May 6th, 2009 |
Now that we have the internal NRCan Resource Wiki hitting its stride, a growing and active blog culture, and a vibrant video community of practice, where does NRCan go from here? Do we add new technologies such as professional networking in order to provide even more ways for employees to collaborate and share knowledge? Do we explore the potential of crowd sourcing to tap into the wisdom of our community? Do we begin to turn outwards in order to engage citizens and clients in new ways?
The answer is all of the above. However, we believe that underlying the implementation of collaborative technologies is a foundational need to integrate them with our traditional tools in order to create a comprehensive knowledge base for the whole department. In other words, our priority these days is to mashup all our sources of knowledge.
The reasons for this are obvious. Collaborative technologies are increasingly being used by employees to discuss issues and share ideas, to provide status updates on key files, and to capture considerations and decisions around our projects and initiatives. At the same time we continue to create studies, reports and datasets using our traditional tools such as word processing and document management systems and databases. By bringing together new and traditional sources via an integrated knowledge base we can create synergies and provide a more comprehensive and complete picture of the work we do.
Imagine being able to easily access all the sources of information on ‘climate change’ at NRCan. You would find a wiki page describing the topic and current status of activities, scientific and policy studies present and past, blog discussions on the latest policy developments, videos of our scientists talking about their findings and a network of expertise with responsibilities in this area, all of this and more from a single point of access. This is what we are aiming for by mashing it all up.
In order to achieve this objective NRCan has articulated two basic principles:
1) Information and knowledge should be openly available. That means putting information and knowledge into shared spaces so that they can be accessed by everyone;
2) A common and basic level of information classification should be applied to all our sources of knowledge to enable better integration and improve findability.
Most importantly, we are also rolling out an enterprise search engine to search across all these knowledge sources. Currently it searches wikis, blogs, discussion forums, the intranet and our departmental phone directory. Over the next few months we will extend the search to content and document management spaces, our growing catalogue of videos and eventually to our legacy shared drives. All of this taken together will lay the foundation for NRCan to make its information and knowledge broadly accessible, first to our employees, but potential beyond to other government departments and to Canadian citizens. Now that’s a mashup!
