Title: Using CoPs To Simplify Processes and Unify Work Across Agencies: CrossIndustry Applications
1Using 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
2Bio
- 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.
3Abstract
- 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.
4Abstract(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.
5Overview
- 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.
61. 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
71. 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.
81. 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).
91. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities
101. 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
111. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities
http//colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage
121. 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.
131. 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).
141. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities
Source Greg Lloyd President Co-Founder
Traction Software, KM Conference 2005.
151. Federal Government Community of Practice
Activities
Source Greg Lloyd President Co-Founder
Traction Software, KM Conference 2005.
161. 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.
172. 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)
182.1 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
192.1 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).
202.1 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Community Wiki
See next two slides for details.
http//colab.cim3.net/
212.1 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 )
222.1 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.
232.1 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.
242.1 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
252.2 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/
262.2 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Best Practices
See http//web-services.gov, Dynamic Knowledge
Repositories
272.2 Dynamic Knowledge Repository - Best Practices
See http//web-services.gov, Dynamic Knowledge
Repositories
282.3 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
292.3 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.
302.3 Collaborative Ontology Development
Infrastructure and Services
Protégé Ontology Knowledgebase Editor
313. 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
323.1 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.
333.2 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
343.3 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
353.3 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.
364. 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