The opening keynote is from Euan Semple (http://www.euansemple.com/). Euan is at the BBC as head of Knowledge Management, and has had to help the BBC adapt to ‘Web 2.0’. When faced with a manager who said ‘if I gave my staff access to that kind of tool, they would just end up wasting their time’ – Euan’s reply was ‘have you thought that your recruitment policy might not be working?’.

So Euan’s opening question is what will ‘Businesslike’ look like when business isn’t like business any more?

Euan’s talking about tools he has used or seen used in the process of implementing technology in the area of KM. Firstly ‘Talk.Gateway’ – a discussion/chat board. He draws a distinction between this approach to ‘document management’ systems "where information goes to die gracefully". He suggests that by using something like a discussion board allows you to access all the collective knowledge of the organisation (in the case of the BBC accessing the collective knowledge of 23k employees). An example where someone asked about a policy and got 6 different answers, as well as a link to the official policy document. Euan’s point is that the discussion board didn’t create this sitution, but surfaced it – don’t blame the system for surfacing inconsistencies or problems.

Second tool, Connect.Gateway – a place where you can post details about yourself – expertise, interests, contact details etc. plus ability to join ‘interest groups’ to bring together people with common interests – espeically the ‘new’ stuff that wasn’t captured in the corporate structure.

Euan is pretty sceptical about structure in these systems – taxonomies etc. He says that with the discussion board, originally there were just two sections. Eventually he came under pressure to provide more structure to the boards – however, as soon as he did this, usage drops. He draws a parallel to a ‘cotswold village’ that grows up gradually over time with no particular plan, compared to organised ‘new towns’ like Milton Keynes which are ‘planned’ to be systematic, but end up being very easy to get lost in. I’m not sure this completely holds up – there are definite advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, but the point with Milton Keynes is that once you understand the layout, it becomes quite easy. Also with a systematic approach, then you can apply the same system to different places – once you understand the system for numbering/naming streets in on US city, you can apply it in others. However, each Cotswold village is different. To make this more concrete, the point is that once you understand LCSH you can apply that to each library catalogue you use, but if we all used local terminology then this would not be possible. On the otherhand this perhaps means you don’t get the advantage of localisation which leads to ease of use for regular users. I think a dual approach can work, and there is no doubt that libraries have traditionally taken a very structured approach, and haven’t yet exploited the ‘organic growth’ approach to any extent.

Euan has just covered blogs as a communication and dicussion tool, and is now mentioning wikis – these are all tools that have been used at the BBC.

Just as an aside – one of my reasons for blogging (especially conferences) is to share information with colleagues. However, I also want to engage in a discussion with a wider community online. At Imperial they have recently introduced the ‘Confluence’ system for blogging and wikis, which I think is great, and some of my teams are already using, or investigating. However, at the moment the blogs we can setup on Confluence are only available internally – which wouldn’t support me in engaging with the wider community – hence I’m blogging on my own site instead. I hope that this might change…

So, wikis – Euan making the point that they are highly auditable, and to some extent self-correcting.

The BBC now have guidelines on blogging etc – again, something I asked about at Imperial before I started blogging as an Imperial employee – but at the moment there doesn’t seem to be anything in Imperial policies or guidelines relating to this.

Euan now coming onto tagging etc. name checking David Weinberger and his book ‘Everything is Miscellaneous’ (http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Miscellaneous-Power-Digital-Disorder/dp/0805080430). Euan is covering use of del.icio.us – with use of tags and his ‘network’ of trusted people who use del.icio.us. Also use of RSS to track this – and telling a story of how he did a talk, and when he came off stage his RSS aggregator picked up a new item tagged with his name, and found that it was someone blogging the talk he had just given (wonder if he will pick up this post?)

Euan mentioning the use of the Google blog search – different type of content to what you would get in response to a normal Google search – he argues more useful.

Now mentioning last.fm – I still haven’t got into this (probably don’t listen to enough music!) – but the point is the power of the ‘network’ – harnassing the knowledge of a network of people. Suggesting that something like this for TV is on it’s way – why watch a programmed ‘channel’ when you can choose to watch something that your ‘trusted’ network is recommending.

Now mentioning ‘Plazes‘ which I haven’t come across – once you connect to a  wireless network, it works out where you are and shows it on a map – so people can see where you are, and you can see if you are near to people you want to meet etc.

Twitter – the ‘intenstity of the mundane’ – what about ‘on my way to meeting with CEO’
Facebook – making contact
Dracos.co.uk – tracks changes to BBC News homepage – allows you to see stuff that has been changed – so can’t hide stuff that you’ve said…

Some final examples – Innocentive from a pharmaceutical company where questions can be posted, and people can bid for answers – story of a member of staff at an Indian university who set the questions for students, and posted answers – one student got £75k for an answer.
A final lighthearted example of an online application – Meeting Miser – works out how much a meeting has cost the organisation based on time and salaries of those involved – the point being, don’t value physical meetings over virtual collaboration.

Coffee time!