Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

On the 12^th July, Lyndsay Rees-Jones (CILIP MSU senior advisor) and I presented the CILIP online communities story so far (one year into it) at Unicom’s Social Tools conference. Our presentation is here. We chose to do it together so that the attendees could hear both sides of the story – my consultant’s model and Lyndsay’s actual insider experience. It was fun and we intend to do another version (from a different angle) of it later in the year at Online Information. This write up is also going into CILIP’s membership magazine.

The presentation is online in the communities here (URL), and all of the presentations from the conference can be heard on the focusbiz website.

As the ‘communities team’ (which we set up as part of the project and is now growing to reflect the true nature of the impact of integrating communities into your organisation), it was always our intention to share our experiences as we support the new community technology and facilitate activities therein; case studies of this nature are thin on the ground so we wanted to share our knowledge openly in reports and presentations. Our focus was on the practical experiences of actually using the technology in a real Membership association context.

The conference was a great success. Hosted by David Gurteen, we had a range of presentations from buzzy theory to almost dry product pitches. David has been working to introduce more conversations into conferences for years and in this one, we were encouraged to have group discussions at our tables after every presentation. Although this sounds too simple to be of note (most great ideas are), we hadn’t seen this before and found that it broadened our understanding of the topics and helped us find out more about our fellow attendees.

The most interesting area for me was the debate around ‘Community’. Being an association, CILIP has been concentrating on this word and its meaning since time immemoriam.

‘Online communities’ were all the rage some years ago, with impermeable boundaries and centralised technical platforms. This concept has been increasingly replaced with the emerging set of tools and related theory known as social software, focusing on ‘networks’ rather than ‘community’.

Lee Bryant proposed that we are all in an era of ‘networked individualism.. being aggregated in the background’ for the organisation’s benefit. I have no doubt that this is the case in many commercial outfits, where Knowledge Management has become an increasingly sophisticated combination of providing the right tools to the right people and gathering ‘attention data’ behind the scenes (for an amazing insight into IBM’s internal KM/networking platform, see Ian MacNairn’s presentation on day 2).

Although a very relevant analysis of the current context in which ‘social tools’ are deployed, I don’t feel that this theory based on individuality is entirely suitable for a membership association (which is why we were there in the first place). CILIP has a keen responsibility to assist members with their knowledge development and networking, host professional conversations, and provide a space where members can influence the future of the organisation; they are thus a community, with common goals and shared purpose. This is not the same as a team, group, or ‘Community of Practice’ within a company.

Therefore our approach to using these social tools was necessarily different from private sector organisations and our presentation reflected that (it had much more emphasis on the social aspects of our story than the tools). Members engaging with CILIP in the Communities can expect to do so in a responsive context, where issues they raise are handled effectively by the relevant members at HQ, and actual organisational change can be experienced from discussions.

Our presentation went down well – Lyndsay was beset with questions afterwards and we hope that our ambition to give others in the ‘Third sector’ a view on our work was helpful to all.

I think the next presentation is going to have to be about facilitating groups using the whole web as a platform, but more on that another day (when I have convinced another client to stand up with me!)