John Stevenson, who works at the International Development Research Centre and is a long-time blogger, kicked it off beautifully, giving an excellent
general history and overview of weblogs and why people love them. He
then explained different ways in which they can enhance communication in organizations.
I spoke right after him and provided some more detail on the mechanics
of how blogging and aggregation works, and explained how the emergence
of the two-way web is moving us to increasingly networked ways of
diffusing information. (My slides are here. By the way, if you were
there and would like to start an email conversation with others who were there too, just send me email at Sebastien -dot- Paquet -at- nrc -dot- ca.)
Did you know the US army had embraced collaborative weblogs on a
private network? Greg Searle,
who's co-founder and chief scientist at Tomoye, explained
how that came about. It's a very interesting story: two company
commanders - Nate Allen and Tony Burgess - who lived next to one
another
in Hawaii and discovered the incredible value of informal conversation
among peers for learning. They then started digging into the literature
on communities of practice to better connect their insights with what
is known in this area.
They ended up wroting a book titled "Taking the Guidon" which became
wildly popular within the army and led to a guerilla knowledge
management effort among people in that position. A community of
practice of company commanders initially built on PHP-Nuke sprang up below the radar and interest
bubbled up over about two years. Despite obvious resistance among
people in the upper ranks, it was eventually recognized that you need a
network to fight networks, and this internal blogging activity
is now officially
endorsed, which is quite an about-face for the military culture. Greg
said the passion of the participants was a key factor in the success of
the CoP. Also, when the survival of your men depends on learning,
it provides a powerful incentive to find more effective ways to learn.
You can get a glimpse of what's discussed in the community in this Washington Post article.
Ray
Valdes, research director in Gartner Research, then gave a presentation
on the future of blogging, syndication, and related technologies. I
especially liked his discussion of how Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
thrived while the much more sophisticated Information & Content
Echange (ICE) standard pretty much floundered. Simplicity rules. His slide on the Gartner Hype Cycle
as it applies to XML technologies was pretty neat too, though I don't
recall exactly where RSS was (I think it was pinned in several distinct
stages, depending on the kind of payload - news headlines, personal
publishing, or data.) (You can get the report for just $495 :)
Afterwards we fielded a number of good questions. One of the things we
discussed was the issue of reaching out to the young. A lady from
Health Canada said they have loads of excellent, relevant, reliable
information for them, e.g. on AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases,
but the issue is getting the kids to rely on it rather than on dubious
word-of-mouth from peers. It is pretty clear that an official Health
Canada blog won't be subscribed to by kids. Spamming blogs with links is out of
the question. Someone suggested sponsoring young bloggers, which is
touchy but could perhaps be done.
In the afternoon, Ian Darragh and Venk Chandran discussed best and
worst practices in e-newsletters. Robert Oates, who's been responsible
for the Government of Canada
newsroom since April 2002 spoke last. The newsroom is Open Source
software-powered, the backend is XML, the rendering is XHTML and 35
webfeeds are offered.
We got a behind-the-curtains look at the
newsroom's administration system, which is basically a pretty well-designed
structured blogging
interface. The news submission form lets you fill
in basic Dublin Core metadata for author, audience, subject, etc. The
people filling this out are professionals so you can kind of expect
them to expend the effort required to fill the form. Interestingly, the
newsroom opted not to offer email subscription because
people are buried under spam and because RSS lets them do away with the
burden of registration and email address collection and management.
Not every government department is using it, but I can see this newsroom becoming a
nicely unified, comprehensive, and metadata-rich one-stop shop for
government information and webfeeds. Kudos to Robert for pulling it off
with a very small team.
All in all a good day. Hopefully the gospel will spread a bit
around the capital and seed new initiatives around blogging and
webfeeds.
John Stevenson, who works at the 
Did you know the US army had embraced collaborative weblogs on a
private network? 
Ray
Valdes, research director in Gartner Research, then gave a presentation
on the future of blogging, syndication, and related technologies. I
especially liked his discussion of how Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
thrived while the much more sophisticated 
