Using CoPs To Simplify Processes and Unify Work Across Agencies: CrossIndustry Applications

1
Using CoPs To Simplify Processes and Unify Work
Across Agencies Cross-Industry Applications

• KM Collaboration Conference, Orlando, Florida
• Brand Niemann (US EPA), Chair,
• Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice
  (SICoP)
• Best Practices Committee (BPC), Federal CIO
  Council
• December 5, 2005
• http//web-services.gov/ and
• http//colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SICoP

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Bio

• Dr. Niemann has been with the U.S. EPA for 25
  years and currently works in the Office of the
  Chief Information Officer and Assistant
  Administrator for Environmental Information as an
  Enterprise Architect and Semantic Web Services
  Specialist. He Chairs the Federal CIO Councils
  Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice
  (SICoP). He serves as a member of the XML
  Conference Planning Committee, the E-Gov
  Institute Program Planning Committee, the
  Architecture Infrastructure Committee, and the
  Knowledge Management Working Group of the Best
  Practices Committee.

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Abstract

• The Federal Chief Information Office Council
  (CIO) is using Communities of Practice (CoP) to
  transform the Federal government to one that is
  citizen-centered, results-oriented, and
  market-based.
• The CoPs explore opportunities to simplify
  processes and unify work across the agencies and
  within the lines of business of the Federal
  government using "open collaboration with open
  standards."
• The CoPs have gone back in time to find roadmaps
  to the future, specifically, Douglas Englebart's
  "Toward High-Performance Organizations A
  Strategic Role for Groupware (1992)" and Tim
  Berners-Lee's "Vision of the Semantic Web (2000)"
  which in turn had its roots in much earlier work
  on artificial intelligence and knowledge
  representation.

4
Abstract(continued)

• The CoPs are beginning to use advanced Wiki and
  Semantic Web technologies to build Dynamic
  Knowledge Repositories (DKR) in "Knowledge
  Workshops" - this requires patience, energy, and
  persistence to achieve enough content and context
  to drive richer conversations with expanding
  participation.
• This presentation will provide specific examples
  of Federal Government CoP activities,
  technologies that support them, and the need to
  integrate paradigms across the scales of work
  (individual to global) and across the overlapping
  communities of interest.

5
Overview

• 1. Federal Government Community of Practice
  Activities
• 2. Supporting Technologies
• 3. Integrating Paradigms Across Scales and
  Communities
• 4. Questions and Answers
• 5. Acknowledgements
• The author is indebted to Doug Engelbart, Susan
  Turnbull, Peter Yim, and the SICoP and Ontolog
  Forum CoPs for all the collaboration reported
  here.

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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities

• The concept of a Community of Practice (often
  abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of
  social learning that occurs when people who have
  a common interest in some subject or problem
  collaborate over an extended period to share
  ideas, find solutions, and build innovations.
• Source http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_
  practice

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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities

• First used in 1991 by Jean Lave and Etienne
  Wenger who used it in relation to situated
  learning (where the learning will be applied).
• In 1998, the theorist Etienne Wenger extended the
  concept and applied it to other contexts,
  including organizational settings.
• More recently Communities of Practice have become
  associated with knowledge management.

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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities

• In the Federal Government
• Department of the Navy The Power of Team - The
  Making of a CIO (Chapter 6.5 Communities of
  Practice)
• Partnered with the Federal Aviation
  Administration and other government and industry
  organizations to develop and publish the first
  government virtual tool for building and
  sustaining CoPs
• Building Communities of Practice Creating Value
  Through Knowledge Communities-A Practitioners
  Guide (See next slide).
• General Services Administration Office of
  Intergovernmental Solutions
• Collaboration Expedition Workshops (Susan
  Turnbull, Leader)
• Since 2001. See http//colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki
  .pl?ExpeditionWorkshop
• Expanded Across Two CIO Committees and Multiple
  CoPs in 2004 (See slides10 11).
• E-Gov Institute Annual Knowledge Management
  Conference
• Since 2000. See http//www.e-gov.com/events/2005/k
  m/
• E.g. Kent Greenes, CKO, SAIC, Leveraging
  Knowledge and Experience for High Performance
  Knowledge is Only Useful If You Do Something with
  It (See slide 12).

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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities
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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities
Industry Advisory Council (IAC)
U.S. CIO Council
OMB - FEAPMO
Enterprise Architecture Special Interest Group
Architecture Infrastructure Committee
IT Workforce Connections
Best Practices Committee
WGs and CoPs
Subcommittees Governance Components Emerging
Technologies
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice
Chief Architects Forum
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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities
http//colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage
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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities
Communities of Passion Effective Knowledge
Transfer
Transform Act
Timely, trusted, highly relevant knowledge
Context
Conversations
Content
CompanyCommand.Com
Source Kent Greenes, 2005.
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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities

• Communities of Practice A New Tool for
  Government Managers
• William M. Snyder, Managing Director, Social
  Capital Group Xavier de Souza Briggs, Associate
  Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University,
  November 2003.
• Wiki means fast Online collaborative sites open
  to everyone enable the sharing of ideas
• Federal Computer Week and USA Today, April 4,
  2005. See http//www.fcw.com/article88467
• See http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
• Facilitating the Evolution of Our Collective IQ
• Doug Engelbart, September 1, 2005
• See http//colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Expediti
  onWorkshop for slides and recording (mp3).

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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities
Source Greg Lloyd President Co-Founder
Traction Software, KM Conference 2005.
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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities
Source Greg Lloyd President Co-Founder
Traction Software, KM Conference 2005.
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1. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities

• In 1975 Doug Engelbart wrote
• Our Journal system was conceived by this author
  in about 1966. I wanted an underlying operational
  process, for use by individuals and groups, that
  would help bring order into the time stream of
  the Augmented Knowledge workers. The term
  "journal" emerged early in the conceptualization
  process for two reasons
• 1. I felt it important in many dynamic operations
  to keep a log (sometimes termed a "journal")
  that chronicles events by means of a series of
  unchangeable entries (for instance, to log
  significant events while evolving the Plan,
  shaping up a project, trouble-shooting a large
  operation, or monitoring on-going operations).
  These entries would be preserved in original
  form, serving as the grist for later integration
  into more organized treatments.
• 2. I also wanted something that would serve
  essentially the same recorded-dialogue purpose as
  I perceived a professional journal (plus library)
  to do.
• Compcon 75 Digest, September 1975, pp. 173-178,
  Douglas C. Engelbart, The NLS Journal System, see
  the full paper, courtesy of the Bootstrap
  Institute, http//www.bootstrap.org.

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2. Supporting Technologies

• 2.1 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Community Wiki
• 2.2 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Best Practices
• 2.3 Collaborative Ontology Development
  Infrastructure and Services (CODS)

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2.1 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Community Wiki

• A wiki (wee-kee or also wick-ey, also why-kie,
  according to Ward Cunningham) is a group of Web
  pages that allows users to add content, as on an
  Internet forum, but also permits others (often
  completely unrestricted) to edit the content. The
  term wiki also refers to the collaborative
  software (wiki engine) used to create such a
  website (see wiki software). In essence, the wiki
  is merely a vast simplification of the process of
  creating HTML pages, and thus is a very effective
  way to exchange information through collaborative
  effort.
• Source http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

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2.1 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Community Wiki

• Key characteristics
• Simple markup using a web browser generally,
  there is no review before modifications are
  accepted usually highly interconnected via
  hyperlinks and most wikis used CamelCase as a
  link pattern by far the most common wiki systems
  are server-side scalability of the search
  depends on whether the wiki engine uses a
  database or not and considerable effort going
  into defining a wiki markup standard.
• Controlling changes
• A person willing to maintain pages will be warned
  of modifications to the pages, allowing him or
  her to quickly verify the validity of new
  editions.
• Vandalism
• Studies from IBM have shown that most vandalism
  to Wikipedia is reverted in 5 minutes or less.
• History
• First wiki established by Ward Cunningham on
  March 25, 1995 (recently left Microsoft
  Corporation).
• Wiki communities
• About 1000 public wiki communities (as of
  6/12/2004).

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2.1 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Community Wiki
See next two slides for details.
http//colab.cim3.net/
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2.1 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Community Wiki

• Community Portal
• http//www.gsa.gov/collaborate
• Community Wiki
• http//colab.cim3.net/wiki/
• Community Forum
• Message Archives
• http//colab.cim3.net/forum/
• Subscribe/Unsubscribe/Configure
• http//colab.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/
• To Post e-mail to 'forum-name'_at_colab.cim3.net
  (substitute 'forum-name' with name of the forum,
  like colab-test_at_colab.cim3.net )

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2.1 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Community Wiki

• Community Repository
• Shared File Workspace
• http//colab.cim3.net/file/pub/
• http//colab.cim3.net/file/resource/ (member
  password required to upload)
• http//colab.cim3.net/file/work/ (member
  password required to upload)
• http//colab.cim3.net/file/community/ (member
  password required to access)
• http//colab.cim3.net/file/admin/ (administrator
  password required to access)
• Google Search
• Search colab.cim3.net
• Search cim3.net
• Search WWW
• Regular Training Sessions Provided
• See http//colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Communit
  yLearning_CWE

See next two slides for a specific CoP example.
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2.1 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Community Wiki

• Table of Contents
• Charter
• Calendar
• Future
• Past
• SICoP Working Groups and Projects
• SICoP Conferences and Public Meetings
• SICoP White Papers and Presentations
• SICoP Support for the Data Reference Model
• Discussion Forum Archives / File Workspace
  Resources
• SICoP Conference Calls

Note There are templates for quick authoring and
reuse.
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2.1 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Community Wiki
New Wiki Pages created by concatenated words
Purple number and RSS enabled!
Linked files are stored in the File Repository
See http//colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SICoP
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2.2 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Best Practices

• Want Large Documents To Have
• Structure
• Searchability
• Semantics
• Repurpose Large Documents
• FAST Folio for Authoring
• FAST LivePublish for Web Server
• FAST Folio-to-XML for Distribution/Reuse

See FAST Search and Transfer at
http//www.fast.no/us/
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2.2 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Best Practices
See http//web-services.gov, Dynamic Knowledge
Repositories
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2.2 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Best Practices
See http//web-services.gov, Dynamic Knowledge
Repositories
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2.3 Collaborative Ontology Development
Infrastructure and Services

• Ontology (phil.)
• The branch of metaphysics that deals with the
  nature of being.
• Ontologies (tech.)
• Standardized classification systems which enable
  data from different sources to be combined.
• Ontologies are ambitious classification systems
• They rely on definitions,
• On the logic of relations,
• And on theories of high-level categories such as
  function, process, thing, event, constituent.

Source Barry Smith, Co-Director, National Center
for Ontological Research, SUNY-Buffalo
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2.3 Collaborative Ontology Development
Infrastructure and Services

• CODS Team
• Stanford Medical Informatics - developer of
  Protégé
• An open-source ontology tool platform.
• Comprehensive OWL / RDF / Reasoning support.
• Active community with thousands of users (33,000
  registrations).
• Has been used to edit ontologies with tens of
  thousands of concepts.
• CIM3 the ISP for CWEs (Collaborative Work
  Environments)
• Mission to enable more effective distributed
  collaboration and virtual enterprise through
  bootstrapping collective intelligence over the
  Internet.
• Products/Services providing a robust CWE
  infrastructure that enables high performance
  distributed project teams, virtual enterprise
  partners and communities of practice to work.
• Host to the Ontolog-Forum an international CoP
  focusing on the practical issues of both formal
  and informal ontologies, and their adoption into
  mainstream application through standardization.

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2.3 Collaborative Ontology Development
Infrastructure and Services
Protégé Ontology Knowledgebase Editor
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3. Integrating Paradigms Across Scales and
Communities

• 3.1 The Constant Tension Between Working Locally
  and Working Globally
• 3.2 Overlapping CoPs Universal Core and Common
  Core Vocabularies
• 3.3 The Challenge of Integrating Open
  Hyperdocument System and Semantic Web Paradigms

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3.1 The Constant Tension Between Working Locally
and Working Globally
Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the SWANS Conference,
April 7, 2005, on the constant tension between
Keep a wise balance. The semantic web allows a
mixture of the two approaches, and smooth
transitions between them.
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3.2 Overlapping CoPs Universal Core and Common
Core Vocabularies
Major Domains
Homeland
Law

COMMON CORE
Security
Enforcement
Border Security,
Emergency Management,
Courts, Probation,
Intelligence, etc.
Transportation Security, etc.
Parole, Corrections, etc.
UNIVERSAL
COMMON CORE
COMMON CORE
CORE
Juvenile Justice,
Immigration

Public Health, etc.
Education, etc.
Secondary
etc.
Domains
Other Domains
Source Michael Daconta James Feagans, NIEM
Project Manager, NIEM Model - Core and
Domain-Specific Components, October 2005. See
http//www.niem.gov
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3.3 The Challenge of Integrating Open
Hyperdocument System and Semantic Web Paradigms
Stage 1 OHS-HyperScope Browsing Over a wide
variety of legacy files - High-resolution
linking - Many viewing options
And also, hi-resolution linking to audio, video
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3.3 The Challenge of Integrating Open
Hyperdocument System and Semantic Web Paradigms

• Some New Initiatives
• What Weblogs and RSS Feeds are about is that you
  make it very easy to write something that you can
  think of, like an email, but it goes up onto a
  Web siteand it doesnt interfere with your
  normal inbox.
• Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO Summit, May 20, 2004.
• It was suggested that recent self-organizing and
  information-sharing tools from the Internet, the
  Wiki and the Blog, be deployed on the SIPRNet.
• The Wiki and the Blog Toward a Complex Adaptive
  Intelligence Community, D. Calvin Andrus, Central
  Intelligence Agency, July 2, 2005.
• Keynote Debate Blog, Wiki, and RSS Technology -
  Are they Enterprise Ready? Applicable? Or a
  Passing Tempest in a Teacup?
• The Gilbane Content Management Technologies
  Conference, November 29-December 1, 2005.
• Quickly build light-weight tools like Semantic
  Wikis that let people casually start modeling
  things.
• Fourth International Semantic Web Conference,
  November 6-10, 2005, Galway, Ireland.

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4. Questions and Answers

• Your Turn to Ask Questions and For Us to Have a
  Dialogue
• Contact Information
• Brand Niemann
• US Environmental Protection Agency
• 202-564-9491
• Niemann.brand_at_epa.gov