For the facilitator, it’s quite different from a session where you are the only one standing(!) The boundaries of the group are more fluid, so it’s easier for participants to arrive unobtrusively, graze a bit, then move on if they wish. This was easier for both parties in Edinburgh than in London, where, despite clear advice at the beginning that moving on was OK and not personal, it felt harder as all were seated and leaving meant leaving the room as well as the circle. Within any given session, there’s also, naturally, a balance to be struck between sticking to your topic and dragging discussion back to it, and allowing (more or less distantly) related points to be raised and considered.
• when to present during the day. There’s a skill here, if you have a message that you do want to get across – like fixing the order of a meeting agenda so that the important items do get a proper seeing to. I think I went early (partly because no one else was at the time) in order to dive in. But by the end, people had mentally moved on and their attention had been taken up by other issues. Some sort of poster wall might help, in terms of providing a reference and reminder point during the day. A digital equivalent of this would need considered too.

Well, quite enough for now, but maybe more learning points will emerge from further reflection. What were your main takeaways from barcamps you’ve been to?

Managing multiple profiles

Kate Ho presented one of the sessions at Barcamp Scotland on Saturday about this. I think that she’d perhaps intended it to be a ‘how’ session, about the tools and the mechanics we are going to need if we are goingto survive the overhead of maintaining and feeding (Kate raised an interesting point about differing communication patterns associated with different SNS – so simply funneling your twitterfeed into your FB status updates may not create an FB-appropriate voice for you) all our various SNS profiles.

However, she didn’t quite get the opportunity, as the discussion seem to spiral away somewhat into ‘why bother?’-land, where some of the participants seemed pretty much happy to ‘just be who they are’ everywhere online – though to be sure other participants were kind of anxious about it all.

Personally, I wonder whether being quite that blithe about how you come across to the different groups in your social and work life is a wee bit naive. What about social situations where things like tact and discretion are needed, for example? I found myself wondering whether it’s something about the stage in life where you enter into the sort of commitments that you are most unwilling to walk away from, that make the difference – in the sense that these ‘fixed’ commitments then just have to be lived with, and manouevred in relation to one another?

As a bit of a greybeard vis-a-vis most of the barcamp participants, I found myself wondering whether it was an age-related thing, so I was amused to come across Identity Woman (I hope she won’t mind me giving her real name (I think!) ) as Kaliya Hamlin – I do so as a sign of respect for what she writes) musing about the same sort of thing, after a session on Privacy at SXSW, and during one on Openness and FB, which had involved lots of (young male) FB developers.

I read ’somewhere’ (google search skills where are you now?) that SNS were ‘autistic’ about this aspect of human relationships. When naivety about these seems to exist in the FB developer community, then the rest of us should be alert to risk, perhaps?

Barcamp Scotland 2009

Hope to write a couple of posts reflecting on Saturday’s event - things that struck me about the content, and also the way the event worked. Barcamps are new for me – had only been to one before, so am still trying to make sense of the dynamics – important if ever the projects I work with ever need one to be run.

But first, I was glad to have had an opportunity to talk a little about one of my current projects, with other people prepared to discuss it. Here’s the elevator pitch, sort of. And also to mention both Social Innovation Camp - watch their space(!), and (in a similarly relevant way maybe) Patient Opinion’s  welcome extension of their coverage to north of the border.

email inbox size limits: making an opportunity out of a problem

We are all (gradually) moving across to the NHS’ very own home-grown email system here. The transition involves a limit (commonly 200mb – and you’d probably not be very surprised at how not-very-far that goes) in the size of individual inbox storage.

Of course this is a source for common grumbling. And staying below the limit can incur some risks (FoI, anyone? – if you are involved in the sort of work which might include public engagement of any sort) if you do anything like delete anything over a given size without checking for significance first. And if you do check, then, costs (staff time spent in sifting old emails vs. storage capacity…but then we are asked to reduce the size of our server farms for the sake of polar bears) are incurred.

However, as a colleague remarked the other day, this all does promote thinking about other ways of communicating and working (cue, social media). He mentioned that IT colleagues are now using a host of wikis to store & share common/developing knowledge, as an example. I wish they’d tell the rest of us…and let us in on this too. Though of course, Wetpaint, PbWiki, etc. etc. (yes I know there are loads of others – this isn’t product placement, honest) are as good places to start with as any.

But for once, perhaps, a (surely?) unintended consequence is beneficial.

“Which is Nice“.

Book Publishing – rather like playing Real Tennis at Wimbledon?

Just the other day, a bulky envellope arrived on the desk. It was my complimentary copy of the book to which I’ve contributed a chapter, on the topic of talking with children and young people about the processing of their personal information.

Well! So here it was at last!

Warm feelings and thanks to Chris Clark and Janice McGhee (the editors) for all their shepherding of the collective enterprise in general, and their support for me individually, especially as I tended to write ‘bulletins from the Front’ (their words) rather than in the calm more academic style that is generally deployed in this context. Ever so many thanks too to Marina, for passing me the original opportunity, and Tamsyn, for giving me such a good flying start with the actual writing and for a friendly eye on the draft later – a review from a peerless peer at a critical moment.

I’d already launched an earlier draft version of my text down the slipway, to fend for itself once I’d cut the restraining chains, having been aware of the general debate about what constitutes a sensible process for academic publishing in the web 2.0 era.

But what gave a certain piquancy to the pleasure of seeing the finished physical artefact was the background feeling that it’s been a bit like a sort of courtly mediaeval dance, really. Something to be wierded about rather than critical of, of course, but…

 What brought this home was the publication of the Byron Review ‘Safer Children in a Digital World’ that was commissioned, researched, written and published within the span of time it took our various chapters to coalesce from draft into ‘galley proofs’ for final checking. With any writing that ends up ‘fixed’ (aye, there’s the rub) of course other sources are bound to arrive afterwards, that you wished you could have catered for.

But it was the contrast between the overall speed of the two production processes that drove the point home.

eHealth and the culture of the NHS IT community

A quiet (spear-carrier’s, merely, possibly) welcome for the appointment of Alasdair Bishop’s appointment as Head of Change & Benefits in the SGHD eHealth team. I hadn’t seen him for quite a while until just recently, when we met at a workshop considering the potential scope of the eHealth Improvement Programme – on the basis of what he was forcefully and effectively arguing for there, I think I may have an idea of his views on things like focus, and the setting of priorities…!

However, perhaps some interesting cultural challenges are available? I thought I’d replay an email I drafted following the event.

I began by thinking of the eHIP in terms of a ‘business opportunity’ but came to realise that this needs more nuance.  

There’s a risk as well as an opportunity (as in SWOT, somewhere): if the eHIP is really well integrated with the other health improvement and change initiatives around, e.g. the Improvement Service Team – as it should be – ICT has had a history of being rather cloth-eared about things like culture, the dynamics & demands of change tools like PDSA etc etc….then over the piece, it may drive a wedge through the existing eH community.

I perceive this being broadly comprised of three (stereotype-warning!) groups:

•  Those who work in NHS IT as a branch of the IM&T industry (procurement, machine-running & contract management with ATOS or whoever, keeping the infrastructure going etc etc.) – quite a bloc of staff, and plenty in senior Health Board IM&T mgt;
• Those whose home discipline. is Project/Programme Mgt – could next month be at home helping put in a retail system, say – smaller numbers;
• Those who enjoy working in public service, who aren’t clinicians, and who are too restless or otherwise don’t fancy ‘status quo managementt’, and have found a space in IT project management & learnt about it as they go along – a reasonable number of these, mostly locally

For the Change & Benefits team, maybe some utility in a little quiet sociological analysis (a.k.a. skills audit, or something?) to underpin resource/org’l planning?

When the going gets tough, or arduous over time, then I wonder whether inhabitants of any of these three groups are likely to gravitate to their own home territory (comfort zone)…? At the scoping workshop, quite a few of us tended to default to talking about IT rather then service change, for example.

If we are going to be ruthless and focus down on just a few real priorities (e.g. single sign on) then the going will get tough – apart from anything else, there are fewer places to hide if it’s not going well. Most of us are subject to, but also indulge in, what might be called ‘chronic agenda shuffling’ (I call mine ‘occupational hobbies’ – things I can turn to when the main priorities are delayed, not going well, or when I just fancy a bit of displacement activity). Keeping all these plates spinning is a full-time and absorbing activity, and who can blame us for not making progress with all those Good Ideas listed at the beginning of the Electronic Clinical Communications Initiative, it’s all we can do to keep the plates in the air. There’s also an element of it being more congenial to grumble about something than actually fix it – you know how it is.

All this stuff is normal organisational survival tactics/behaviour. Signing up at a workshop to being radical/focused won’t make normal life go away back at base the day after.

But back to Alistair. He is the only person I know in this domain who has actually done this focusing, with it’s attendant No Place to Hide risks, with CHI. Maybe there are more lessons to learn from his personal experience. He’ll be in a good position to pass them on.

Good luck Alasdair!

a ‘Learning Community’ developers Academy?

So often, lots of work is devoted to creating tools and making them available, only for there to be a Gaping Void when it comes to the hard graft needed with actually getting people sat down and comfy with what’s practically involved in a virtual community. It really is a more complex version of helping people realise that you don’t need to shout into the phone, ’cause the person you’re conversing with is actually a long way away…

In this point, it’s good to note that there’s good work starting up in Argyll & Bute, with a very dispersed (some of them live & work on islands, literally) group of practitioners working with children with disabilities, centred upon asyncronous(?) online discussion of s eries of complex case scenarios. But first, some structured exercises are being worked through, so as to help participants get at ease with this unfamiliar discourse.

Later on when talking to a colleague at the eLib, about the Communities of Practice Toolkit they have drafted (remember the Stirling workshop last autumn?), she smiled wryly and commented that the Argyll & Bute project ‘has permission’ (to get directly involved in CoP development). Whereas (I think) the eLib don’t, and can only go as far as making the tools available in a supportive way (Shared Space + ‘toolkit’ – which isn’t a toolkit so much as a booklet).

Which, on reflection, I thought leave a gap in the market. Hence the notion of an ‘Academy’ for CoP developers where the collective experience of actually developing a CoP for real could be replayed for the benefit of others…. 

• Might Health be persuaded that they have a need for this – well one can only ask;
• Meantime could the GIRFEC folk be warmed up to the idea – well, again, one can only ask – I think they might be receptive…
• Anyone else? Could the SFC’s current commissioning of KT research lead in this direction? And any prospect from the Improvement Service?

Lessons from decaying production models elsewhere, for research utilisation & knowledge transfer

Some interesting conversations and related reading last week triggered a couple of thoughts, which I hoped might be worth sharing. Anyway here goes:

• The train of thought started in a conversation which included a touch upon Social Services Research Registers, which seem hard to enthuse people about and keep up to date, and the reflection ‘why couldn’t the process be more social?’
• Next I was luckily able to obtain a preview of the upcoming ‘My Community Space’ functionality to be launched within the NHS eLibrary this April.  
• Then on the way home I read an interesting piece about the collapse of the traditional production and distribution models for music and film – but there is hope in a much more community-oriented one.

If you pop over to the ‘Hyperpeople’ blog (strapline: ‘what happens after we’re all connected?’) you’ll find a lengthy post, which is, it transpires, the script of a presentation to Irish filmmakers…Anyway, scroll down to part III ‘And the Penny Drops’, and skim-read from there to the end, particularly the last four paragraphs.

The trick is, while doing so, mentally to transpose the discussion of ‘media’ (film, music) into ‘research’. For example there’s a nice bit in the penultimate paragraph about roles – and the need for a new one (a sort of ‘community developer’). Might researchers “be practically autistic when it comes to working with communities”? (Not literally, one would prefer to think, but perhaps, because of the other pressures they are under, maybe there’s a tint of accuracy?).

The message is a clear one I think:

“…the key is to find the communities which will be most interested in the production; this is not always entirely obvious, but the filmmaker should have some idea of the target audience for their film. While in preproduction, these communities need to be wooed and seduced into believing that this film is meant just for them, that it is salient…

…Starting at the earliest stages of pre-production, someone has to sit down with the creatives and the producer and ask the hard questions: “Who is this film intended for?” “What audiences will want to see this film – or see it more than once?” “How do we reach these audiences?” From these first questions, it should be possible to construct a marketing campaign which leverages microaudiences and social networks into ticket receipts and DVD sales and online purchases….”

…Meanwhile, across at the eLibrary, My Community Space is coming*. This involves the opportunity for any Athens user registered with the eLibrary to create a personal profile, along the lines of the ones we are becoming familiar with in all the main Social Networking Systems like Facebook, Ning, Bebo etc. You can register your interest in topics (interest in, or experience of, or both? – anyway, you can register that you have a stake of some sort). You can also tag resources with your own labels (and pick up those used by others?) – resources that you find both within the eLibrary (and associated repositories) and beyond, anywhere on the web. This act also records your ‘stake’ in topic – the resource gained your attention sufficiently for you to tag it with a label. If you agree, these notes of interest are visible above the level of the existing communities (little silos – but in a good way) that the eLibrary supports.So, a researcher, could, within the new production model hinted at above, search for eLibrary users – right across the user population so long as they had created a visible profile – by labels relevant to her project, to seek and thereafter develop collaborative involvement right from the point of hypothesis formation, through project planning, funding proposals, survey construction, editing the products, and considering the findings.

With some imagination, perhaps the collaborative involvement of others could be framed as a learning activity too (here the Associate Schools Groups (ASGs) model might repay scrutiny) and as such, attract CPD points or whatever.

Could this be made to happen? Not overnight, to be sure, but might it not be worth tinkering with and planning for. What else might need to be developed?

• The model is sort-of available;
• The technology infrastructure is available though not seamlessly joined-up (does it need to be? – not sure that it does)
• Organisational model (have a look at the ASG structure for a start?)
• Learning infrastructure – CPD points etc.

What d’you think?

Can parallel universes link? – talking with children and young people about the use of their personal information

Over this last year or so, what I would guess I would call my Occupational Hobby has focused on questions around privacy and the way children’s personal information is handled.

But the take I have on it relates to what I see as a disconnection between how those whom I perceive as ‘the usual suspects’ (well-meaning – of course! – officials in Children’s Services) think how this should be handled, and how, increasingly, children and young people themselves handle their own personal information and learn about – an hopefully come to terms with – the implications of this for their privacy.

To put it another way, what is now ContactPoint was thought about and designed well before anyone had ever thought of MySpace, but the disjunction between the frames of reference that the two operate under re privacy is too noticeable not to remark upon it. Hence ‘parallel universes’. Among other triggers for action (well, writing, anyway) was the widely observed capability for nuanced handling of privacy issues by children and young people, which the officials have thus far resolutely seemed blind to.

 So I thought I’d write a bit about this, and did so earlier this year, with the result that’s attached below at the foot of the post. When I finished this draft, I had a strong sense of returning the ideas to the wild from whence they came originally, as I had throughout been able to surf on the ideas that were already publicly available. So, many thanks to all those who went before. It felt like launching it down a slipway – the material would need to fend for itself on the open sea hereafter. Publishing it here follows through on that, a little.

Though pragmatically, I should say that a substantially edited, much shortened, probably tighter and ‘final’ version of this material is intended for traditional publication as a chapter in a Policy Press book, at some point. Accordingly, this version is but a rough draft…

talking-with-children-and-citizens-about-handling-their-personal-information-v8.doc