IDeA: Communities of Practice
Supporting online collaboration and innovation in local government
Communities of Practice for Local Government is a website that supports collaboration across local government and the public sector. It is an institutional initiative by the Improvement & Development Agency for Local Government (IDeA) centred on a specially developed web platform for user-generated content. It is a freely accessible resource that enables like-minded people to form online communities of practice using collaboration tools including blogs, wikis and social networks. It encourages knowledge-sharing and learning from each others’ experiences, and the fundamental aim is ‘helping conversations to happen’.
The ‘Communities of Practice’ (CoP) project began four years ago and the first 18 months was devoted to designing, building and testing the system. It now has a core team of four facilitators plus a contractor for web development and support. The users – mainly local authority officials – now number more than 30,000, 16% of whom are active participants. Between them the members have set up over 800 CoPs to allow knowledge and experiences to be exchanged between specialists and novices nationally and, increasingly, internationally. In 2009, the site won a Government Computing Award for Collaborative Working.
Local councils are independent and geographically distinct organisations with locally determined priorities, yet they deliver a common range of services in a common framework and there is hence an enormous opportunity to share and develop good practices collectively, there is a tendency towards Do It Yourself and reinvention.
The development of practice-sharing has involved a range of new techniques which have become embedded in local government and have been adopted by other parts of public sector. Perhaps the most important is peer review where leading local authority practitioners, both political and managerial, review and challenge the performance of councils against an agreed best practice benchmark.
In 2005, IDeA’s website – IDeA Knowledge – advertised events, workshops and publications in the traditional fashion, but they began exploring the possibility of using new web 2.0 technologies to increase engagement and help councils share best practice. As a result they decided to invest in creating their own platform.
IDeA’s Director of Services, John Hayes, says:p“For me, what is really exciting about Web 2.0 is that for the first time you can see what’s happening. You know who is involved, what they are interested in and how they react to something. Just as importantly, given the defined nature of local government, you know which people you are missing and where programmes and activities are not having an impact. From an improvement point of view it has the potential to provide real and powerful feedback”.
Working with their existing technology partner IDeA Knowledge, a team of four enthusiastic IDeA staff was set up to train prospective users and facilitate online knowledge-sharing by them.
An IDeA online community of practice can be set up by anyone in local government for any kind of practice improvement. IDeA support is available but using it is not mandatory. And CoPs are not just a tool for IDeA programmes: for example, staff at Kent County Council have become expert users and have set up a whole series of CoPs as part of their Kent Innovation programme.
The most active CoPs are those which address a particular technical issue – like the Mapping Services Agreement – or a specific professional community such as the planners and their Permitted Development Community. The same applies to groups where current information is really important – for example the Policy and Performance Community.
Although subject matter is important, IDeA is also learning about how to help conversations to happen. Online conferences have been a particular success in this regard. Just as with a face-to-face conference, the event is promoted in advance, content is prepared and speakers are lined up. Some of these online conferences have generated involvement from many hundreds of participants and initiated contacts between them which persist after the event.
The Communities of Practice site went live in September 2006 and so far around £1 million has been spent on development and support. Take-up has exceeded expectations in terms of headline numbers. Over 550 CoPs have been started to date. There are now over 20,000 registered members of the platform and they have downloaded 64,000 documents in the last year. Membership is increasing by over 80 per day, or nearly 2,000 per month. There are about 30,000 visits per month and in a typical month over 3,700 members log in on multiple occasions.
For Lawrence Hall, who monitors performance and impact for CoPs, it’s definitely not simply about the headline numbers. “The number I want to see improve is the proportion of active users … those people who frequently contribute to discussions and edit wikis and so on. At the moment they account for about sixteen percent of the total. This is better than the industry norm of ten percent but I want to see the proportion get even higher.”
There are issues of inclusion and of skills gaps too. John reflects that: “People who are happy to communicate to hundreds of people via e-mail suddenly get writer’s block when it comes to publishing their views on a CoP. It may be an age thing. Younger people, or digital natives as they are called, find that contributing to an online community of practice is a natural thing to do. On the other hand, my generation, which is over-represented in local government, finds it harder.”
John’s vision for developing IDeA CoPs is to go more towards being a blend of the most effective features of blogs, social networks and wikis.
He sums up: “I want to see participation in CoPs being very immediate and merging into ordinary conversation. The degree of change looks scary. But remember that ten years ago e-commerce was also very new….”
