Public sector blogging in Scotland

I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this you think that people blogging about their work is a GOOD THING. And possibly also that blogging AT WORK about more personal stuff is also a GOOD THING. If, however, you’re not convinced, have a read of this and this.  And if you’re still not convinced – why on earth are you reading this blog?!

I’ve been blogging about my work (with the occasional post about more personal stuff) for about four years now. I’m still not very good at it, but I think the fact that I’m doing it at all is a GOOD THING. For me, even if it’s not for anyone else. And for me other people blogging about their work in the public sector has been a VERY GOOD THING - I’ve learnt a hell of a lot from the blogs I read.

Because it’s a GOOD THING we need more folk doing it. There are some very good blogs with a public sector focus written in Scotland. Here are some that I’m aware of - in no particular order (and with apologies to any I’ve missed out):

• http://benplouviez.wordpress.com/
• http://corrinnedouglas.wordpress.com/
• http://www.prettysimple.co.uk/blog/
• http://royhair.com/
• http://scotgovcamp.wordpress.com

But we can do better!  So I’ve being having a think about how we might get more public sector folk in Scotland blogging. (And I’m talking here about blogging outside the walled garden of the Communities of Practice space – lovely though that garden is.)

Blogger extraordinaire Mr Dave Briggs recently wrote a post about Public Sector Bloggers, which aggregates content from UK public sector blogs (very few are written this side of the border), and mentioned it’s growing unwieldiness (cos of the increase in blogs). Suggestions for the future development of the site include better categorisation and the addition of blogging guidance.

But...I’m wondering if a Public Sector Bloggers type resource specifically for Scotland/Scottish bloggers would be something worth developing?

What do you think?  Would existing Scottish public sector bloggers be keen to have their posts aggregated in this way?  Would it be a useful resource for encouraging people to blog?  Or could we just make more of the existing Public Sector Bloggers site?

I’d also be interested in suggestions for other ways to encourage more blogging in the public sector in Scotland.

Spikkin, speerin and a fly piece

Last Thursday I did a wee turn at the Scottish Knowledge Management Network (SKMN) meeting, which took place at the rather plush Subsea 7 offices in Westhill (Aberdeen).

I’d been at the ancestral pile in Aberdeenshire for the previous five days and had gone a bit native, so I called my slot ‘spikkin, speerin and a fly piece’. For the non-Doric speakers, that roughly translates to ‘talking, questioning and a cup of tea and a biscuit/cake/sandwich’ – which I thought summed up the day nicely.

When Mike McLean (Improvement Service) asked if I’d do a slot at the meeting, I asked him what he’d like me to talk about. An update on ScotGovCamp and something about my information literacy activities, he said. But rather than do separate presentations, I thought about common themes to link the two and then tried to tie them up nicely with a knowledge management bow…

…and basically what that boils down to is me and what I do on a daily basis…

...that being three things: communities, collaboration and conversation. I could talk about all three all day, but decided to concentrate on the third. The main point of my presentation summed up by David Weinberger in the Cluetrain Manifesto: “business is a conversation...and ‘knowledge workers’ are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations”. My slides are available on Slideshare.

In the spirit of GovCamp, I wanted the session to be a conversation so I tried not to spend too much time talking before asking:

• is conversation important within and between organisations important? 
• do you have interesting conversations?
• if not, why not? 

leading us into an interesting conversation about conversation ;-).

Find out more

• about ScotGovCamp
• about UKGovCamp
• about the information literacy CoP

The rest of the day

I’m not going to write in detail about the other presentations as that will be done better  elsewhere, but the main points I picked up were:

• Let people learn and share their way not yours. [Dave Briggs]
• A knowledge management strategy can make a corporate re-organisation less painful. And Sharepoint can be useful :-) [Annie Robertson]
• Faced with the dual drivers of continuous improvement and financial stringency, we need more than ever to lead and manage the use of knowledge as an asset, to improve quality of care, create innovative solutions, and maximise use of existing resource. (NHS Education for Scotland and the Scottish Social Services Council are holding a series of Social Innovation events to “co-create” Knowledge Management Action Plans for Health and Social Services Organisations. Looking forward to hearing more about these.) [Annette Thain]
• Jamie Kirk is going places (initially to North America in late May to study apps for government). [Jamie Kirk]
• Before encouraging others to share we have to show willingness to share with each other. [David Friel]
• The Knowledge Hub (KHub) is coming and will be fab. Join the KHub CoP if you want to find out more [Mike McLean]

Thanks are due to Subsea 7, and Annie Robertson in particular, for hosting the meeting and for admitting that sometimes the private sector can learn from the public sector :-).

What the IL have I been up to?

I’ve been really bad recently at keeping up with developments in information literacy. And to contributing to the information literacy community. The odd thing will pop up in Google Reader or my Twitter stream that I’ll skim over and highlight in the information literacy community of practice or tweet using the #infolit hashtag. But it’s intermittent and a bit half hearted.

So  I’m doing a bit of cramming now to get up to speed in advance of CILIPS ‘Information literacy: what’s it all about?’ event at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow on 20 January – at which Jenny Foreman and I are delivering a workshop.

If you’re not already signed up to attend, you should – not least because our workshop will be ace. There’s a great line up in addition to me and Jenny:

• Christine Irving will be chairing
• Debbi Boden (Director of Library Services at Glasgow Caledonian University and chair of  CILIP’s Information Literacy Group) will give an overview of information literacy
•  Ian Watson and Michelle Drumm from IRISS will talk about their information literacy programme for the social services
• Dr Audrey Sutton will present on information literacy in education

As to the workshop, I don’t want to give too much away yet...but it'll be based on the social media game – developed by David Wilcox – which you may have seen in action. It’ll be the first time we’ve tried it, but I think it’ll work. If it does, we’ll do a full write up and put all the materials in the community of practice. If it doesn’t, we’ll flee the country.

And in other news, there have been developments recently regarding a new home for the Scottish Information Literacy Framework. I hope to bring you more details shortly...