Working Notes 2.0

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?

(try saying the title fast…)

An initial blether planned for tomorrow, on the topic of collating/updating the strategy for SHOW. Obviously, an opportunity not to be missed, given SHOWs centrality to all things webby this side of the border. Here’s my letter to Santa on what we might touch upon:

• the political/organisational context. What does this conversation emerge from and lead to, both immediately and more broadly? Specifically, it seems that there’s a senior management discussion coming up very soon, for which at least initial thoughts need to be organised. More broadly, for example, as far as I’m aware, there was a discussion within SG (Scottish Government) recently of the idea of creating some form of Gov’t-wide portal - it seemed someone thought that a scottish equiv of Direct.gov should be created, and had mooted a spreadsheet-based exercise to collect all relevant links…sigh. Really…
• the business context. That’s, most directly, Scottish health web-business, with readily-identifiable players including SHOW itself; NES and the e-Library; NHS24; the Health Boards including Health Scotland. Each will have their own plans, areas of specialisms, and probably, ideas for taking over the rest of the world. Atos too, in terms of server farms and the like? And other key contractoors too by extension. Any SHOW strategy will have to say some enabling and influencing things about these stakeholder interests.
• which takes us to stakeholders, and whether we should at an early stage do some form of stakeholder analysis.
• We’ll need to sketch out some form of big-picture outline of where we’ve been, and where we’re going to. There’s quite a lot of mantra-level material easily available about web 1.0 and its all-pervasive ideas & metaphors, for the former, and other stuff on web 2.0. But maybe we shouldn’t major on the decimal point stuff in case that puts the hi-heid yins off. The same concepts can be aired without the labels.
  • it’s the social web we need to orient towards;
  • also publication standards (microformats & the like);
  • the mainstream influence of open source (not just the geeks’ version, but the broader open source movement and thinking), in distributing so widely the tools that confer the power to co-create information and knowledge;
  • key mantras like ‘the web comes to you, not you go to the web’, and the like.
• But sloganising can only stand in for analysis for so long. Perhaps its role is to buy time to make the case for some decent analysis, which will need to be bought in, I suspect. And could usefully be seen to be done so, anyway. One might be able to acquire some of this ready-made, for example the recent Gartner reports, and the ‘Power of Information’ (see also the ‘co-creation version’) thinking.
• We’ll also need to deploy, or re-deploy, available research into what users will be doing by the time any strategy we collate comes to fruition. Here, there’s maybe an insight to be gained from the recent JISC report into the user voice. JISC suggest that todays expert users, which they give space to, are tomorrow’s mainstream. While the power of this is more intituitive than scientific, it’s still…powerful. The unsettling lessons JISC spells out for knowledge providers surely have their parallels for the health domain too.

Then there the organisational development part of strategy. What’s SHOW’s ‘core business’? Or USP? Hosting expertise? Standards and their development & promulgation? or what? If this is to be majored on, does anything else that SHOW does currently have to be downsized or better dealt with elsewhere? (This assumes that no organisation can move into new fields and carry on doing all of what it was doing before. Some things may need to be shed, or carried on with elsewhere. What might these be?

 Just to start with.