This week I’d like to open up discussion about what we see south of the border. Open Text as a Canadian headquartered, but globally-focused provider of Enterprise Content Management applications gets to hear and see firsthand what public sector around the world is doing with 2.0 and the collaborative culture this phenomenon brings.

One of my colleagues, Debra Lavoy, inspires and engages me. She’s an active participant in the Government 2.0 community inside the beltway in Washington DC.  She’s become a popular contributor to transparency workshops and is an active and thought-provoking blogger on issues that resonate well here in Canada too.

Is everyone familiar with a site called SlideShare.com?  If not, it’s worth some exploration. Think of it as PowerPoint heaven.  People and organizations can share their key slides, with notes and talking points that they want to broadcast. 

Two of Debra’s decks I want to highlight here are posted on Slideshare.

The first is “Social Workplace for Government 2.0”: http://www.slideshare.net/dllavoy/social-workplace-for-govt-20 .  Three key points?

·         Social Media tools make connections that drive collaboration and knowledge management

·         Culture is more important that technology

·         New technologies are pleasant to use, so people use them

All of these key points highlight the new world of opportunity that Web 2.0 brings to the immense information management challenges public sector professionals face.  Simpler tools can foster better connections, leading to a more cooperative and efficient working culture.

Next key point Lavoy makes – Collaboration is not one size fits all.  She argues there are three main types of collaboration that have different motivations and offer different types of success.  These three types are:

·         Creative

·         Connective

·         Compounding

The second slide deck does a deeper dive into the concepts of these 3 ‘C’s:  in “Social Media at Work” , specific scenarios and examples are explored.

Creative Collaboration

·         Means Innovation. Finding new solutions when and learning how to meet new challenges. Incorporate new insights and brainstorming across a team to develop, vet and test ideas.

Connective Collaboration

·         Means awareness and agility: spreading critical information quickly in even in complex and dynamic situations

Compounding Collaboration

·         Means finding the right person at the right time. Grassroots knowledge management and expert locator to get to the right information and ensure that critical gut instinct we call tacit knowledge can be shared.

Take a look at the slides I’ve linked to and let me know what you think. Maybe I can get Debra to come up for GTEC in October, and we can continue the conversation further.