Round-Up: 'bout time.

Like I said, a lot has crossed my desk these past few weeks. Hopefully this post captures most of it. Yes this post is rushed ... sorry but rushed updates are better then no updates!


Blogs

Etienne has started posting the results of his unofficial survey on PS Renewal:

1. Challenges of Conducting the survey
2. Access to Web 2.0 and PS Renewal related websites
3. Interest and Usefulness of PS Renewal related websites
4. Getting Involved in PS Renewal
5. Ideas on How to Get Involved

We also wanted to wish AIR a happy anniversary. Btw since drafting this update his blog has seen a slew of new posts – go check it out.

Over the course of his posts Etienne mentioned that:

The figures are better for my friends at CPSRenewal.ca who, despite the fact they use the same platform as I do (Blogger), are able to be reached by an additional 25% of public servants (that means 65,000 more people!). That is a relief, since I think their blog is the single best source of news on PS Renewal. But why is my blog blocked more than their's? I don't know...

The reason that our blog is more accessible then Etienne's is that we registered a unique domain name that doesn't end in ".blogspot.com". Our reasoning (dictated to us by our experience) was that the blogspot domain was routinely blocked by internal firewalls while a unique URL was more likely to reach more of our colleagues. The result was our deliberate purchasing (with our own funds) a domain name to use.

In other blognews GCPEDIA has been garnering some coverage in the blogosphere (outside our own coverage of course). Check out these posts at Spaghetti Testing and SoSaidThe.Org respectively.


2008 Public Service Employee Survey

You should be getting or already gotten a link and an access code in order to complete the 2008 PSES. More information can be found on their website. It goes without saying that this is a good opportunity for you to participate.


Opportunities for Public Servants Abroad

Interested in working in Afghanistan as a Public Servant? Check out this webpage.


News

The Ottawa Citizen published an article called Rise of the Public Sector. Here is the snippet on renewal:

... efforts at public sector renewal should continue and be more widely publicized. In Ottawa, the Privy Council has been leading a reform and renewal effort on the grounds that a well-functioning public sector is crucial to our competitive performance, and that argument will now resonate much more than it has in the past. Slogans that might have seemed pretentious or empty in the recent past -- being the "best employer in the country" -- now have a chance of being given a fair hearing. People who might have aimed at a corporate career may now see some attractions to working in a sector that is, on the whole, untainted by "greed" and now clearly responsible for the well-being of both the economy and society.

I also came across an article entitled The public service must lead change out of Atlantic Canada.


A cool new space for civic-minded young Canadians?

[h/t to Robin for sharing this with us. Here is an email from someone from PPF looking to start an initiative targetted at youth.]

From: Vinod Rajasekaran [mailto:vinod.rajasekaran@ppforum.ca]
Subject: PPX : a cool new space for civic-minded young Canadians

Hi!

My name is Vinod and I am a Research Associate with the Public Policy Forum (PPF). I thought you’d be interested to know that the PPF is starting up a new venture called PPX that is focused on engaging young Canadians – PPX is youth-designed and youth-led.

So, what is PPX?

It is a new kind of space that brings together young Canadians from all fields and sectors to learn about, inform, mingle, collaborate on, influence, and discuss issues that matter to Canada and the world.

Why are we doing it?

Young Canadians care about their communities. But traditional ways of engagement do not respect or reflect the ways in which they organize themselves, interact, and hope to influence. Public issues need to be seen as relevant and worth participating in.

What will we do together?

Using a mixture of web 2.0 stuff (blogging, texting, Facebook, etc.) and events (cappuccino sessions, lectures, dinners, etc.) in new and creative settings, we will generate approaches to tackle issues affecting Canada and the world, strengthen relationships between young professionals and Baby Boomer executives, increase collaboration between the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors, and reinvigorate public debate.

We don’t have a website just yet, but do have a Facebook page where we have discussions, post events, and share ideas. I invite you to check it out and join the group.

Also…the first PPX project is a workshop on retaining young talent. A few words about it: Lately, attracting and retaining young talent has become a challenge for businesses, NGOs, and the public service. To help address this issue, organizations need to better understand the values, interests and priorities of Gen Y on the nature of work and the workplace. While some studies by HR experts exist, rarely has an opportunity been created to bring together Gen Ys, who are the workforce of the future, to develop recommendations.

This workshop is still in conceptual stage but, if you have any ideas or thoughts, feel free to email me!

Here is the link to PPX Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=43065177400&ref=share


Thanks and look forward to hearing from you on PPX!

Cheers,


Vinod Rajasekaran
Research Associate / Associé à la recherche
Public Policy Forum / Forum des politiques publiques
1405 - 130 rue Albert Street
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1P 5G4
Tel/Tél 613 238 7858 x 230
Fax/Téléc 613 238 7990
Vinod.Rajasekaran@ppforum.ca

CPSRENEWAL.CA Weekly: Too Busy Dodging Alligators to Drain the Swamp?

I have to level with you; I am pretty excited about GCPEDIA, and the tag line, People & Knowledge is a great fit. At the time of drafting this weekly column, there are 688 users and 1,003 articles.

People, Process, and Technology

I sat in on an IT Modernization Workshop this week (completely unrelated to GCPEDIA), and the facilitator said something that really struck me. He said that what we were engaging in wasn’t really a discussion on IT modernization per se, but a discussion on IT enabled business modernization. Below is my adaptation of what he shared with the group.

Organizations that succeed in modernizing their IT solutions are the ones who modernize their business delivery models as well. There are three elements that need to be addressed (in order) when undertaking IT enabled business modernization:

1. People do the work, so they have to be on board. People can be sticky: they get accustomed to doing things a certain way, and they can be proprietary. Changing old habits is incredibly difficult. Typically, people account for 70% of the problems that arise during IT modernization.
2. Process is simply the chain of actions that create results. Process usually accounts for 20% of the problems during modernization.
3. Technology is the enabler. It comes into play once people and process are aligned. Technical solutions typically only accounts for 5% of the problems during modernization projects.

It is no surprise that the sticking point is people. I think convincing people to use and create content for GCPEDIA will be the most difficult part of rolling out this type of initiative.

As Etienne pointed out in one of his more recent posts “[online] user participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., those that read or observe, but don't or very rarely contribute);
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time;
• 1% of users are active participants and account for the majority of content.

Couple the 90-9-1 rule with public service culture and what do we get? Well only time will tell, but given the potential that I think GCPEDIA has for the future, I think there should be people creating content or facilitating content creation as a part of their full time jobs. I can tell you this much – I am moving my substantive position into an area where I deal primarily with knowledge management. My first order of business is to bring GCPEDIA to the attention of my managers and initiate discussions about how we can leverage it to better manage our own knowledge and share it with our colleagues from outside our department.

A Tremendous Opportunity

Truth be told, I was in the midst of creating my own personal wiki on a USB stick (using portable applications). Once it was completed, I was planning on unveiling it to Senior Management as a better way to manage the transition between Ministers, increase collaboration, and retain corporate knowledge.

However, as I said, I am moving into a new area so those wheels have ground to a halt. In retrospect, given the presence of GCPEDIA, I wonder how departmental initiatives in similar veins would overlap with the admittedly great work that TBS has done with GCPEDIA. I have a lot of questions around how GCPEDIA is impacting, and will continue to impact, internal departmental communications and intranet sites, but those will have to wait for another day. My interim conclusion is that GCPEDIA represents a tremendous opportunity for knowledge sharing across the Public Service. Furthermore, it is an opportunity I encourage you all to take.

Getting the Ball Rolling Part I

Having coordinated my departmental briefing book by email and diskettes (ugh!), I know that a wiki could be a better way of doing business, especially when it comes to internal collaboration. I also know for a fact that every federal department in the country just delivered briefing books to their Ministers. So why don’t we drop all of the (non-secret) notes into GCPEDIA?

If you want to create a central repository for knowledge, GCPEDIA seems to be a good place to start. All the notes have ADM and DM approvals and all of them are available in both official languages. I can’t think of a better way for someone to learn more about another government organization (or even their own) than by centralizing all of this information in GCPEDIA. If I were to do this today, I could easily add over 100 articles to GCPEDIA - an increase in the current article count of 10%!

While this little suggestion seems entirely tangible to me, I think that this type of push is something that needs to come from the central agencies. A collaborative call to open up our briefing books (again, minus the secret material) made by both TBS and PCO could go a long way towards creating useful wiki content, a lot further then this blog’s recommendation anyways.

My only fear about GCPEDIA was summed up nicely at the IT Modernization workshop. When asked about how we were proceeding with IT Modernization, one participant aptly responded: “We will be too busy dodging alligators to drain the swamp”. What he meant to express was his worry about the operational necessity of the day precluding our ability to address the root causes of our knowledge management problems. Given the depth and speed at which information can be made available, it is imperative that we share knowledge more effectively and efficiently both within and across federal government departments, and I think that GCPEDIA represents a tangible means through which we can start to drain that swamp.

Getting the Ball Rolling Part II

True to the 90-9-1 rule, a very small percentage of people have self-identified as “wiki gnomes” - motivated wiki-savvy public servants. That’s not to say, of course, that many public servants are neither motivated, nor wiki-savvy. As above, it could simply be the case that, despite being eager to drain the swamp, dodging alligators simply takes too much time and effort. But in another case, many might have the concern that management may not allow the level of participation that wiki-gnomes might want to engage in. While there is undoubtedly a discussion underway about how participation can be justified from a number of official standpoints, let’s think about it in a different way.

The concern, and the desire for a solid foot to stand on, though valid, may be slightly misplaced. Rather than justify participation to your manager, see if there’s an opportunity to work with your manager to piece together assignments that integrate content generation into your deliverables.

A Quick Note from CPSRenewal.ca

Hi Everyone,

I Just wanted to drop you a quick note saying that we have been very busy these past few weeks, and there has been a lot of things that have caught our eyes that are worth pointing to.

That pointing will most likely have to wait until after this week's weekly column. I simply haven't had the time to pull together a post.

Stay tuned ...