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=659http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC0HCotLDxQhttp://friendfeed.com/khubhttp://ideapolicy.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-knowledge-hub/http://www.slideshare.net/stephendale/knowledge-hub-advisory-group-17-sep09http://www.slideshare.net/ingrid_k/draft-idea-social-media-strategyhttp://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 1You 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

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 doing4. Identify people locally who are working on similar issues5. Identify people across the country who are at the same stage in your improvement

journey6. Find resources to help you deliver improvement against NI 1117. 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 2You 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 others2. 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 doing4. Identify people locally who are working on similar issues5. Identify people across the country who are at the same stage in your improvement

journey6. Find resources to help you deliver improvement against NI 397. 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?

OutcomesThe scenarios brought home to participants the difficulties in (a) knowing where to find the information required, (b) the lack of any consistency between different

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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.

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.

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Knowledge Hub Advisory Group – Reports of Meeting 17 December 2010

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 DaleIDeA Associate ConsultantKnowledge Hub Project Lead.

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Knowledge Hub Advisory Group – Reports of Meeting 17 December 2010

APPENDIX – PHOTOS FROM THE WORKSHOP

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