Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

From August 2006 to July 2007 I worked with CILIP’s Department of Knowledge and Information to help them prepare for, establish and nurture their online membership communities. It was a wonderful experience; we all worked hard breaking new boundaries, and we all learnt a huge amount about all sorts of things one encounters while getting online communities up and running in a membership association.

I remain very proud of the job and am a great admirer of the communities team who pulled together magnificently in the face of a brand new challenge.

At the end of the project, we had a ‘lessons learnt’ session in order to capture as many of the findings we found as possible. I am pleased to say that the resultant document is now available to all for downloading and reading.

Download the document here (approx 61k, MS Word document)

The document is structured chronologically – into findings from the pre-pilot, kick-off, pilot, live, and evaluation phases. It ranges from organisational findings in a membership association context to technical findings while using Community Server (with very few adapations, and then in it’s early days). It’s the bare bones of our honest and open analysis of the situation and we all hope that it can help others in a similar situation, providing guidance, learnings, wheel non-re-invention, and whatnot.

Download the document here (approx 61k, MS Word document)

Other CILIP related learning materials on this site:

• Membership engagement story (presentation for Online Information)
• Membership communities story (Social tools conference presentation)

Enormous thanks to the CILIP communities team for agreeing to sharing their learnings.

All too often we chose not to share the ups and downs of our work, preferring instead to keep quiet about stuff in the name of ‘private-ness’ or ‘professional-ness’ or whatnot. But how can we all learn together if we don’t offer eachother the fruits of our experiences? So well done to CILIP I say.

My main point of contact was Lyndsay Rees-Jones (Senior Advisor, Membership Support Unit), who was working closely with Patricia McHugo (Web Officer), Stephanie Baxter (Web Editor), Alan Cooper (Web Manager), Hilary Morris (Deputy Information Manager), Kari Channell (Head of Corporate Marketing and Membership), and Mark Taylor (Marketing Executive), who were all admirably managed by Jill Martin (Head of Knowledge). The technology (Community Server) was provided by cSCape and I was subcontracted to do the consultancy work by Sift.