Communities of Practice for local governments
…a community platform supporting professional social networks across local government and the public sector. It provides a secure environment for knowledge development and sharing through online communities of practice.
I recently was invited to join a Scottish group on “shared representation using semantic technologies”. I noticed this site has recently won the 2008 eGovernment national award in the UK. And rightly so, it is a very good example of a site for people who care about people. This collaborative tool features forums, library (document management), wiki, news feeds (RSS) and user blogs. All entries are tagged so one can navigate and search more effectively. A member can start up a new community of practice (CoP). To do this the site provides a “create new CoP wizard” that asks the creator to agree a number of principles and responsibilities for positive, effective collaboration, although a usability hurdle I can see how it really would make one think about what they were about to start up. Apparently the site is a success as there seems to be a very large number of groups collaborating on it. I think it’s a good benchmark for social software to support communities of practice.
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