IDeA's innovative ideas

I was a guest at the IDeA 'Community of Practice' facilitators' conference in London today. This organisation, which supports knowledge sharing and improvement across the 367 UK Local Government Authorities, has achieved some remarkable results since I last looked at it a couple of years ago. An example is the really interesting way of recording the conference. They start simply with the agenda and embedded presentations (in this case hosted on Slideshare) in a Wiki page. They then add content to it contemporaneously during the event. This includes specific quotes, notes, links, bookmarks, a twitter feed, vox pop video snippets and audio clips. It does take a lot of dedicated effort, for example several people using Flip videos, someone dedicated to updating the page and a red hot broadband connection. In effect it appears as a narrative and would replace an Event Workspace/ site or a set of PowerPoint slides. IDeA have some very ambitious plans to utilise 'social technologies' to create a knowledge hub over the next year or so. If their success with online communities of practice (they have about 800) is anything to go by, they will be way ahead of most other public sector organisations and dare I say it, many private sector too.