Friday, February 20, 2009

Understanding the Facebook Terms of Service from Rocketboom

Long-time readers of this blog know I am a fan of the video show Rocketboom. At Podcamp Halifax in January I had the pleasure of being able to hang out a bit with Rocketboom's creator Andrew Baron. This video exemplifies why I am such a fan--the show is smart, informative, and entertaining at the same time. Here is their explanation of why the recent changes to Facebook's terms of service have been problematic.

Monday, February 09, 2009

Government and Public Policy in a New Collaborative Age

I have been following the conversations around how social media and collaboration are slowly making in-roads into citizens and government working together toward jointly-developed public policy. Not surprisingly, the road to "Government 2.0" is not always an easy one.

Recently in Toronto ChangeCamp was held to "Re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation." If that doesn't quite sink in, watch this quick promo video by Mark MacKay:


ChangeCamp '09 from Mark McKay on Vimeo.

Results from the one day are being tracked on the ChangeCamp wiki. Mark Kuznicki, one of the most influential leaders of the event, was interviewed by Nora Young for Spark over on CBC Radio. The full interview and blog post are here. Some additional impact on the media is also traced on the ChangeCamp blog here.

It is amazing to see change taking place, and it is not just Toronto. Social media professor of Stanford and Berkeley Howard Rheingold discusses the affect of the Internet Age on Public Policy in this video discussion:

New Information Management Certificate at University of Toronto's PLC

As someone who teaches at the Professional Learning Centre at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, I help to spread the word about their various excellent programs. Their new Information Management Certificate has me even more excited than most! A lot of the work I do touches on either information management or knowledgement management (and I am sure there are plenty of overlaps between these areas). So I am looking forward to starting this program next week to learn as much as I can. Check out the line-up of courses (click through for full descriptions including instructor and dates)~

Overview:

Information Management Fundamentals

Overview of ECM Technologies

Practitioner's Toolkit:

Information Management Analyses

Classification, Taxonomy and Metadata – Basic

Classification, Taxonomy and Metadata – Advanced (Elective)

Information Architecture – Basic

Information Architecture – Advanced (Elective)

Manager's Toolkit:

Strategic and Business Planning for Information Management

Setting the Management Framework for Information Management

Getting Commitment for Information Management in Your Organization


The whole thing starts up next week. I was speaking last week with Eva Piorkowski (who I know better as Eva Kupidura but alas will have to re-learn her name!), and she was telling me they are committed to running the courses at least twice each year over the next two years minimum. So, if you start now there is plenty of time to work your way through the program.

Or, if just one or two courses grabs you, you can always take the individual courses without following the full certificate.

All the courses look outstanding, but what really grabbed my attention is the last course listed above which will be taught by Peter de Jager, who I have seen speak a few times now on change management. I expect that course will be a real highlight.

As an instructor and someone who helps to get the word out, I have to be honest and let you know I am receiving some free time in the program. But I was all planned to pay the whole thing out of pocket personally, I am that jazzed about it. And I'm looking forward to working through what I learn, and expect the results will show up in some of the writing I do including here on the blog. I'm hoping to see others out and learn from you, as well.

Cheers,
Connie

Wikis as Intranets

Today over on the Slaw post Collaboration Through Wikis: Law Firm Case Study I pull together a presentation and a write-up about a project to implement a wiki platform as an intranet by the Toronto-based law firm Hicks Morley. Heather Colman, Knowledge Management Specialist, spearheaded the project for them and describes in detail how this project was conceived and implemented over on LLRX.com in the feature article Collaboration Through Wikis at Hicks Morley. Her slides presented to Toronto Wiki Tuesdays last November are below.



I thank Heather and Hicks Morley for sharing their innovative ideas with all of us. It is an inspiration as to what can done with a smaller time-frame and smaller budget than available at a really big law firm. This sort of innovation starts to level the playing field with implementing current technologies inside the organization.