Late Tuesday afternoon, we launched NRTube which is NRCan’s internal, YouTube-like video sharing tool.  Consistent with our suite of tools, NRTube is open source with a simple interface.

 

The tool was quietly announced via an email from the CIO to all employees.  There was no great fanfare.  No balloons, no confetti, no big splashy posters.  Just a short message inviting employees to test out NRTube by using it as much as possible and posting any performance or other issues to a feedback page on our Wiki. 

 

What resulted in the 24 hours following the launch was inspiring.

 

1. At 8:28 on Wednesday morning I received an email message from an NRCan scientist with the subject line:  NRTube – no contest!  His message read:  I posted two videos at around 16:30 last night. Currently sitting at #1 and #2 most watched overall. #3 is so far behind we can’t see it in our rear-view mirror.
2. At 10:43 am I received a telephone call from a 2.0 colleague at NRCan absolutely giddy.    “Have you seen the stats for NRTube?”, he exclaimed.  “Check out the number of watched videos!”  At that time the number was 913.  It was pretty cool to watch the number increase as we continued our conversation and by the time I hung up the receiver about 15 minutes later, the number of watched videos had climbed to 1,191. 
3. At 1:58 I made a phone call to a Director in our Sydney, BC office with whom I am coordinating a Web 2.0 workshop for the Fall.  He sheepishly admitted he has spent about an hour of his morning watching some NRCan videos on NRTube and proceeded to tell me about his favourite ones.  

 

Wow!  On all three counts I was thrilled. 

 

Regarding the scientist, this is the same scientist who was luke-warm to NRCan’s suite of collaboration tools back in April when I first contacted him to set up a meeting.  When we finally met a few weeks ago to talk about how he and his group could begin incorporating some of the tools, I suggested he use NRTube, once it was released, to help him manage his volume of video.  This suggestion was met with indifference and a comment about not seeing the value of sharing his material with an internal audience.   And now, he posted 2 videos to NRTube within 15 minutes of its launch and by the next morning his two videos were, by far, the most viewed videos out of 21 videos posted. 

 

His initial reluctance to use the tools for internal knowledge creation and sharing is in keeping with most from the science community.  Scientists are quite adept at collaborating and sharing their knowledge – just not so much outside their community of peers.  But now, I suspect another Web 2.0 champion is born!

 

At the time of writing this blog posting, NRTube had 36 videos that had been viewed over 1,650 times.  I think I am catching my colleague’s giddiness.  The fact that employees are using NRTube is great.  That they are watching videos about NRCan science – amazing images of explosives testing, a succinct history of the Geological Survey of Canada, instructional videos on how to make our homes more energy efficient and more – is fantastic!  These videos are imparting knowledge. 

 

All of a sudden I feel that employees at NRCan are really beginning to see the value of Web 2.0 in the workplace.  There has always been a very active community of Web 2.0 champions, but it seems that NRTube might just be the tipping point that sees Web 2.0 tools become so integrated that we forget what it was like not to have them. 

 

Put out the tools and let the community decide how to use them.  Darn right!  For me, it’s the small victories that are the sweetest – one employee at a time! 

 

Tags: CIO, Wiki