Information Management Now

Spy agencies now share the Wikipedia way (LA Times - Greg Miller)

2006-11-01T18:50:00.000-05:00

This one was just too interesting and I had to mention it... See the story, by Greg Miller from the Los Angeles Times. Thanks to Lieutenant-Commander Mary Gardam for sharing the story.

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Wikipedia

GC Top IT Job Open to the Public

2006-08-01T10:45:00.000-04:00

No posts lately - I am enjoying a restful two weeks vacation away from the computer (mostly). :-)

This might interest some readers: the top IT job in the Government of Canada, Chief Executive Officer of the Information Technology Services Branch, Public Works & Government Services Canada, has become available - advertisement 2006-TLN-SVC-APE-09 (indeterminate). The competition is open to the public until August 15th, 2006. It is at the EX-5 level ($151,800-178,700).

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Wanted - Legal Adviser in Botswana (e-government)

2006-07-21T18:30:00.000-04:00

I'm putting this here for Steven Bilodeau, Crown Prosecutor (Technology & Internet Crimes Coordinator), Alberta Justice - Special Prosecutions Branch:

The government of Botswana has put out a tender for an e-government portal. One of the requirements is for a "Legal Advisor" to advise on legal issues relating to e-government projects and must be a graduate in law with experience handing such projects.

Do any of you know someone who would fit this description? The person putting the tender together wants to approach qualified candidates.

Please reply directly to Steven, at Steven.Bilodeau (at) gov.ab.ca

[cross-posted on slaw]

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Update on drupal - Free and Open Source Content Management System

2006-07-11T18:22:00.000-04:00

Ever had the feeling, after you bought a new car or a new house, that you made the right choice? Feels good, doesn'it?

That is how I feel towards drupal, a free and open source content management system, covered earlier. Powerful third party recognition keeps adding up:

By Google, in the context of its Summer of Code program;
By IBM, in the context of its ongoing series of article on Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site, drupal was selected over Mambo, Typo3, Movable Type, Wordpress and Text Pattern; noticably taking note of drupal's founder Dries Buytaert desire to focus on simplicity and usability;
By Forrester Research, listing drupal as a "strong performer".

[cross-posted on G2TT]

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Microsoft Adding Office Support for ODF

2006-07-06T19:46:00.000-04:00

Microsoft is on a roll! (in right directions)

After introducing a Creative Commons add-in for Office, they are now adding a capability to translate the Open XML Office format into the Open Document Format - see the post by Brian Jones:

Today we are announcing the creation of the Open XML Translator project that will help translate between the Office Open XML formats and the OpenDocument format. We've talked a lot about the value the Open XML formats bring, and one of them of course is the ability to filter it down into other formats. While we still aren't seeing a strong demand for ODF support from our corporate or consumer customers, it's now a bit different with governments.

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L’absence de blogues civilistes (commentaire)

2006-07-04T20:20:00.000-04:00

Comme certains lecteurs le savent déjà, je suis un avocat francophone, membre du Barreau du Québec. Je publie ici et sur slaw en anglais, malgré quelques rares exceptions. Récemment, grâce à un billet de Dominic Jaar sur son nouveau blogue, j'ai trouvé plusieurs blogues juridiques francophones et j'ai décidé de répondre ci-bas à un thème soulevé à plusieurs reprises: l'absence de blogueurs civilistes.

Pour expliquer cette rareté juridico-québécoise-blogique, il faut revoir quelques prémisses, notamment celles à l'effet que les deux finalités d'un blogue juridique sont de (1) partager, confronter avec l’autre; et (2) se faire connaître.

Le blogueur régulier (au moins un billet par semaine) doit être motivé par un incitatif qui va au-delà du simple désir de se faire connaître ou de créer des confrontations ou controverses. Parmi les autres éléments de motivation, on retrouve le simple plaisir d'écrire, d'articuler sa pensée dans une forme suffisamment intelligible et structurée pour qu'elle soit couchée sur clavier.

Tout blogueur régulier se rend rapidement compte du phénomène suivant: plus on écrit à propos d'un sujet, plus on l'approfondit; plus on approfondit un sujet, plus on a envie d'écrire et d'étendre les frontières de sa connaissance. Quand l'effort est sincère et novateur, le blogueur éprouve un plaisir suffisant à simplement "accoucher son billet" (!) Quand l'effort est novateur et recherché, il n'est pas rare (exemple) que plusieurs personnes interviendront pour y ajouter leurs commentaires, critiques et suggestions.

Ceci dit, je crois que la rareté des blogueurs civilistes francophones au Québec s'explique par les raisons suivantes:

Nombre d'auteurs potentiels est réduit. Le Québec n'est pas la France ni la communauté de common law Nord-Américaine: le nombre d'auteurs potentiels est moins important. Par auteur potentiel, il faut comprendre un civiliste québécois qui est réceptif aux nouvelles technologies informatiques et qui pourrait développer le désir d'écrire autre chose que des ouvrages de doctrine et des déclarations et requêtes.
Audience civiliste réduite. L'un des facteurs qui motive un blogueur à régulièrement prendre sa plume électronique est, avouons-le, le nombre potentiel de lecteurs internet. Or, le nombre réduit d'auteurs potentiels risque de ne pas être encouragé par l'audience réduite que représente les civilistes québécois "branchés" lisant régulièrement des blogues.
Forme d'écriture plus exigeante. En moyenne, je crois que le civiliste est beaucoup plus cartésien que son confrère de common law. Simplement en comparant un manuel de droit criminel de première année rédigé par un professeur de common law, consistant souvent en un amalgamme de décisions-clés en la matière, et un Dubois; on constate immédiatement la différence... Lorsqu'il rédige un ouvrage de doctrine, une déclaration ou une requête; une partie importante de la réflexion du civiliste consiste à organiser et même découper la matière. Cette forme de pensée, idéale lors de la rédaction de traités, se prête plus difficilement à l'écriture de simples billets ponctuels. Je crois que le blogueur de common law éprouve moins de difficultés à ce niveau.

Scobleizer Exit Interview

2006-07-03T02:58:00.000-04:00

By now, it is fairly common knowledge that Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft. Robert went on record, a few weeks ago, to put to rest some rumors about his departure. Yesterday, he shared with us the details of his exit interview.

I found this exit interview fascinating, and well worth the read. Employees often have insights about their company that go well beyond their pay scale and position; wisdom comes from everywhere. Exit interviews that are well designed will seek out that wisdom. For example, here are three things that Robert thinks could be done better at Microsoft (full explanations in his post):

"I would incubate more products outside of Microsoft for a longer period of time. (...) I’ve seen lots of things change this industry that were done by small teams of people. Xbox? Two people. .NET? A handful. Live.com? A handful. (...) In fact watch what Google does. They keep teams separate which makes them look chaotic and not strategic but it lets them innovate longer before they get sucked into the “integration” phase. (...).
I would actually start a new company that’s designed to destroy the old one. Xerox got very close to doing that with Xerox PARC, but the executives weren’t able to pull the trigger. Imagine what our industry would have been like if the executives there HAD pulled the trigger?
I would put a single person in charge of naming and fire anyone who didn’t listen to the dictator. I’d do the same thing about corporate image. Same with conference planning. Same with advertising. Committees just suck the soul out of the best ideas. On the other hand, I would hate to be that person cause if you screwed up you’d have no one else to blame."

Refreshing and gutsy views. Thanks Robert!

Categories:

Microsoft
KM

The Paperless Lawyer-Speaker: Dominic Jaar

2006-06-30T14:48:00.000-04:00

Last week, several lawyers from the Office of the Judge-Advocate General converged to Ottawa, at the Government of Canada Conference Center, for a National Retreat on integrated information management. The 3-day retreat opened with a one-hour session on Modern Law Practice led by Dominic Jaar, corporate counsel at Bell Canada. Dominic accepted an earlier invitation posted on slaw.

Dominic treated us with something far better than a vision of a future, modern and paperless lawyer: he simply shared with us how he currently worked and demonstrated his day-to-day practice, including court room practice. From accessing remotely the corporate Practice and Case Management System to sifting, filtering and sorting through thousands and millions of documents in the context of e-discovery in a court room setting; Dominic's demonstration was getting the point across very convincingly: it is well worth the upfront investment to become a true paperless lawyer. Whereas he could manage about 30 to 40 cases concurrently, Dominic estimated he could now manage about 110 to 120 cases, with more ease and pleasure.

He also demonstrated several technologies that are part of his Law 2.0 arsenal:

VPN conduit to the office, enabling him to remotely connect to corporate resources;
In addition to a Practice and Case Management System, a distinct application to manage, sort, filter, annotate and generally better manage and present evidence in electronic format;
Whenever authorized by the Judge, automatic voice recognition and transcription of testimonies in his laptop: as witnesses (or anyone for that matter) is speaking in the court room, testimonies and verbal exchanges are automatically transcribed into text;
Phone service from the computer also, enabling automatic logging of calls into the relevant cases, etc.

If you need a lawyer as speaker for a seminar or conference that is gifted and that has truly gone the paperless route and is also web 2.0 enabled; consider Dominic. He is a member of Sedona Canada (Working Group 7 of Sedona) and regularly writes in the newsletter for l'Association du Jeune Barreau de Montréal. Participants to my Retreat last week were unanimous: his presentation was an eye opener into the future and was very stimulating. We all want him back next year. Now all that you need Dominic, so people can find you easily (especially if they google you); is your very own claimid page. ;-)

[cross posted on slaw]

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Creative Commons Licenses Added to Microsoft Office

2006-06-30T04:29:00.000-04:00

As you may already know, I'm a fan of Creative Commons licenses, because they allow authors to promote the dissemination of their ideas and their work using one of many carefully designed licenses. One such license is featured on this blog. Instead of publishing under the default almighty "All rights reserved", placing severe restrictions on the reuse and re-purposing of their works; creative commons licenses empower authors and publishers to decide exactly what rights they want to retain as opposed to retaining "all rights".

Microsoft has recently offered the option to embed Creative Commons license in Word documents, Excel workbooks and PowerPoint slide descks; by offering a new Microsoft Office add-in. Great idea!

PS: with this Firefox extension, you can instantly view creative commons licenses embedded in web pages.

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Metacrap: 5 Years After

2006-06-29T00:27:00.000-04:00

About five years, ago, Cory Doctorow published the entertaining reality check called "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia". Take a look at it. Still valid. A bit extreme, but to counterbalance the huge amount of meta-utopia already published, I would surmise that Cory wanted to get his point across in a way that most of us could immediately relate to.

Such reality checks are useful, especially before embarking on organizational metadata journeys. Highly recommended!

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Open Source Software Gaining Momentum: Taiwan, Belgium

2006-06-28T23:24:00.000-04:00

The logic of adopting open source software in governments has been recognized in several governments, such as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Taiwan and Belgium are the latest into the club of governments adopting and promoting open source software, for a number of not too suprising reasons:

Taiwan (and presumably China is next) are fed up with high licensing fees, most of them paid to Microsoft. The sums involved are staggering.
Belgium, on June 23rd, 2006, issued a press release confirming the adoption by the Belgium government of the Open Document Format (ODF) in government. An excerpt from the press release follows (my translation): "In the first stage, each federal Department and Agency must ensure that documents in ODF format can be read. A transitory period is planned. This will enable all administrators to take all necessary measures without jeopardizing level and quality of service. Further progress will depend on the impact assessment study and on the existence of appropriate plug-ins for reading and saving documents in ODF format. This decision illustrates the overall federal government strategy of promoting the use of open standards." Thanks to Russell McOrmond for reporting this (GOSLING mailing list).

[cross-posted on G2TT]

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Starting With Web 2.0

2006-06-22T22:54:00.000-04:00

I am keeping fairly quiet this week, as I am leading a National Retreat for selected lawyers of our Office in Ottawa. One question I keep getting asked: "How can we get started using web 2.0 stuff - wikis, blogs, feeds...?"

Last Fall, I took a University of Toronto course taught by Stephen Abram, VP Innovation at SirsiDynix. I felt overwhelmed by his forward looking horizon, knowledge, and I kept asking myself - "what is all this web 2.0 stuff? how does he keep current with so much?!" I finally asked him. Stephen just said: "start by looking up web 2.0 on google, subscribe to a few blogs... it will come".

He was right.

Eight months later, I read on a regular basis over 100 blogs, I now am fully immersed in that forward-looking horizon. If you feel very new to this, no worries. One year ago, I had no clue of what "web 2.0" meant. It's not rocket science.

In this post, I share some recommended steps to anyone new to web 2.0 and interested to start experimenting with feeds (RSS), wikis, blogs, the whole shebang. Feel free to add comments and other suggested steps and resources.

Introductory Reading. Before you start experimenting with blogs, wikis and the like; I suggest you follow these links to get a bird's eye view: Intro to Web 2.0 by Joshua Porter, other web 2.0 definitions compiled by Dion Hinchcliffe, wikipedia articles (Web 2.0, RSS, wiki, blog, social tagging).
Web 2.0 and your Environment. Each field of human endeavour, including yours, will be influenced by the web 2.0 phenomenon, sooner or later. Why? Web 2.0 promotes a participatory web in which ideas are shared, exchanged, debated, online and in full view, instantly connecting all interested parties. Web 2.0 offers alternative modes of expression and lowers the publishing threshold - to be an author once required a literary agent, now; you can open and publish on a blog in mere minutes. The long term wordlwide impact of this information revolution has been neatly encapsulated in the provocative EPIC 2014 movie. Here follows an example of how web 2.0 is increasingly having an impact on the legal profession: Web 2.0 and the Legal Profession.
Experiment Web 2.0: ClaimID. You cannot develop a good understanding of web 2.0 trends and paradigm shifts without experimenting and using its tools and technologies. So, in the next steps below, I offer a few ways to get you going and experimenting. These experiences may result in you establishing an online presence: before you do so, open yourself a ClaimID page (see mine as example). Check these suggestions too. It is good practice to tie your online presence to a single ID page: I recommend ClaimID for this purpose.
Experiment Web 2.0: NewsReading. If you want to be able to read syndicated feeds (see links in para 1 above), you will need a news reader. I use GreatNews for desktop based newsreading. There is also bloglines for internet based news reading. If you plan to do your news reading from the same computer all the time, a desktop newsreader is faster and more efficient. Once you have installed the software on your computer (or opened yourself a bloglines account), you are ready to subscribe to your first feeds.
Experimenting Web 2.0: Subscribing to Feeds. A good starting point to give you an idea of the kind of things you can subscribe to is a recent article by Steve Rubel: 35 Ways You Can Use RSS Today. Standard icons are now used to identify feeds. Do not forget to subscribe to this blog! ;-)
Experimenting with Web 2.0: Time to Tag. You are going to do a lot of exploration and reading on the net. You need a way to reference pages and sites. The "web 2.0 way" to do this is with "social tagging", so open yourself an account on http://del.icio.us - and start tagging pages as recommended in The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users. By way of example, you can see how my del.icio.us account has grown to over 1,000 resources in about seven months only, and even when I hit 10,000 resources; I am confident I will be able to retrieve any page I want simply by combining my own keywords. For example, the list of my resources tagged both with "Web2.0" and "Trends" can be accessed witha URL formatted like this: http://del.icio.us/Fidelis1970/Web2.0+Trends ("Fidelis1970" is the name of my account on del.icio.us). Similarly, I know I can retrieve my own list of sites using drupal with the following URL: http://del.icio.us/Fidelis1970/drupal+Example
Experimenting with Web 2.0: Time to Blog. Ok, you subscribe, you read, you tag; it is now time to become and actor of the information revolution! Open yourself a blog. The easiest, no hassle and free way to do this is by starting at blogger - see also the full explanation.
Experimenting with Web 2.0: Time to Wiki. Whereas blogs represent a method for updating pages with regular posts, displayed in reverse chronological order, each posts typically enabling comments; wikis are more in the nature of a collection of easily editable web pages that are interlinked. The most successfull implementation of a wiki the wikipedia. There are places where you can start experimenting with wiki and even to open your own little wiki, such as Peanut Butter wiki. You can also simply register yourself an account on an existing wiki, and start editing and creating topics.

A few months of this; and you'll be a brand new web 2.0 citizen! ;-)

[cross-posted on G2TT]

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Does Anyone Know? How to Create "Web 2.0" Lists?

2006-06-13T21:24:00.000-04:00

Does anyone know how to do this?

I would like to:

Be able to send emails to an address;
Have those emails transformed into a feed (with attachments and full text feed - no one line teasers);
For free?

I can't get MailBucket to work, same for mail2rss; and the Gmail email to RSS gateway solution is ugly...

UPDATE: and after trying the "Google Groups solution", I found out that their group feeds do not validate so I can't subscribe via my news reader...?!

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G2TT in the Ottawa Citizen | Web 2.0 in governments

2006-06-08T22:19:00.000-04:00

The Ottawa Citizen (main newspaper of Canada's National Capital Region) featured today a full two page story in the tech weekly section, written by Peter Hum, on Government 2.0 Think Tank ("G2TT"), a private association dedicated to open source government. This marks the official launch of G2TT.

To the extent you are interested in web 2.0 happening in governments, please publicize this post on your blog and in your own networks. This is the welcome message on the G2TT site:

Government 2.0 Think Tank, or "G2TT", is an outlet of participation for those who are passionate about Public Service and want to solve problems in their fields.
Thought leadership. Vision. Skill. Comprehensiveness. Common sense. Not only can you find these attributes on G2TT, but you can, and should, contribute yours. You can register and view all content on this site. You can also become a member and participate to G2TT endeavours, including its first project, Leveraging Web 2.0 in governments.
G2TT promotes governmental efficiency. G2TT does not promote any particular viewpoint on any political issue. G2TT seeks to offer quality information to governments and members of the public about improving the way government does business, leveraging an open source community spirit.
G2TT is a private association, made of members drawn from the Global Public Sector ecosystem: Public Servants, citizens - anyone interested in operational issues facing any government, world-wide. Whether you are cynical, dispirited, passionate or just curious; there is no excuse not to get involved: G2TT puts within your reach an architecture of participation in which your voice can contribute to governments moving forward. Join us. We are thought leaders.

The first project of G2TT, called Project Eureka, specifically targets web 2.0 and related issues in a governmental context:

Throughout the world, governments are facing unprecedented opportunities and challenges in how they manage information. For example, the commoditization of Information Technology ("IT"), coupled with Web 2.0 trends and technologies, present a basket of solutions often leveraging Open Source Software and Open Standards. The Information Technology ("IT") landscape is dramatically changing, at a pace that few governments and large corporations are able to keep up with.

While these fundamental changes are occuring on the IT front, the traditional governmental silos of Information Management, such as Records Management, Library Management, Archives, Metadata & Taxonomy, Access to Information & Privacy, etc. are breaking down to make room for an increasingly unified version of information management, reconciled and working with IT.

These major transformational currents will completely reshape the way governments operate and interact with the Public they serve. How these changes will occur, however, is difficult to predict, because few governments entrust the full spectrum of responsibilities related to Integrated Information Management to a single Chief Information Officer (CIO's). Current CIO's are often "Chief IT Officers" as opposed to "Chief Information Officers".

Many public servants possess the necessary knowledge to empower their governments to embrace these major trends. However, they are typically responsible for only one piece of the problem. This is where G2TT comes in.
This is the first association project, seeking to bring Public Servants and any other interested parties to work on a common goal, leveraging open source community spirit: Leveraging Web 2.0 in governments. This project, similarly to other G2TT projects, is designed in accordance with a common set of project principles, in particular, the need to identify a clear, well-articulated deliverable. This project deliverable is a report structured as follows.

(read more)

I am excited by the potential of G2TT, as it embodies the best of open source software communities in an altogether different context: open source government. For more details, please see the G2TT Association Charter. Digg the article! ;-)

Why Law Blogs ("Blawgs") Are On A Roll

2006-06-06T06:28:00.000-04:00

Lawyers like to argue, to write, to publish; that's a known fact. When it comes to blogging, there is something special, something uniquely appealing that ought to be pursued; something that makes the connection between the legal community and society better. And that has been nicely stated by Dahlia Lithwick in The American Lawyer, June 1st 2006 edition:

If you combine a journalist's fear of offering a personal opinion with her even greater fear of boring the reader, the result can be legal writing that is too constrained, while at the same time fixates on the details of the human drama at the expense of explaining the legal dispute. By contrast, legal blogging is wonderfully technical and detailed, but also largely accessible and opinionated. In the blogosphere, the taboo on opinionated legal writing has been lifted. Even better, law professors, who can be exceedingly cautious in print, sometimes become slightly drunk on the Internet's thin air. Whereas legal thinkers once limited their most serious scholarship to law review articles, occasionally nipping out into the dangerous world to write an op-ed, now many of them offer off-the-cuff observations about everything from partial birth abortion bans to their favorite CDs, several times daily. The blogosphere thrives precisely because it exists at the interstices of the ivory tower and pop culture. As a result, it's the most fertile ground for cutting-edge law talk.

Thanks to Ian Best (3L Epiphany) for reporting this.

[cross-posted on Slaw]

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Why Workflow is Not Good Enough

2006-06-04T19:59:00.000-04:00

I enjoyed reading this candid take on workflow, especially this excerpt - I'm liberally quoting from James Robertson's Column Two here:

"Organisations looking for a CMS read vendor marketing materials, and all offer extensive and powerful workflow features. These same features are discussed in many of the industry reports, and included on standard lists of CMS features.
Organisations naturally assume that this functionality works in practice, and seeing the potential benefits, ask for it in their tenders and requirements lists.
Vendors see that organisations consistently ask for workflow features, and often very powerful features at that. This forces them to promote their workflow functionality in their marketing materials, and to develop ever more sophisticated workflow features.
Vendors know very well that workflow isn't used in practice, having only 1 in 50 clients ever making real use of it. The problem is that customers don't believe them, instead responding: "you're just saying that because your workflow features are weak!".
At so it goes on, in this self-reinforcing cycle, with no opportunity to have a real discussion about best-practice (or even just practical) approaches."

I agree. The issue of the "death of business process" in knowledge-based organizations was quite alive a few months ago (see for example the articles by Irving Wladawsky-Berger and Ross Mayfield). Business Process, when knowledge workers are concerned, does not work very well. Knowledge workers work differently. Don't even get Dave Snowden going on this, because if you do, you're in for an intellectual ride, taking you to the same destination but on a much more sophisticated and entertaining way!

Being a knowledge worker is very different than working on an automobile assembly line. By focusing efforts on developing and maintaining a rich and optimized information environment for their knowledge workers, organizations will get better overall results than by focusing on "business process re-engineering" (BPR).

Mapping business processes has its uses, for example, when the exercise is conducted to a reasonable level of granularity to exemplify information flows. Such maps inform the business systems analyst on what are the information requirements flowing for any given activity performed by a knowledge worker. These mapping exercises, however, should always be complementary to other methods of deriving information requirements, to include, at least; business line analysis and end-user interviews.

Solely relying on workflow and business process analysis is not good enough, as you risk capturing only a subset of the real set of information requirements in the workplace.

Knowledge workers are rarely bound to particular processes. They often acquire and derive knowledge from a variety of sources and activities that are not tied to any process. Information managers should therefore strive to provide their knowledge workers with a rich information environment, maximizing opportunities for knowledge creation, sharing and acquisition. This is done by planning the delivery of integrated information management.

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Why Defining Requirements is Not Good Enough

2006-05-28T19:47:00.000-04:00

A recent comment on this blog (thanks James) stimulated me enough to put pen to paper and to explain why "defining requirements" is not enough.

Once upon a time, the mainframe was. The mainframe hosted complex corporate applications that required a very disciplined and sequential approach to requirements definition. In particular, it required requirements to be fully flushed out before coding began. Changing requirements en route was a big no-no and (mostly) constituted a too expensive proposition.

That era is gone, although it has been noted that some environments still exact the same sequential and disciplined approach to requirements definition, which dates back from mainframe times. The generally accepted approach in software development now calls for iterative (or evolutive) development. You figure out what you need, then you build some. By building some, you can better articulate further requirements. The cycle continues.

Similarly to the passage from sequential and disciplined requirements definition to evolutive requirements definition; I advocate to go from "specific capability evolutive requirements definition" to "integrated information management planning".

It is not good enough to adopt, as a starting point, "we need a content management system", or "we need a document and records management system". Other starting points are equally not valid: "we need a new records management policy", "we need a new training program". The optimum starting point should be: "we need a sound information architecture promoting integrated information management". Note: I actually believe that integrated information management nicely paves the way to ulterior knowledge management, but this is a contentious issue best left to be discussed at another time.

What of reality? How to achieve "the real thing" - a supportive and compliant information environment?

Here's the recipe. Many of these concepts (including Standard Information Management Frameworks) are fully explored in a new 3-day course offered at the Canada School of the Public Service:

Just as architects need blueprints, general need battle maps and accountants need ledgers; information managers need a standard information management framework from which they can plan, design and develop the optimal information architecture for their Department - Agency - Company. The development of such a framework has been hampered by the lack of recognition of "information management" as a unified management discipline. I will explore these topics in a conference I'm giving at the ARMA Canadian Regional Conference in two days (sessions T31, T41).
The Standard Information Management Framework answers the following questions: what are the necessary and sufficient components, in order to implement integrated information management? What is necessary to take into account, in order to develop each of these components? How can information management Vision and key Principles be tied to these components? And, last but not least, how can directives and end user guidance be derived from all of this?!
The Standard Information Management Framework has nine components: information context, information requirements, information resources, information activities, information roles / services / products, information training / education / standards, Recorded Information (includes Data, Records and Library Management), Information Technology and Architecture Optimization. These nine components, when developed and applied to any particular environment, constitute an Information Management Architecture. You need all components. You do not need other components.
Six areas of considerations need to be taken into consideration when developing the IM Architecture: Compliance (with legislation, regulations, policies, etc.), Business Context, User Empowerment, Interdependencies, Constraints and Trends & Opportunities. Each of these categories need to be populated with relevants "considerations", for example, in any given work environment, a complete inventory of applicable legislation related to information management, and then, for each such Statute, the information manager should analyze what is the impact of that legislation on any, many or all IM Architecture components.
Vision and Principles need to be taken into consideration when developing the IM Architecture: Each organization, even within a large Department, is unique, and will warrant a distinct information management vision that should be tied to its role and mandate. Selected principles will vary over time; depending on where senior management wants to focus efforts. Examples of principles include Life-Cycle Approach, Accessibility, Security, Accountability, etc.
The IM Architecture needs to be translated into IM Directives to realize the potential of integrated information management. Directives should be written from end end user point of view and help them do what they need to do, daily (here is a draft example in a particular environment).

One of the fundamental changes brought by this integrated approach has to do with requirements definition. The integrated approach considers six areas of inputs to develop nine IM architectural components. One of these components is Information Technology.

To compare the old and the new, one could say that whereas the old approach saw Compliance (sometimes), the Business Context and User Empowerment (ideally) taken into account to flush out the requirements of a subset of Information Technology (any given IT capability - e.g. Content Management System, etc.); the new approach formally adds Interdependencies, Constraints and Trends & Opportunities into the equation, not only to define "requirements" for a specific IT capability, but to architect the complete IM solution (which is larger than the total IT solution).

In that integrated analysis, one must let himself or herself be influenced by Trends & Opportunities. For example, the ways in which the marketplace is naturally shaping itself into "categories of software" is pertinent. For example, there is a category of solutions catering to documents and records management. Another catering to practice and case management (often in law firms). Another catering to generic web content management. If your "client" has a set of requirements that spans the entire spectrum covered by these three category of solutions; will you ignore these "marketplace facts", or will you structure your Request for Proposal accordingly, by articulating three distinct sets of requirements?

Just defining requirements is not good enough. One must get involved in becoming more knowledgeable in current trends & technologies; one must become more knowledgeable in how the marketplace confirms standard ways to manage information (e.g. wikis, blogs, syndication via RSS, etc.) and, most importantly; one must take a stand on deciding how to best marry a set of business requirements to a set of solutions. If information managers do not do this, who will?

Along that vein, I believe that when these "categories of software" are studied, you become familiar with the good and the not so good. Best features will become apparent. From these best or desirable features, you can build a list of criteria to iteratively assess solutions in a particular category. All of this work and analysis should be done in the spirit of integrated information management, not with any agenda of promoting a specific product.

Now here comes the tough part.

If you have done all the work previously explained, then you can make some judgment calls. And start figuring out your top picks in any given category of solutions. For example, after completion of this kind of analysis; if you come to the conclusion that you require a web content management system; and that the environment in which it needs to be deployed corresponds to features A - B - C being mandatory or desirable; and that such features are best implemented in a particular solution, do not be afraid to take the next step. Do not let the old disciplined and sequential requirements definition process hijack common sense hardly derived from an integrated approach analysis. Go forward. That may take some wrestling with proponents of the old approach, insisting that you stick to "requirements definition" and do not concern yourself with investigating solutions; go forward anyway. And hopefully, in the process, your colleagues will realize that you are doing something potentially novel: implementing a solution that works from all angles. Of course: that solution flows from an integrated approach analysis. ;-)

Categories:

Why Drupal Would Make Sense in the Government of Canada

2006-05-27T22:02:00.000-04:00

Drupal, a free and open source web content management system, represents a very attrative option for managing content online. Here follows a list of reasons why I find it attractive in a federal government context:

Drupal is free and open source software (FOSS). Treasury Board Secretariat guidelines prescribe Departments and Agencies to at least consider FOSS alternatives, especially when they are viable.
Drupal is a stable, mature and robust WCMS, as confirmed from neutral sources in the book "Open Source for the Enterprise: Managing Risks - Reaping Rewards", see the book review.
Drupal only requires PHP and MySQL on the server to run. PHP and MySQL are often authorized on governmental intranets and internet servers. This means that you can avoid a lengthy procurement process, it can be up and running in a few days - literally. I have myself deployed a Drupal site in a few hours - and I'm not a programmer.
Drupal can power sites that are "Common Look & Feel" (CLF). All that is needed is to develop a drupal CLF Theme. This is something we are working on and we can share that Theme with you.
Drupal can power sites that are fully multilingual, hence, bilingual - for interface and content. I was in Toronto last week and saw a demo of a live, fully developed trilingual drupal site (English, French and Spanish).
Drupal can support multi-sites. That means that with one installation of drupal, you can maintain a lot (I do not know the limit) of totally different sites, even with different domain names. Very useful when it comes to upgrades and patches - only one installation to deal with and all sites are automatically updated.
Drupal is fully Web 2.0 enabled, that is, aligned with major trends and technologies worldwide, and incorporates (if and only if these features are "turned on") blogs, free tagging (folksonomies), wikis, automatic syndication, forums, commenting, aggregation, etc...
Drupal also supports traditional methods of organizing information, such as "categories" that can be assigned to content according to a centrally defined taxonomy. This can be done concurrently with free tagging, in which users decide which tags to add to contributed content.
Drupal supports custom content types. For example, if you were to build a registry of applications in use in any given Department or Agency, "application" could be defined as a content type and you could further define what kind of information you want to track for each application. Because this is done within drupal, you would automatically benefit from all the other drupal features - the ability to (if you turn these features on) comment on applications, view them differently (sort - filter), etc.
Drupal supports custom roles and permissions. You can define, for example, an "Administrator" role, "Project Lead" role, and as any roles as you need to differentiate between what some users can and cannot do. This is all done via a web interface.
Drupal has a modular architecture. You only add / select / enable the modules you want / need.

If you are in the federal government, working in Ottawa and interested in Drupal, make sure that you signup with the Drupal Ottawa User Group.

[cross posted on G2TT]

Categories:

Bloggers Afforded Protection by US Court

2006-05-27T17:59:00.000-04:00

In a recent decision, the Sixth District Court of Appeals (California) has afforded bloggers the same kind of protection usually reserved to journalists. Here is an extract from the judgment:

The trial court denied the motion on the ground that the publishers had involved themselves in the unlawful misappropriation of a trade secret. We hold that this was error because (1) the subpoena to the email service provider cannot be enforced consistent with the plain terms of the federal Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 2701-2712); (2) any subpoenas seeking unpublished information from petitioners would be unenforceable through contempt proceedings in light of the California reporter’s shield (Cal. Const., art. I, § 2, subd (b); Evid. Code, § 1070); and (3) discovery of petitioners’ sources is also barred on this record by the conditional constitutional privilege against compulsory disclosure of confidential sources (see Mitchell v. Superior Court (1984) 37 Cal.3d 268 (Mitchell)). Accordingly, we will issue a writ of mandate directing the trial court to grant the motion for a protective order.

The interesting part starts at p. 35 of the judgment, about "legitimate" journalism. The court states:

We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes “legitimate journalis[m].” The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish “legitimate” from “illegitimate” news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace.

Thanks to Somewhat Frank for reporting this.

PS: for the careful reader... you will note that the court used Wikipedia as a reference, in footnote 16.

[cross-posted on slaw]

Categories:

Blog
Law

Government of Canada IM Day 2006 | Web 2.0 "Track"

2006-05-20T07:29:00.000-04:00

Last week, the planning committee of the Fall 2006 Government of Canada "Information Management Day" (GC IM Day) met, and we flushed out some ideas on what topics to put on the schedule. In our current planning, one track will have the "Leading" flavour, in the sense of leading change, and that one or two sessions under that track will specifically deal with Web 2.0 implementations in the Government of Canada - existing, proposed and suggested.

IM Day is an event planned by Public Servants for Public Servants, held in Ottawa every Fall. It is very well attended by key individuals in information management throughout federal government. There are chances are that our keynote speaker (not selected yet) will be "web 2.0 enabled" this year...

Do you have an example of Drupal deployed in a governmental setting? Please drop me a line, I'm interested in proposing a session describing the capabilities of Drupal as a Free and Open Source web content management platform that is fully web 2.0 enabled. By then, I hope to have completed the development of a bilingual and Common Look & Feel Drupal distribution, suitable for GC sites.

[cross-posted on G2TT and Drupal Ottawa User Group]

Categories:

GC
Web2.0

Drupal Ottawa User Group: Making Web 2.0 Happen

2006-05-15T20:26:00.000-04:00

A lot of talk in the blogosphere (see posts by Dion Hinchcliffe, Rod Boothby) about making Web 2.0 happen in corporate contexts, behind firewalls. How can you go beyond the hype and fancy graphs and introduce web 2.0 technologies in corporate and governmental contexts?

One such option is to seriously consider Drupal as a solution of choice when it comes to a fully web 2.0 enabled Web Content Management System. Drupal is Free and Open Source software and is favourably commented upon in Open Source for the Enterprise: Managing Risks - Reaping Rewards. It has a very active and vibrant community as seen from the frequency of recent posts (about a post every other minute), to the point a distinct, related site called Groups.Drupal, fostering geographical and working group affiliations, has been created. Drupal offers community management, forums, blogs, wikis, comments, RSS feeds and aggregation, taxonomy management (categories, free tagging or both), etc...

Are you from Ottawa and interested in Drupal? Consider joining the newly created Drupal Ottawa User Group (guess I thought of you Doug when I created the group) - especially if you are interested in the creation and sharing of a reusable Bilingual, Common Look & Feel compliant distribution of Drupal throughout the federal government; and in corporate / behind the firewall installs of drupal.

Prefer to get to know Drupal by reading? Consider these two books:

As written in the announcement on drupal.org: Written by David Mercer, this book is a complete guide to every aspect of creating a variety of different websites using Drupal. The book has been written against the latest release v4.7. "From top to bottom, Drupal is the type of project that makes the Internet work as a medium for communication" explains author David Mercer. "With powerful and flexible functionality, it is the ideal tool for people to begin creating their own Websites, without being subject to the burden of learning how to program."

From the announcement on drupal.org: "When I first met Dries Buytaert, in February in Antwerp, we discussed the need for a book explaining how to use Drupal. We agreed that such a book would be a great asset to the many people who are becoming interested in our great software. Since I had already decided that it was my goal to write a Drupal book, I expressed this to Dries. (...) The result was a project that lasted until October; writing the first book about Drupal."

I attended last week DrupalCampToronto: I was blown away (and I'm not easily blown away) by the exciting range of capabilities of Drupal. Here are a few things that I have confirmed or found out:

The internationalization module (Drupal Module i18n developed by Jose A Reyero) has been successfully implemented on several site to achieve fully mulilingual sites - see for example telecentre.org
The Liquid Wiki module (Liquid Wiki Module developed by Sören Petersen) is working with Drupal version 4.7, as evidenced by this test site by Bryght - thanks to Boris for his excellent review of the features and potential of this module
The rich set of information that can be derived from a Drupal web site incorporating CiviCRM, as explained Phillip Smith from communitybandwidth.ca in his tour of admin features associated with one of his recent sites (kleercut.net).

If you are interested in introducing Drupal in the federal government, please also see Project Eureka from Government 2.0 Think Tank, consider becoming a member of that association and a contributor to that project.

Categories:

Building a Drupal Community Website

2006-05-12T11:22:00.000-04:00

As I'm sitting in my first session of DrupalCampToronto (12 May 06), "Introduction to Drupal" by Khalid Baheyeldin, I'm realizing the incredible momentum powering Drupal worldwide. Over 60,000 pieces of content (not counting comments) on drupal.org, 59,000 registered users, over 64,500 web sites running drupal, the NDP is using it, and so many more... Even Foreign Policy magazine, a NATO web site and Tim Berners-Lee web log - the father of Internet!

Khalid first covered the basics of Drupal (what is is, core Drupal vs modules and themes, its history...) and showed us next how to install it from using shell access. Note that this is not necessarily needed - this site, for example, is hosted by Siteground, and Siteground offers automatic installs of many Free and Open Source Software packages (including Drupal) through the Fantastico utility in the C-Panel. Unless you comfortable using shell access to a server, I suggest using a hosting company that automates or offers the installation ofdrupal. If you prefer to to it yourself, it's not that complicated - I have done it to install a multi-site configuration (many sites running off the same drupal install).

Next, we covered the basic decisions and choices and how to configure drupal settings accordingly: menus, blocks, primary and secondary links, extra modules such as TinyMCE (used on this web site), etc... Thanks Khalid!

[cross-posted on G2TT]

Categories:

Books for Hungry Minds

2006-05-10T08:30:00.000-04:00

I just obtained a suggested reading list from Bain McKay, CEO and Chief Scientist of Kayvium, who gave a very-forward looking presentation on the semantic web in the context of a desktop application being capable of establishing and navigating semantically meaningful links between information sources.

Here's the list:

Semantic Technology

Brian Nosek, U. o. V. (2005). Project Implicit. Internet, Harvard
University , University of Virginia,University of Washington: Web Site.
Daconta, Michael C. Obrst, Leo J. Smith, Kevin T. (2003).
TheSemantic Web, Wiley Publishing Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Coveney, Peter and Highfield, Roger (1995). Frontiers of Complexity - The Search for Order in a Chaotic World, Fawcette Columbine, New York
Cummings, R. C. a. D. D. Minds, Brains, and Computers - The Foundations of Cognitive Science - An Anthology - Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies, Blackwell Publishers Inc, Mass.
Gottdeiner, M. Postmodern Semiotics - Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life, Blackwell, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA.
Institute, S. M. (2005). Protege. University of Standford , California.
Holland, J. H. (1995). Hidden Order - How Adaptation Build Complexity, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Sowa, J. F. Conceptual Structures - Information Processing in Mind and Machine, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Monica Crubézy, S. U. S. M. I. (2005). The PSM Librarian tab plugin for Protégé, Internet.
Sowa, J. F. (2000). Knowledge Representation - Logical, Philosophical and Computational Foundations, Brooks/Cole Thomson Learning.
Sun, R. (2002). Duality Of Mind - A Bottom Up Approach TowardCognition, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers London.
searchWebServices.com (2005). "BPEL." Internet.
Terry Schurter, B. G. C. A. (2005) Standards, Methodologies and Frameworks Volume, DOI
Advisor, E. (2004) Business Process Trends. Internet Volume, DOI (in pdf)

Cognitive Science

Brown, A. S. (1987). Maximizing Memory Power, Stephen Kippur, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Blum, Kenneth, PhD, Payne, James E. (1991). Alcohol and the Addictive Brain, The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan Inc, New York
Bly, Benjamin Martin, Rumelhart, David E. (1999). Cognitive Science - Handbook of Perception and Cognition - Second Edition, Academic Press, New York
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown and Company, New York
Flesh, R. The Art of Plain Talk, Collier Books.
Kotulak, R. Inside The Brain - Revolutionary Discoveries of How the Mind Works, Andrew and McNeel - A Universal Press Syndicate Company, Kansas City.
LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain, Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, 10020.
LeDoux, J. (2002). Synaptic Self, Penguin Group - How the Brain Becomes Who we Are.
Leiberman, P. Human Language - and Our Reptilian Brain, HarvardBusiness Press, New York
Miller, J. G. Living Systems, Mcgraw-Hill Book Company.
Penrose, Roger (1989). The Emporer's New mind - Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics, Vintage, , Oxford University Press, London
Pierce J. Howard, P. D. (2000). The Owner's Manual for The Brain - Everyday Applications from Mind-Brain Research, Bard Press.
Pinker, S. The Language Instinct - How the Mind Creates Language, Harper Perennial.
Richard M. Restak, M. D. (1979). The Brain - The Last Frontier, Warner Books.
Rumelhart, B. M. B. a. D. E. (1999). Cognitive Science - Handbook of Perception and Cognition - Second Edition, Academic Press.
Talbot, Michael (1991). The Holographic universe, Harper Perennial, New York
Turkle, S. The Second Self - Computers and the Human Spirit, Simon and Schuster, New York.
University of Massachusetts, A. (2005) Reinforcement Learning Repository.

Chaos and Complexity Theory

Allison, S. K. a. M. A. (1999). The Complexity Advantage, McGraw-Hill.
Davies, PAul (1995). About Time, A Touchstone Book, Published by Simon & Schuster, New York
Davies, Paul and Gribbin, John (1992). The Matter Myth - Dramatic Discoveries Challenge Our Understanding of Physical Reality, A Touchstone Book, Published By Simon & Schuster, New York
Dawkins, Richard (1999). The Extended Phenotype - The Long Reach of the Gene, Oxford university Press, New York
Dawkins, Richard (1989). The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, New York
Deutsch, David (1998). The Fabric of Reality, Penguin Books, 1998
Ferguson, Marilyn (19800. The Aquarian Conspiracy - Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s,J. P. Tarcher Inc, Los Angelos
Gleck, J. (1987). "Chaos - Making A New Science."
Gleick, J. (2000). FSTR JMS GLCK, Vintage Books - A Division of Random House. Inc New York.
Hofstadter, Douglas (1979). Godel, Escher. Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid - A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York
Hofstadter, Douglas (1995). Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, BasicBooks, A Division of Harper Collins Publishing, New York
Johnson, Steven (2001). Emergence - The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, A Touchstone Book, Published by Simon & Schuster, New York
Kanter, R. M. The Change Masters - Innovation for Productivity in the American Corporation, A Touchstone Book - Published by Simon & Schuster.
Kim, Jaegwon and Sosa, Ernest (2002). Metaphysics - An Anthology, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Malden, Massachusetts
Kordis, D. L. a. P. (1988). Strategy of the Dolphin, Ballintine Books.
May, R. E. N. a. E. R. Thinking in Time - The Uses of History for Decision Makers, The Free Press.

Science and Mathematics Theory (that one is for you Mikey!)

Asimov, Isaac (1984). 'X' Stands For Unknown - Sixteen Fascinating New Essays on the Mysteries of the Universe, Avon Books, New York
Berlinski, David. (1995). A Tour of Calculus, Vantage Books, A Division of Random House Inc, New York
Chaitin, Gregory (2005), Meta Math - The Quest for OMEGA, Pantheon Books, New York
Freiberger, D. M. a. P. Fuzzy Logic - The Revolutionary Computer Technology that is Changing The World, A Touchstone Book - Simon And Schuster, New York
Feynman, Richard (1997). Six Not So Easy Pieces - Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry and Space-Time, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc, Reading, Massachusetts
Gullberg, Jan (1997). Mathematics - From the Birth of Numbers, W.W.Norton and Company, New York
Kahanm B. Peter (19900. Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers - Linear and Nonlinear Systems, Dover Publications Inc, Mineola, New York
Lamport, Leslie (2003). Specifying Systems - The TLA+ Language and Tool for Hardware and Software Engineers, Addison-Wesley, New Yorks
Messiah, A. Quantum Mechanics - Two Volumes Bound As One, Dover Publications Inc, New York.
Mlodinow, Leonard (2001). Euclid's Window - The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace, A Touchstone Book, Published by Simon & Schuster, New York
Pappas, Theoni (1999), Mathematical Footprints - Discovering Mathematical Impressions All Around Us, Worldwide Publishing, Tetra, San Carlos, California
Singh, Simon (1997). Fermat's Last Theorem, Fourth Estate, London
Sticker, Henry (1945), How To Calculate Quickly, Dover Publications Inc
Turner, Jonathan H. (1988). A Theory of Social Interaction, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California
Wolfram, S. A New Kind Of Science, Wolfram Media Inc.
Zek'dovich, Ya. B, and Raiser, Yu. P. (2002). Physics of Shock Waves and High-Temperature Hydrodynamic Phenomena, Dover Publications, Inc, Mineola, New York

Methods and Techniques

Adler, M. J. (1940). How To Read A Book, Eleventh Paperback Printing, 1964.
Byrley-Alen, Madelyn (1982). Listening - The Forgotten Skill, John Wiley & Son, New York
Gini Graham Scott, P. D. (1987). Mind Power, Prentice-Hall International, Inc. London.
Gladwell, Malcolm (2005). blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,Little, Brown and Company,New York
Kepner, Charles H.,Tregoe, Benjamin B. (1973). Problem Analysis and Decision Making, Kepner-Tregoe Ltd, Princeton, New Jersey
Kepner, Charles H.,Tregoe, Benjamin B. (1965). The Rational Manager - A Systematic Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making, Kepner-Tregoe Ltd, Princeton, New Jersey
Sampson/Marthas Group Process for the Health Professions - Second Edition, John Wiley and Sons.
Scott, Gini Graham, PhD. (1987). Mind Power - Picture Your Way to Business Success, Prentice-Hall Inc, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
Wycoff, J. (1987). Mindmapping, Berkley Books, New York.

Philosophy

Bahan, Yogi PhD, Kalsa, Gurucharan Singh PhD. (1998). The Mind - Its Projections and Multiple Facets - 3 Functional Minds, 9 Aspects, 27 Projections, and 81 Facets, Kundalini Research Institute, Espanola, NM
Capra, Fritoj (1999). The TAO of Physics - The Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Shambhala Publications Inc, Boston
Ching, Tao Te (19630. Lao Tzu, Penguin Books, New York Glenn, Jim (1996). Scientific Genus - The Twenty Greatest Minds, Saraband Inc, Rowayton, CT
Hawkins, S. On The Shoulders Of Giants, Running Press, Philadelphia, London.
Russell, Bertrand (1985). ABC of Relativity, Unwin Paperbacks, London
Russell, Bertrand (1987). Russell's Best, Unwin paperbacks, London
Shapiro, Robert (1986). ORIGINS - A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, Summit Books, New York
Whitehead, Alfred North (1938). Modes of Thought, The Free Press, MacMillan Publishing, Co inc, New york
Griffith, S. B. SUN TZU - The Art of War, Oxford University Press.

Management

Covey, S. R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, A Fireside Book - Simon & Schuster.
Covey, S. R. Principle-Centered Leadership, Summit Books.
Drucker, P. F. Innovation and Entrepreneurship - Practices and Principles, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York.
Drucker, P. F. Management - Tasks. Responsibilities. Practices, Harper & Row, Publishers.
Drucker, P. F. Post-Capitalist society, HarperBusiness.
Micheal LeBoeuf, P. D. GMP - The Greatest Management Principle in the World, Berkley Books.
Mintzberg, H. (1979). The Structuring of Organizations - The Theory of Management Policy Series, Prentice-Hall, N.J.
Notron, R. S. K. a. D. P. The Balanced Scorecard - Translating Strategy into Action, Harvard Business School Press.
Peter S. Pande, R. P. N., Roland.R. Cavanagh The Six Sigma Way, McGraw-Hill.

Categories:

Books

La pratique du droit | Comment exploiter les technologies web 2.0?

2006-05-08T21:19:00.000-04:00

Dans l'article "A to Z: 26 trends for the legal profession", à être publié dans la prochaine édition du National de l'Association du Barreau Canadien, 26 tendances affectant présentement la profession juridique sont examinées par Jordan Furlong et Mélanie Raymond. Plusieurs de ces tendances sont directement reliées au phénomène web 2.0.

Les auteurs remarquent avec justesse, à la fin de leur article, que ces tendances ne sont ni hypothétiques, ni futuristes: ces tendances se concrétisent maintenant, à chaque jour, qu'il s'agissent de juges qui bloguent, de savoir juridique qui se "wikéfie" (wikéfier. verbe. de l'anglais "wiki", ou "wikify") - voir Wex et WikiLaw, d'avocats analysant l'impact des wikis - blogues - fils RSS et autres technologies sur la profession, et même de l'Université Harvard qui a déjà mené une conférence sur le phénomène juridico-blogique...

Les cabinets d'avocats devraient-ils tenter d'exploiter ce phénomène et les nouvelles technologies s'y rattachant? Je suggère ci-après quelques pistes de réflexion sur ce sujet.

Premièrement, il est utile de comprendre le fameux phénomène web 2.0. Web 2.0 ne s'agit pas d'un mouvement technologique, mais social. Web 2.0 représente un ensemble de nouvelles façons pour les internautes d'utiliser Internet de façon beaucoup plus interactive. L'internaute peut dorénavant publier régulièrement et facilement (les blogues), il peut modifier facilement une foule de pages internet inter-reliées (wiki), il peut recevoir le contenu de ses sites favoris dans un seul lecteur de nouvelles (fils RSS et agrégateur de nouvelles), et ainsi de suite...

Ces nouvelles pratiques entraînent:

Des changement importants des modèles d'affaires des compagnies opérant dans le domaine virtuel;
Des changement fondamentaux dans la création, la gestion, la diffusion, la catégorisation, le repérage, la gestion et l'archivage de l'information - incluant aussi l'information juridique;
Une migration des logiciels vers l'internet (voir l'article "Software as a Service" de Wikipedia) - par exemple, AjaxWrite disponible en ligne qui reproduit assez fidèlement l'interface de Microsoft Word). Voir aussi la rubrique "Ajax's Disruptive Influences" dans cet article de Dion Hinchcliffe;
Des possibilités intéressantes concernant le déploiement de communautés virtuelles, fondées sur des principes éprouvés "d'architecture de participation". Il faut comprendre cette dernière expression comme un moyen de promouvoir une expérience virtuelle stimulante, qui encourage les gens à participer sur le web.

Un cabinet d'avocats peut tirer des bénéfices appréciables du pénomène web 2.0, si l'analyse suivante est complétée:

Tous les cabinets juridiques obéissent à la même logique en matière d'organisation de l'information. Celle-ci est généralement divisé en trois domaines:
- Les dossiers des clients, typiquement organisés par client, puis par dossier ("client / matter");
- L'information de référence, incluant tout document ayant caractère de précédent ("material of precedential value"), représentant l'information juridique collective du cabinet; et
- L'information administrative - finances, ressources humaines, etc.
En prenant pour acquis que le cabinet gère de façon optimale ses dossiers clients et ses dossiers administratifs, c'est dans le domaine de l'information de référence que les technologies web 2.0 peuvent avoir l'impact le plus positif.
Le cabinet est-il organisé en domaines de pratique ("practice groups")? S'il ne l'est pas, c'est à faire... Voir les arguments à cet effet sous la lettre "P", dans l'article A to Z: 26 trends for the legal profession.
Pour chaque domaine de pratique, le degré d'efforts à déployer pour créer un environnement d'information soutenant la pratique du droit est fonction des facteurs suivants:
- Complexité. S'agit-il d'un domaine exigeant régulièrement des recherches fouillées et que l'exercice est laborieux à chaque fois, puisque le domaine est spécialisé (e.g. propriété intellectuelle et brevets); ou s'agit-il d'un domaine à haut volume (e.g. droit criminel en première instance pour les infraction mineures) - où l'avocat possède généralement et subjectivement toutes les connaissances voulues pour exécuter son mandat? Dans le premier cas, le cabinet a tout avantage à favoriser un environnement dans lequel le partage du savoir subjectif est encouragé, facile et récompensé. Dans le dernier cas, il n'est pas avantageux de déployer des outils de collaboration. Un simple registre d'expertise peu satisfaire les exigences minimales de gestion du savoir.
- Accès. Les avocats ont-ils un accès libre et facile à des sources d'information juridique afférente à leur champ de pratique (e.g. Lexis-Nexis, doctrine)? Dans la mesure où ces sources sont satisfaisantes, le besoin de déployer un environnement de partage d'information de référence est moins grand. Dans le cas contraire, un environnement où l'information juridique spécialisée est facilement repérable à l'interne procurera un avantage compétitif réel au cabinet.
- Nombre d'avocats. Le domaine de pratique est représenté par combien d'avocats? S'il y a seulement quelques avocats et qu'ils sont colocalisés, la "gestion du savoir" se fait et continuera de se faire par osmose, au gré de la pratique quotidienne; s'il s'agit d'une pratique nationale, un environnement optimisé pour le partage d'information de référence soutiendra efficacement la gestion du savoir dans ce champ de pratique.

En donnant en exemple ces quatre étapes, j'espère transmettre le message suivant: avant de mettre un place un effort concerté visant à déployer de nouvelles capacités de technologies d'information, il est essentiel de poser et répondre à plusieurs questions fondamentales et de clairement visualiser la situation avant et après cet effort concerté.

Une fois cette vision clairement établie, chaque milieu, chaque cabinet aura une façon différente de procéder - par exemple, dans un milieu gouvernemental où il y a beaucoup d'avocats:

Plusieurs directives de gestion d'information peuvent être nécessaires (exemple);
Plusieurs facettes du cabinet peuvent être à revoir (exemple) - incluant la gestion des renseignements consignés (exemple);
Plusieurs technologies d'information peuvent être nécessaires (exemple);
Et bien sûr, un plan doit être élaboré, communiqué...

La clef de la réussite, dans ce domaine, consiste à définir avec soin l'environnement d'information optimal en fonction des facteurs énoncés ci-haut; à doser les efforts consacrés en fonction des bénéfices espérés et, surtout; faire en sorte que ce nouvel environnement d'information soit utile et apprécié par les utilisateurs finaux: les avocats!

[article aussi publié sur slaw]

Categories:

Canadian Bar Association | The National | Web 2.0 Trends

2006-05-08T15:09:00.000-04:00

In the next issue of the Canadian Bar Association magazine ("The National"), Jordan Furlong and Mélanie Raymond publish an excellent article titled "A to Z: 26 trends for the legal profession" (thanks to Simon Chester for reporting this).

Under "Z", we find "Zero Hour":

This final entry means, simply, that time’s up. These preceding 25 trends aren’t way off in the future somewhere: they’re happening today, and no law practice can afford to be unaware of or uninterested in them. These are 25 forces that are already shaping the legal profession, and they will continue to do so, with escalating force, in the years to come.

What can you do to stay ahead of this fast-moving curve? If your law firm doesn’t have a Chief Strategic Officer in charge of mapping out trends in the lawyer and client marketplaces, consider appointing one. Bring your younger lawyers into the strategic
planning loop and get them to advise you on the changes they see. If you’re in a small firm, match the trends that most affect your narrow focus and track them closely.

The authors are very alive to web 2.0 trends, selecting Blogs under "B", RSS for "R" and Wikis and Web 2.0 under "W". The entry under "K", for knowledge management, takes the cake:

If you read “Knowledge uprising” in our January/February 2006 issue, you already know how important KM is becoming to law firms of all sizes. Knowledge management allows lawyers to access a vibrant, constantly refreshing database of information, experiences, trends and wisdom, individually and collectively drawn from their colleagues.

Lawyers are part of the 21st-century vanguard of “knowledge workers” who will revolutionize the global economy. The problem is that lawyers are among the least efficient and effective knowledge workers around, thanks in large part to how they’re managed and how they sell their services.

The key in making Knowledge Management tick in a meaningful way for end users is to build a solid Information Management foundation. It is then far easier to leverage that foundation for the purposes of knowledge management. See also a review of Web 2.0 and how it applies to the Legal Profession in another context.

Categories:

G2TT In Pre-Launch Period (May 2006)

2006-05-07T02:28:00.000-04:00

Government 2.0 Think Tank, or "G2TT", is currently in its pre-launch period during the month of May 2006. Here follows the current text of the home page of the new Drupal-powered association web site.

G2TT is an agent of social change in the way governments operate, particularly in how they manage their information.

G2TT promotes governmental efficiency. G2TT does not promote any particular viewpoint on any political issue. G2TT seeks to offer quality information to governments and members of the public about improving the way government does business, leveraging an open source spirit, one project at a time.

Throughout the world, governments are facing unprecedented opportunities and challenges in how they manage information. For example, the commoditization of Information Technology ("IT"), coupled with Web 2.0 trends and technologies, present a basket of solutions often leveraging Open Source Software and Open Standards. The IT landscape is dramatically changing, at a pace that few governments and large corporations seem to be able to keep up with.

While these fundamental changes are occuring on the IT front, the traditional governmental silos of Information Management, such as Records Management, Library Management, Archives, Metadata & Taxonomy, Access to Information & Privacy, etc. are breaking down to make room for an increasingly unified version of information management, reconciled and working with IT.

These major transformational currents will completely reshape the way governments operate and interact with the Public they serve. How these changes will occur, however, is difficult to predict, because few governments entrust the full spectrum of responsibilities related to Integrated Information Management to a single Chief Information Officer (CIO's). Current CIO's are often "Chief IT Officers" as opposed to true CIO's.

Many public servants possess the necessary knowledge to empower their governments to embrace these major trends. Unfortunately, they are typically responsible for only one piece of the problem. This is where G2TT comes in.

G2TT provides an architecture of participation in which members can become contributors on specific association projects, resulting in the production of Association Reports. These reports are built in a comprehensive and self-contained format, addressing the complete range of issues for any given set of problems, in an "open source community" spirit. They are drafted in an open and collaborative environment (for contributors).

The association will launch in early June. Stay tuned for further developments.

Categories:

Drupal Powering a NATO Site

2006-05-05T23:09:00.000-04:00

I wrote earlier that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is getting more and more mature, and even enterprise ready. Here is a great example of this: Drupal powering a NATO web site (Partnership for Peace Training Centers), as reported by the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert:

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Managing Your Online Presence: ClaimID

2006-05-05T22:38:00.000-04:00

You may have noticed, in the side bar menu of this blog, the above ClaimID chiclet: it will take you to a ClaimID profile.

With ClaimID, you can collect in one place your online presence. You can use your ClaimID URL when you sign your posts in public forums or even on your business card - this is what I have started to do on a regular basis. There are several benefits to this approach:

Your contacts and readers are only a click away from finding out what you want them to find out about you: instead of relying on a Google search, they can simply follow your ClaimID URL.
ClaimID has a very clean, simple and intuitive design. I hope they keep that way. I still remember how disappointed I was when ICQ evolved into a feature-bloated Instant Messaging client. Long live extreme simplicity.
I suggest using, if you can, your full name in the URL. This will rank your ClaimID higher in search engines, which is good. It is becoming common practice to google potential employees, business partners, etc... Let them see first a clean list of stuff ordered the way you want.

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Canadian Federal Bill Tracking With RSS

2006-05-05T20:39:00.000-04:00

The Library of Parliament now offers RSS feeds to monitor the progress of bills through Parliament. From the last link, click on Government, Senate of Private Bills; and voilà!

Would even be better if their feed icons complied with the new standard, instead of the old orange "XML" button.

Thanks to Library Boy (Michel-Adrien Sheppard) for reporting this.

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Drupal Installer Videocast

2006-05-05T07:25:00.000-04:00

In addition to Drupal books and other Drupal videocasts, there is a new drupal installer videocast available, which also covers the CivicSpace distribution of Drupal:

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Book Review | Open Source for the Enterprise: Managing Risks - Reaping Rewards

2006-05-02T08:09:00.001-04:00

I have just finished reading "Open Source for the enterprise: Managing Risks - Reaping Rewards" (thanks to Karl Audet for lending me this book). Before I share my review of this book with you, here are a few thoughts.

Open source software used to be considered unstable, immature and ill-suited for corporate and governmental contexts. There are now detailed studies, such as this one, prepared by Defence scientists and posted on Treasury Board Secretariat web site, that confirm what open source community members already know: open source software is ready for the enterprise. Generically speaking, we have:

Source: A Software Taxonomy

This chart illustrates that risks are now considered higher in the proprietary software arena, as opposed to open source. This chart is based on a scientific study of the field (the full report is 189 pages) rather than subjective fears and beliefs.

From the executive summary of Free and Open Source Software Overview and Preliminary Guidelines for the Government of Canada, we learn the following:

The good reputation of free and open source software has attracted the attention of many governments around the world and they are now considering the systematic migration of their servers and their workstations to FOSS. The leading countries, currently migrating to FOSS, are the United Kingdom, Germany and France but it is estimated that more than 20 other countries are preparing policies and action plans to adopt FOSS systematically in their government and industrial systems. The strategic rationale for migrating to FOSS is typically related to three main factors: 1) the expectation of direct cost savings, 2) the reduction of economic loss at the national level caused by commercial software imports and 3) the hope to better develop national IT expertise by means of access to source code (and development of original components) which is not really possible with COTS packages.

Canada appears to be behind the curve in FOSS adoption. The lack of clear business cases and the underestimation of the strategic value of FOSS partly explain this situation. However the Government of Canada (GoC) has recently endorsed a pro-active position on FOSS to ensure that GoC staff are aware of the options available and that no barriers to procurement remain. Some comprehensive open source initiatives can be found in the education and health sectors and an increased awareness is now being expressed by the GoC, who see FOSS as a viable alternative to COTS software and expensive custom code development.

Government of Canada (GC) Managers and directors in the fields of Information Management (IM) and Information Technology (IT) are, unfortunately, all too often unaware of these preliminary guidelines and of the potential for efficiency created by the adoption of open source software. One of the reasons for this shortcoming is lack of knowledge and education. The book "Open Source for the enterprise: Managing Risks - Reaping Rewards", by Dan Woods and Gautam Guliani, goes a long way in convincing the reader that open source software is a viable and cost effective alternative in the enterprise. But not without adequate preparations!

The book opens in Chapter 1 with "The Nature of Open Source". I really like the detailed discussions on topics such as what is open source, where does it come from, how does it grow, how does it die. Chapter 1 ends appropriately with specific consideration of each type of risk associated with open source software and comparing the nature of these risks with comparable risks on the commercial software sector.

Chapter 2 is essential for decision makers in corporate and governmental contexts: "Measuring the Maturity of Open Source". There are clues, factors and best practices one can evaluate in order to develop an informed judgement on the maturity of specific open source software communities. Taking this rational approach moves the use-of-open-source-software-in-the-enterprise discourse away from irrational fears and unfounded beliefs by providing a rational basis for objective evaluation. Using this approach will yield widely varying results depending on the open source software evaluated, reflecting the reality that not all open source software is equal...

Chapter 3 addressesthe open source skill set challenge. Running an IT Department that is resourced to support open source software is different than IT Departments solely responsible for network stability, deployment, upgrades and patches, etc.. The authors describe how to prevent an "open source nightmare" by carefully assessing the skills required as a function of the maturity of the open source software adopted.

Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 are helpful and necessary for managers seeking to introduce open source software:

Making the ROI Case
Designing an Open Source Strategy
Support Models for Open Source
Making Open Source Projects Easy to Adopt

Chapters 8 and 9 were an eye opener. I knew little of open source licenses. Acronyms such as BSD, GPL, GNU... were alphabet soup. The authors succeed in making the subject not only readable, but very interesting. Chapter 9 alone, on the "SCO Crisis" (when SCO believed it held the original patents and intelectual property rights to Unix and asked all Fortune 500 companies to pay $699 per CPU running Unix), felt more like a novel and should be made into a movie!! You heard it here first... ;-)

The book ends with Chapter 10 on Open Source Empowerment, placing everything into context and giving some insights on how to make it all happen; and with six annexes including helpful reviews of individual open source software packages by categories.

From O'Reilly, ISBN 0-596-10119-8.

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Drupal 4.7.0 Released

2006-05-01T08:15:00.000-04:00

This is something I have been waiting for with a lot of anticipation! Drupal 4.7.0 has been released. If you're like me and like to read about stuff in books before you dive in, check these Drupal books. I intend to use Drupal to power G2TT and also to explore how it could enable a Web 2.0 environment at work. Spread the word and digg it!

In the annoucement we find out:

After more than a year of development we are ready to release Drupal 4.7.0 to the world. More than five years, 13 major releases, 30+ servicing firms employing 100+ Drupal professionals, 300+ third party modules, and over 55,000+ Drupal powered sites later, Drupal 4.7.0 is finally here and it rocks!

Drupal is an open source content management platform. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal can support a variety of websites ranging from the personal weblog of Tim Berners-Lee, podcast sites like TWIT.tv, and community driven sites like SpreadFireFox.com, to large media sites like TheOnion.com, and even sites for NASA.

2005 has been explosive for the Drupal community. Drupal.org usage has almost tripled in terms of page views, downloads, and number of users, and with the release of Drupal 4.7.0 we are seeing this new found energy drive the platform development forward at an amazing pace. There have been over 338 contributors to this latest release with over 1500 patches which is almost triple our previous record with Drupal 4.6 of 523 commits by 50 developers. These new contributions are seen in the major usability improvements, new Drupal core functionality, and expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.

Categories:

drupal

Job Opportunity (Ottawa) - Drupal Programmer / Developer

2006-04-27T18:00:00.000-04:00

I have a 5 months (approx) casual employment opportunity to offer - Canadian Federal Government, in Ottawa, CS-02 level. If you are a good and motivated Drupal programmer / developer, or know someone like this; please check my post on drupal.org. A gifted member of my team, François Dupras, is moving on to an acting opportunity elsewhere in the Office of the JAG and I need to replace him (even if you are irreplaceable François) ;-)

This is an exciting opportunity: you can be part of one of the first Canadian Federal Government efforts in using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to address a range of information management requirements in a governmental context, in accordance with the applicable federal government guidelines on the use of FOSS. I would expect gosling members to be interested in this opportunity, for example.

Drupal has been featured as the cover story of php architect (vol 4 issue 12 - that would be december 2005 I think). In his article, Titus Barik characterizes Drupal as follows:

Drupal provides a flexible, extensible framework - an alternative to roll-your-own content management solutions. It can be refit for a variety of different content systems, including community portal sites, personal weblogs, and resource directories, simply by adding and removing sophisticated modules.

Drupal offers you a working, tested framework for building components, and handles the insignificant but tedious details of module management, user management, and integration [...]

Unlike a dedicated content system such as WordPress for blogging, or osCommerce for e-commerce, Drupal aims to be flexible, to suit any type of web platform.

Drupal has also been positively commented upon, several times, in the book "Open Source for the Enterprise : Managing Risks, Reaping Rewards" by Dan Woods and Gautam Guliani. I have been impressed by the long list of Drupal-powered web sites, of which I bookmarked a few examples.

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BarCamp Ottawa in The Ottawa Citizen

2006-04-27T13:11:00.000-04:00

Check out The Ottawa Citizen today, two full page spreads (and more) on BarCamp Ottawa, pages F1 and F3. Great article written by Peter Hum.

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How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship

2006-04-22T22:46:00.000-04:00

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, is hosting a free and open to the public symposium on Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship on April 28th, 2006, and a webcast will be available:

Web logs (“blogs”) are transforming much of American society, including government, politics, journalism, and business. In the past few years, blogs have begun to affect the delivery of legal education, the production and dissemination of legal scholarship, and the practice of law. We are delighted that over twenty of the nation’s leading law professor bloggers have agreed to join with us for the first scholarly conference on the impact of blogs on the legal academy.

Thanks to Library Boy (Michel-Adrien Sheppard) for this info!

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Government 2.0 Think Tank at BarCamp Ottawa

2006-04-22T21:17:00.000-04:00

Wow! What a day! BarCamp Ottawa was truly mind-invigorating. The following sessions were my favorite. There were others that I would have liked to attend; but many of them were held concurrently, so I had to pick... My favorites:

iotum, a successful Canadian startup, currently beta testing and crowned DEMO God in 2006, made a great presentation on "What Makes A Great Demo";
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the eclipse foundation, presented on "Open Source Communities | All About Platforms: Lessons Learned from Eclipse". I was particularly interested in Mike's answer to "How do you create a [successful] community around a platform?" In his words, it takes: (1) great technology; and (2) broad adoption; (3) architecture of participation (I think this ingredient is, perhaps, the most important one); and (4) "hijacked by a fanatic community". A little later in this post I will explain how his presentation will influence the shaping of the G2TT community;
Bain McKay, CEO and Chief Scientist of Kayvium, gave a very-forward looking presentation on the semantic web in the context of a desktop application being capable of establishing and navigating semantically meaningful links between information sources, by leveraging ontologies and pattern recognition. On a scale of 0 to 4, 0 representing unorganized information and 2 information organized with taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, Bain talks and lives at the 4 level. I have asked him for a "progressive bibliography" on topic, in other words, what should one read in order to develop a better understanding of the theoretical concepts behind the capabilities Kayvium offers. I will share with you his suggested list of readings when I have it.

I also presented at BarCamp today, in my personal capacity (it has nothing to do with my full time job and employer - I made that disclaimer at the beginning of my presentation), and engaged participants in discussing:

Open Source Government. The concept of Open Source Software is explained at wikipedia. To be successful, as Mike Milinkovich from the eclipse foundation suggested, a community built around an open source software must possess several characteristics. Thinking about these characteristics, I was particularly interested in seeking out the opinions of the audience on how to best transpose these "Open Source Software" community characteristics (see for example What makes a good open-source project?) into an "Open Source Government" context, such being the context and community spirit advocated by Government 2.o Think Tank;
Government 2.o Think Tank ("G2TT"). G2TT is a not-for-profit private association to be launched in June 2006. G2TT is about open source government, one project at a time. In a sense, it has the potential of being analogous to sourceforge.net, and to be what sourceforge.net is to open source software - by providing an architecture of participation (in Mike Milinkovich words) built around projects instead of software. Instead of code, G2TT projects have, as deliverables, "reports". G2TT projects will always result in the production of complete reports with standard headings (Assumptions, Problems/Challenges, Solutions, Opportunities and Recommendations) and other headings depending on the nature of the project. The first G2TT project is Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies in Government and you can find its draft Table of Contents here;
Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies in Government (the first G2TT project). Web 2.0 as an Internet phenomenon generally encompasses the collection of trends and technologies enabling the web as a platform and the read/writable web: see this introduction to web 2.0 by Joshua Porter and also these 50+ Web 2.0 resources. Web 2.0 many facets and enablers, such as RSS (resources), Wikis (resources), Blogs (resources), Social Tagging / Enterprise Bookmarking (resources) and Ajax (resources) - among others - collectively constitute a formidable basket of technologies that governments could efficiently leverage both for internal information management and external dialogue with the public they serve. G2TT has chosen to target these technologies and to explain how they could efficiently solve many common problems, such as Email Overload and the difficulty in finding information on intranets.

I wished I had been able to attend Craig Fitzpatrick's presentation, on devshop; but he was presenting at the same time as me. Craig's devshop makes project management specifically for software teams. I recommend, without hesitation, that you get in touch with him if you need project management software in a software development context.

I was pleasantly surprised, at the end of my presentation this afternoon, to see that many participants (including Jason Furlong, Clayton Scott and Ajay Krishnan - thanks to everyone!) pointed out the potential of G2TT in offering a community space in which the Canadian Public could be meaningfully engaged.

On this point, I anticipate G2TT members to debate the acceptable scope of G2TT projects during the first G2TT meeting (signup first if you are interested in attending). I did point out, however, that G2TT had a vested interest in building its credibility with early successes: the association will benefit from selecting and working, initially, on non-contentious projects. For example, the first association project (Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies in Government) is not about Government Policy "with a big P" but about the exploitation of better information technology to enable better governmental decision-making and improved policy development.

The distinction is important. G2TT does not seek to substitute itself to policy makers and elected officials, it rather attempts to offer insights on how to improve the way government does business, internally and externally, by focusing on specific problems and challenges, one project at a time.

You can follow the progress of G2TT by subscribing to the G2TT RSS feed or to the email subscription service.

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BarCamp Ottawa | The Evening Before

2006-04-22T17:24:00.000-04:00

After the gosling pit stop at 16:30, sometime after 19:00 I made my way to Fox & Feather to meet some of the BarCamp Ottawa participants and organizers. Kudos for the Toronto crowd - lots of them came in for the occasion!

I wanted to meet before the conference and have a feel whether I would be an "out-of-context" speaker. It turns out that attendees have a variety of backgrounds. Sure, a lot of programmers and geeks in the crowd - I have never seen so many laptops actively used in during a conference - but a good variety of participants nonetheless.

On BarCamps:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. Learn more or organize your own Barcamp!

Next time I'll bring my camera... ;-)

Categories:

gosling community

2006-04-22T16:47:00.000-04:00

I met yesterday some folks from the gosling community ("Getting Open Source Logic INto Government"), at their weekly get-together, Black Bear pub, Friday 16:30. I really enjoyed my conversation with Don Kelly and Russell McOrmand.

Don, aside from a shared interest in old games from the Commodore 64 time, made me discover ubuntu - a Linux distribution well suited for "normal people" (read: non-geeks - I like geeks by the way!). He runs it on his laptop and I had a glimpse at it - ubuntu has a very clean and friendly desktop-based user interface.

Russell, aside from his strong opinions on killing Bill C-60 (see also the associated blog), has a wealth of knowledge on open source issues and does not shy away from exploring these issues with a critical mind: I look forward to meeting him again - I learned a lot in an hour with him!!

If you are interested in finding out more about gosling, feel free to drop by in person at the Black Bear pub, any Friday 16:30. I plan to attend again.

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Judicial Blogging

2006-04-18T20:31:00.000-04:00

I have been following 3L Epiphany posts for a while and I was pleasantly surprised to see that some judges are blogging.

The author has even sent the following survey - two judges have answered and granted permission to publish their answers to the following questions:

When you cited a legal blog, did you consider it unusual or unprecedented at the time?
How often do you read legal blogs?
Which are your favorite legal blogs?
Do you consider blogs to be substantial and legitimate forms of scholarship?
Do you think legal blogs will begin to be cited more often by the courts?
What predictions do you have about the effect of legal blogs on the profession?
What other changes to the legal profession do you foresee because of the Internet and the online world in general?
Do you regularly read law reviews? If so, which are your favorites?
What advantages and disadvantages do legal blogs have when compared to law reviews and other traditional forms of scholarship?
Do you have an opinion about whether law students, lawyers, and/or law professors should blog?
Do you think it is appropriate for judges to blog? If you were to start one, what subject(s) would you write about?
(Off the subject of blogging:) If you could change one thing about the legal educational system, what would it be?

See the answers by Justice Judith Lanzinger (Ohio Sp. Ct.) and by Justice Richard G. Kopf (U.S. District Judge, Nebraska). Fascinating.

[cross posted on slaw]

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Number of Blogs Doubling Every Six Months

2006-04-17T18:58:00.000-04:00

Amazingly enough, about one blog per second is now created (75,000 per day), the number of blogs is doubling every six months, about 50,000 legitimate posts occur every hour in the blogosphere and almost 20 million (55%) bloggers are still blogging after 3 months. Read all about it in David Sifry's Alerts:

Categories:

Blog
Trends

G2TT and BarCamp Ottawa (22 April 2006)

2006-04-14T23:08:00.000-04:00

The pregnancy is almost over, by early June 2006, Government 2.0 Think Tank ("G2TT") will officially launch with a Drupal powered web site, ready to tackle its first project - Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies in the Government of Canada.

Until then, G2TT offers:

Some basic information;
A draft Association Charter;
RSS feed and email subsciption services;
A signup form.

If you are interested in G2TT, please use the signup form. If you're in Ottawa, you're also welcome to join us at BarCamp Ottawa, Saturday, April 22nd, all day.

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Favorite Articles on Tagging

2006-04-13T08:35:00.000-04:00

I am responding to Bill's invitation (Portals and KM) by offering the following resources.

Here are my favorite resources on social tagging in a corporate context and more on tagging. I have also written on topic a while ago. This article from InfoTangle on Community 2.0 is also well written and I like the many clarifications it offers. The latest I have read about dogear is here (see my comment waayyyy below - it's a long and funny article).

Because social tagging is intricately related to folksonomies, folksonomies resources are also useful to take a look at.

PS: Bill - I had to answer here because your comments do not accept the "a" tag. ;-)

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Object Oriented Editing and Personal Wikis: Wildly Addictive!

2006-04-11T20:15:00.000-04:00

I have been extensively using, for over a month, a personal mini-wiki tool called "TiddlyWiki". Do not let the deceptively funny name distract you from its powerful features! Over 3,600 del.icio.us users have bookmarked the original TiddlyWiki site by Jeremy Ruston. Why is it so successful?

A TiddlyWiki is a Free and Open Source, self-contained HTML file. That's it. No software, nothing needed, you can carry it around on a USB stick. It is similar to a wiki because you can create distinct topics that can reference each other. There are many flavours of TiddlyWikis, such as a student edition or the MonkeyPirate edition, or the advanced ELS Studio version.

A TiddlyWiki is incredibly simple to edit and to add new content: see this tutorial by JeremyH. There are a lot of good resources available and a very dynamic Google User Group.

I have used it to create and regularly update this discussion paper. Just as any other technology and solution out there, such as blogs and wikis, TiddlyWikis are not good solutions for all requirements. For example, Wikipedia would never fit in one TiddlyWiki.

TiddlyWikis are great:

For small web sites with micro-content;
For people (like me) interested in making non-linear papers available online;
For students, researchers, anyone wanting to organize personal notes and topics...

...And many more possibilities that you can imagine.

To be used in a Canadian federal government context, a brave soul would need to develop (a) a bilingual plugin (TiddlyWiki features can be significantly augmented with freely available plugins) to facilitate the creation and updates of bilingual tiddlers; and (b) a Common Look & Feel TiddlyWiki.

Shifting Gears: From Applications to Services

2006-04-05T21:06:00.000-04:00

In "Software Out There", John Markoff, from the New York Times, describes how the web has been evolving into a vast array of online services as opposed to desktop applications. When mainstream media finally notices established trends, governments and corporations are more likely to follow suit, especially when considering such priceless quotes (from John's article):

Mr. Ozzie, who used the Firefox browser (an open-source rival to Internet Explorer) during his demonstration, said, "I'm pretty pumped up with the potential for R.S.S. to be the DNA for wiring the Web."
He was referring to Really Simple Syndication, an increasingly popular, free standard used for Internet publishing. Mr. Ozzie's statement was remarkable for a chief technical officer whose company has just spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars investing in a proprietary alternative referred to as .Net.

As posted earlier in The Death of Enteprise Software, John correctly predicts the migration of monolithic desktop and corporate client-server based applications to web based services:

As a result, computer industry innovation is rapidly becoming decentralized. In the place of large, intricate and self-contained programs like Microsoft Word, written and maintained by armies of programmers, smaller companies, with just a handful of developers, are now producing pioneering software and Web-based services. These new services can be delivered directly to PC's or even to cellphones.

John's article also covers (briefly) a few other Web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax.

Reading his article, I discovered the following services:

WINKSite. From their site: "In minutes, you can set-up a free mobile site that's available worldwide on any web-enabled phone, PDA or desktop PC. Each mobile site is outfitted with easy-to-use mobile channels including chat, blog, mobile feed reader, surveys, journal, forum, calendar, guestbook, bookmarks, email and more."
CastingWords. Human transcription services for audio files, 42 cents a minute. Interesting service for podcasters. Je me demande si ce type de service existe en français!
Amazon S3. Storage service for developers priced at 15 cents per GB used per month plus 20 cents per GB of data transferred.

Categories:

Supreme Court of Canada: Public Factums?

2006-04-03T19:54:00.000-04:00

The Supreme Court of Canada syndicating factums filed in court via RSS feeds available on its web site, subject to a Canadian Creative Commons Attribution - No Derivative - No commercial uses license: fiction or reality?

Thanks to the Canadian Bar Association Supreme Court of Canada Liaison Committee, this issue, framed as "whether it would be worthwile to post Supreme Court factums on a website after the conclusion of cases", is now considered. In order to help moving it along, I would ask lawyers reading this blog to take the survey - it only takes 2 mins: take the survey.

Categories:

When April 1st Strikes

2006-04-01T18:08:00.000-05:00

Funny,

How some news get picked up, even the funny ones. Google Romance is a riot (follow the full explanation!). Scobleizer, Microsoft employee, defecting to Google, instantly attracted lots of buzz in the blogosphere and was picked up by Slashdot.

My all time favorite however is the news that Microsoft, or rather Bill Gates, purchased OpenOffice.org! Attracted lots of attention... because they put it on their home page and will likely disappear tomorrow, here it is:

For an undisclosed sum reputed to be in the billions, Microsoft's Bill Gates has personally bought the leading open-source desktop project. Saying he "was sick and tired of open-source eating away at his profits," the world's richest man decided to put an end to the nuisance and simply buy OpenOffice.org. It will form part of a growing list of Microsoft acquisitions, including several erstwhile competitors, a considerable number of prominent politicians, and a few small governments.

The initially stunned OpenOffice.org community--a happy-go-lucky international band numbering in the hundreds of thousands--later turned to champagne to celebrate their newfound wealth. "Bless Bill!" one happy Torontonian exclaimed, bubbly in hand. "With all this money, I can beat Mark's time in orbit!"

Gates has assured all current OpenOffice.org users that their future migration path to Microsoft Office is guaranteed thanks to OpenOffice.org's faultless support of MS Office files formats. Users can further rest assured that the full functionality currently provided by OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be available in MS-Office 2020 - or possibly 2030.

Interested in Folksonomies?

2006-03-30T00:22:00.000-05:00

Anyone interested in deepening one's knowledge of folksonomies, after reading "Tidying up Tags?" by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin, should take a look at InfoSpaces, a blog by Emanuele Quintarelli. Emanuele is an Italian information architect with a sharp analytical mind. I recommend, in particular, the following posts authored by him:

Emanuele explores in his blog the tension that exists between free form folksonomies, such as those found on del.icio.us, and more ordered taxonomies. Several of his inquiries run along the theme of how to exploit the best of both worlds - folksonomies freedom and semantic order.

Categories:

Taxonomy of Legal Blogs

2006-03-29T23:35:00.000-05:00

[cross-posted on slaw]

3L Epiphany wrote a very interesting taxonomy of legal bogs. On March 17th, 2006, the list was up to 686 legal blogs, all categorized and sorted. A definite resource for anyone interested to witness how many law blogs, or blawgs, exist out there.

Categories:

Law
Blog

Office 2.0 Applications

2006-03-29T00:33:00.000-05:00

I have just read Office 2.0 by Ismael Ghalimi, from IT | Redux - his post is a a great lead into the world of Office 2.0 applications.

Office 2.0 applications enable users to use software online instead of software installed on their desktops. There is now an impressive variety of such applications. Thanks to this list compiled by IT | Redux, you now have access to an extensive directory of Office 2.0 applications with corresponding links to application web sites and reviews by Solution Watch, TechCrunch and IT | Redux.

Categories:

Gartner Predictions on RSS, Corporate Blogging and Wikis

2006-03-28T23:42:00.000-05:00

As reported by Cerado, the Gartner Group (see the full report in pdf format) has published their 2005 Hype Cycle, from which we see that RSS and corporate blogging are less than two years away as standard corporate capabilities. Wikis are trailing behind on a 2 to 5 years horizon:

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a well know, evolution in time depiction of technology trends:

One thing I can't figure out is why they left out social tagging from their graph...

Categories:

Solving Corporate Email Overload - with blogs

2006-03-23T21:15:00.000-05:00

To alleviate email overload in corporate and governmental settings, one can efficiently use subject-based Blogs, a Web 2.0 technology. Mass emails are then re-directed to these subject-based blogs.

Because these blogs are:

Searchable - both as part of Search Collections and as a web page with a search function;
Sorted - by definition, each blog will be created and used for one topic and purpose only, therefore the sorting and categorization will occur at the source instead of having thousand users trying to organize this massive traffic themselves in different ways;
Archived - in the sense that the availability of blog posts will go back farther than the email account creation date. This limitation does not allow users to efficiently go back in time and search. Blogs solve this problem;
Syndicated - RSS feeds will be associated with each blog, enabling mandatory (based on user category) and optional (based on user interest) subscription;

They represent a simple technology, often leveraging Free and Open Source Software, capable of dealing once and for all with a real tangible problem for most of not all users in large corporations and governments.

Categories:

The Web 2.0 Enabled Law Firm

2006-03-22T00:41:00.000-05:00

[cross-posted on slaw]

For the past several months, I have been diligently exploring how Web 2.0 technologies could better support the work of lawyers. I'm happy to report my findings in this discussion paper, albeit in a particular context, using a TiddlyWiki. If you are interested in what it takes to write a document like this, make sure you check the About section in the paper.

Web 2.0 and the Legal Profession is also specifically discussed.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Categories:

Firefox 2.0 (Alpha) Released

2006-03-20T01:23:00.000-05:00

An early release of Firefox 2.0 (Alpha) is now available, as reported by Michael Arrington in TechCrunch.

Categories:

Over 3,000 People Have Bookmarked These Pages

2006-03-19T23:52:00.000-05:00

Since I have started using del.icio.us on December 10th, 2005, I have bookmarked and tagged over 450 Internet pages. 14 of these pages have also been bookmarked by more than 3,000 other people.

Here is the list (the numbers were accurate when I wrote this post):

Quick Online Tips: Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool Collection (10,855 bookmarks). Not suprisingly, the first resource is a page regularly updated about del.icio.us hacks, plugins, extensions and API's
script.aculo.us - web 2.0 javascript (9907 bookmarks): "script.aculo.us provides you with easy-to-use, compatible and, ultimately, totally cool JavaScript libraries to
make your web sites and web applications fly, Web 2.0 style"
digg (7762 bookmarks): "Digg is a technology news website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do"
Last.fm (6961 bookmarks): "You get your own online music profile that you can fill up with the music you like. This information is used to create a personal radio station and to find users who are similar to you. Last.fm can even play you new artists and songs you might like"
Writely - The Web Word Processor (6016 bookmarks): "Pick exactly who can access your documents. · Upload from Word/OpenOffice & save to your desktop. · Edit your documents anytime, from anywhere." Note: Writely has been purchased by Google
Prototype JavaScript Framework: Class-style OO, Ajax, and more (5630 bookmarks): "Prototype is a JavaScript framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for the development of Web applications"
The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 (5289 bookmarks): 2005 Review of the best software, by Dion Hinchliffe
Yahoo! UI Library (4031 bookmarks): "The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX"
WordPress › Free Blog Tool and Weblog Platform (3638 bookmarks): "WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time"
YouTube - Broadcast Yourself (3617 bookmarks): "Broadcast yourself. Watch and share your videos worldwide!"
QuirksMode - for all your browser quirks (3560 bookmarks): "contains more than 150 pages with CSS and JavaScript tips and tricks, and is one of the best sources on the WWW for studying and defeating browser incompatibilities"
TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook (3392 bookmarks): A free micro-content and object-oriented editing environment consisting of a JavaScript/HTML page - no software is needed. Note: I will soon publish a series of posts dedicated to TiddlyWikis - I have recently been experimenting with them and I think they are extraordinary
Feed Icons - Help establish the new standard (3201 bookmarks): New standard icon to be used when identifying syndicated content
Dojo - DojoToolkit.org (3030 bookmarks): "Dojo is the Open Source JavaScript toolkit that helps you build serious applications in less time. It fills in the gaps where JavaScript and browsers don't go quite far enough, and gives you powerful, portable, lightweight, and tested tools for constructing dynamic interfaces. Dojo lets you prototype interactive widgets quickly, animate transitions, and build Ajax requests with the most powerful and easiest to use abstractions available"

These are my most popular links. You can find at del.icio.us popular sites the list of most popular sites as ranked by all users.

Categories:

Canoë | Mainstream Media Goes Blogging

2006-03-19T20:10:00.000-05:00

Canoë, a francophone Quebec-based mainstream media site, goes blogging (in French a blog is called a "blogue"). Make sure that you scroll down the Canoë Blogs home page, past the latest posts from several blogs, in order to find the blogs.

Some room for improvement:

Canoë ought to implement trackbacks in their blogs. Only comments seem to be supported at this time;
Permalinks should be more clearly accessible. Not all readers will know that they have to click the "comments" hyperlink in order to access to permanent link to the URL post, etc.;
On this note, some of the links in the "previous posts" section do not seem to be properly coded. For example, when I tried to access a post "Petit délice d'un..." in Jasmine's blog, although the browser displayed a permalink - that link took me to her blog home page.

As I surveyed a few posts, it seems that one of their bloggers, Patrick Lagacé from the Journal de Montréal, is discovering just how fun can be unmoderated comments (!). Jasmine Legault is using her blog as a diary.

Overall, a pleasant suprise to see mainstream media en français embracing blogging (timidly!), even if a few quirks need sorting out.

Categories:

How To Poison Your Career

2006-03-13T18:29:00.000-05:00

From time to time my readings take me on various tangents, and this time I ended up on a blog I had not previously visited, on this article: 10 Ways to Poison Your Career. It's fun... and truthful! Take a look - well written and insightful.

Categories:

Career

Social Tagging Makes It to A Mainstream Library

2006-03-12T08:48:00.000-05:00

Social Tagging, or bookmarking, develops over time a folksonomy (as opposed to more rigid corporate taxonomies). LibraryThing, for example, successfully exploits this concept in the realm of books, to the delight of their users.

Recently, it seems that social bookmarking made it in the world of mainstream libraries: have a look at this library item in the online catalog of the Penn Library. They also have LiveChat support. That rocks! Thanks to "UPenn Catalog Tagging" by Steven M. Cohen for reporting this.

I strongly believe in the usefulness of social bookmarking in the enterprise context. Hopefully, we will see in the coming year an increasing number of examples where mainstream institutions are embracing enterprise bookmarking.

Using Siteground As Web 2.0 Playground (Wikis, Blogs, CMS...)

2006-03-11T19:43:00.000-05:00

It is bound to happen: after you have been exposed to a zillion bright ideas for blogging platforms, wikis, different Content Managements Systems; at some point, you want to start your own site, your own wiki, your own blog... Wait, start what exactly?! What if you're not sure, or what if you want a wiki and a blog and... and...?

I recently found myself in this situation. I want to start a private association and provide its members with an online community. Because of the nature of the association, I immediately thought of using a wiki. What wiki to use, then? Wiki Software to install on your own server was out of the question, so I started looking for a hosted wiki solution, such as Stikipad, Foopad or PBWiki. I even tried Stikipad a little. But I then realized: why not use, for my space, the same software powering Wikipedia? After all, if it works for that; it would sure work for my small community. Wikipedia is powered by MediaWiki, a free software package originally written for Wikipedia, but also powering other wikis now.

After some research, I finally settled for Siteground at $5 a month. What initially turned out as a requirement for a "password-protected MediaWiki hosted solution" morphed into a "why not a Web 2.0 (and more) hosted playground". Why? Take a look a this.

Upon registration to Siteground, you can also register a domain name.

What I realized, with Siteground, is that you have access to a lot of features via the C-Panel. What you see opposite is a partial screenshot from the C-Panel, giving you an idea of the control you have over your web site. I draw your attention to the subdomains icon (last 2nd row): by adding subdomains such as "wiki.domain.(whatever)", "blog.domain.(whatever), "forum.domain.(whatever)", etc.; you can create as many subdomains you wish and start experimenting with blogs, wikis, bulletin boards or forums; and I suggest that you keep your root directory ("www.domain.(whatever)") for a Content Management System (CMS).

Until such time as a CMS will offer a truly integrated and ideal mix of traditional CMS / wiki / blog / etc (what an idealistic notion); this approach works for me, especially at a total of $5 per month.

The last icon on the C-Panel is Fantastico. Fantastico allows you to automatically install an impressive array of hosted applications.

As you can see from the list opposite (partial list), there are several blogging platforms (including WordPress) and a wide range of Content Management Systems (incidentally I just found out that socialtext web site - an enterprise blogging platform - is now powered by Drupal which is available in the Siteground C-Panel CMS list).

I admit that I toyed with the notion of diving right away into CMS installation and deployment, especially when I looked at intuitive user interfaces such as the TYPO3 UI. Upon further reading, I realized I was probably overextending myself, about TYPO3 anyway - typo3.org recommends a month to learn the software:

Be aware that all the flexibility and richness come with a price: complexity. If you're not ready to spend a month learning the system and are in a hurry to satisfy a customer, you should probably look into getting somebody to help you or look for something else.

I looked then at Mambo and Joomla and found them to be closely related, for obvious reasons. Considering the history of both products, I would prefer Joomla. Its online manual seems satisfactory.

I have to do further reading though on Drupal and its CivicSpace distinct distribution in order to develop a realistic appreciation of what it takes to deploy and maintain a community website. For that purpose I have ordered "Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress" by Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little and Jared W. Smith.

The Fantastico list continues like this (and even more that did not fit in my "print screen"):

From E-commerce, FAQ, guestbooks, polls & surveys to site bulder and wiki scripts; the list goes on. It is also possible to install other applications on the server but the list here is a very good start for people without a definite idea of what they want to use.

I should also conclude by saying that I appreciated the quick turnaround time from Customer Support, both pre-sales (using their online chat system) and after-sales technical support on two occasions. First ticket was answered in 30 mins and the second one in 20 mins, both tickets were routine.

At some point I plan to migrate this blog, currently hosted on blogspot.com, to a Wordpress platform. I'm not really sure how yet, but I think Drupal allows each community member to have its own blog, something I will check further. If you know of a good "how-to" guide to wisely deploy and manage the CivicSpace distribution of Drupal, please let me know!!

To-do list for the next little while:

Continue blogging... perhaps less frequently so because of -
Develop the "Government 2.0 Think Tank" private association wiki, enough anyway to sart recruiting its founding members and get our first project going ("Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies in the Government of Canada"). Note: membership in this association will be restricted to Public Servants at the federal, provincial and municipal levels and to academics without private industry ties.
Investigate and choose CMS/Blogging/Forum platforms for the association, deploy them.

Categories:

Who Needs A Library, Anyway?

2006-03-05T22:47:00.000-05:00

Students and the Public need libraries, fair enough: schools, universities, cities, villages... When the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec (official web site here) was planned, I would have preferred to see the total project cost (Cdn$90M) injected into a "book acquisition revitalization program", allowing local libraries, especially in remote areas of Québec; to revitalize their collections - especially books for children. That story and the shifting uses of corporate libraries prompted me to think of the continued relevance of corporate and governmental libraries: do we need them?

The question becomes increasingly difficult to answer in corporate and governmental settings, because of workstation access to relevant information. The 21st century knowledge workers in corporations and governments have access to more and more information right from their desktops: why walk to their "in-house" libraries?

Well, for starters, one of the good answers is not very scientific but resonates true - see this recent post by Amanda Robertson:

I think any librarian would agree that the most important part of the library isn’t the materials contained within but how they are used. (...) [Patrons] certainly want the instant desktop access of electronic copies, particularly when it comes to reusing data from other in-house work. But they also want the copy in paper, and many of them can’t yet imagine keeping up with the industry by reading e-journals.

Additionally, many of them use the library serendipidously. They poke their head in the door and ask me where petroleum technology materials are shelved. I show them, and they browse through the shelves. Sometimes they find something they wouldn’t have noticed when searching the OPAC.

Serendipity is fine. However, as powerful electronic search, discovery and retrieval methods become available; the never-to-stop quest for governmental and corporate cost efficiency will result in second-guessing the existence of several corporate and governmental libraries, especially in settings where the community served is article-centric.

I thoroughly enjoyed the issues and discussion on topic as presented in "paved paradise: the future of (a particular type of) research library?" by Richard Akerman (thanks Amanda for the link). Highly recommended reading. I really liked this part:

When I said "pave over the library" it got read I think as "pave over the librarians". To me, librarianship and librarians are completely separate from their current physical container, the library. You could pave over the library and still have as many or more librarians providing services, just from different locations, e.g. co-located with the researchers.
My fundamental argument is more around holdings, and how they are presented. Firstly, is it true that the sciences mentioned above are article-centric? If they are, then

1. Why would I use as my primary research tool a giant physical container of lifeless, non-searchable paper articles that I have to request and wait for, rather than having live articles online that I can access instantly, with clickable linked citations, interconnections to data, and all sorts of wonderful electronic goodness?
2. Why is the library's website book-catalogue based, or journal-title-based, rather than putting full-text articles front and centre?

Also, to make it worse, is it true that science is moving beyond just articles to becoming data-centric as well? If so, where is the library transformation to data-centricity?

The article by Richard is thoughtful, beginning to end, and the comments are worth reading too.

Thinking in Web 2.0: The 17th Way

2006-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00

I just finished reviewing a post by Dion Hinchcliffe called "Thinking in Web 2.0: Sixteen Way", and I could not resist the temptation of adding a 17th Way, for those of us primarily concerned with large governmental and corporate intranets:

17. The Web 2.0 is for governments and corporations too. The world wide web is changing, evolving into a new kind of user experience, leveraging new technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, web-based applications using Ajax, and many more technologies. Governmental and Corporate Information Managers need to seriously think and imagine how they could replicate this internet evolution into what we could call intranet revolutions, because, as those of us working in large corporations or governments know, introducing new trends and technologies in large intranets can often prove a formidable challenge, in part due to bureaucracy, diffused information leadership and information management confusion (see the entire post on topic here). Notwithstanding these obstacles, can Information Managers afford not to introduce Web 2.0 into their environments, and run the risk of increasing user experience obsolescence?

Social Tagging For The Enterprise

2006-02-25T09:19:00.000-05:00

Web 2.0 technologies will promote and enable fundamental changes on intranets. They will alleviate many user "frustrations" with their intranet environment, such as useless search capabilities, email overload, rigid taxonomies, etc.. A peculiar difficulty, however, facing forward-looking IT (or business user) early adopters of Web 2.0 technologies is the fact that Web 2.0 is often "the web as a platform": That web is, currently, mostly the Internet as opposed to intranets. Some resources are only available through an Internet connection. Often, these resources are unavailable due to lack of connectivity to the Internet, corporate firewalls or corporate policy. The larger the corporation, the most likely there will be challenging obstacles.

What of eureka moments, then? How can we exploit moments of clarity when encountering great web 2.0 technologies that feel like a natural extension of the way we "think", of the way we work? One such technology is social tagging (or "social bookmarking"), best exemplified with del.icio.us and many articles illustrating how to best exploit social tagging, such as this one by Marshall Kirkpatrick and this one by Brendon Connelly, and others that go in more depth on topic, such as "Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?" by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin - introduction of the article quoted here:

A folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. A general review of social bookmarking tools, one popular use area of folksonomies, was given in the April edition of D-Lib [ref omitted]. In the article the authors elaborate on the approach taken by social classification systems and the motivators behind tagging. They write, "...tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc.... Rather, they are a supplemental means to organise information and order search results."
In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

I have recently come across two interesting options for introducing social tagging into corporate and governmental intranets. The first is a platform developed by IBM, the second is a Free and Open Source Software ("FOSS" - on FOSS in the Canadian Government see the applicable Treasury Board of Canada FOSS guidelines) module for PHP/MySQL applications.

First, in the corporate environment, IBM has moved forward by developing "dogear", an enterprise-scale social bookmarking system. David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg and Bernard Kerr, from IBM, have written an excellent article based on the following query:

The apparent success of Internet-based social bookmarking applications begs the question of whether large enterprises or organizations would also benefit from social bookmarking systems. To investigate this question, at IBM we are designing and developing an enterprise-scale social bookmarking system called dogear. The rest of this article describes the design challenges and early lessons learned from a friendly trial of the technology.

Their article briefly describes the evolution of personal bookmarks into social bookmarks and the common features of social bookmarking systems. More importantly, the article describes desirable features in order for social bookmarking communities to successfully develop:

Identity and Transparency. del.icio.us allows users to choose pseudonyms instead of real names. In an enterprise context, IBM has chosen to implement dogear using real names: "real-name identity would facilitate communication among users of the application since the various corporate collaboration tools (e.g., corporate directories, e-mail, chat,) all use real-name identities. There is also a strong cultural norm within the organization to use more formal names within corporate applications." It seems that the IBM team has struck an optimal balance on several decision points for identity and transparency, for example, by enabling both public and private bookmarking and by implementing team-based and role-based collections. I agree with the authors that these decisions are not easy to make. In their own words: "The decisions to use real-name identity and to support private bookmarks were made with some trepidation. The success of social software applications, in general, requires participation to reach critical mass to provide value to users and to ensure a sustainable level of contribution and vibrant interaction. Real-name identity may discourage some people from using the system, and private bookmarks will significantly reduce the benefits of information sharing among users. For a large enterprise, however, we believe that the ability to reach critical mass will not present a problem."
Alerting and Discovery. A very useful feature of social bookmarking systems consists in being alerted whenever a resource is added by a user, when a resource has been tagged with a keyword of interest, or any combination thereof. del.icio.us offers RSS feeds in order to deliver this requirement. IBM has adopted the same approach, potentially moving the corporate world closed to a 2006 prediction that "everything will get an RSS feed" (see prediction no 5 by Dion Hinchcliffe!)...
Designing for Extensibility: Enterprise Remixing. The design of the IBM system encourages enterprise remixing "by giving potential exploiters a number of easily parsed data formats from which to choose".
Exploiting the Links. An enterprise bookmarking system, over time, represents an inherent assessment of valued information resources. Collections of links can be exploited by the enterprise to (a) augment enterprise search applications, as such collections constitute "search collections" within the meaning of this earlier post; (b) supplement directory information about a particular user; and (c) to augment workgroup online content.

The authors are excited about the prospects of dogear and I share in their excitement - and hope dogear will make it to fruition soon! (and where is the IBM dogear public blog anyway?!)

Here is a snapshot dogear's interface:

Second, another promising way of introducing social bookmarking in a corporate or governmental context is to exploit Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), such as Freetag, released under both BSD and GNU Lesser GPL library license (see license for details):

Freetag is an easy tagging and folksonomy-enabled plugin for use with MySQL-PHP applications. It allows you to create tags on existing database schemas, and access and manage your tags through a robust API.

Hopefully, there will be an increasing number of "social bookmarking for the enterprise" options in the coming months.

LibraryThing Innovates Again

2006-02-23T17:42:00.000-05:00

In a previous post, I have written about LibraryThing and described it as follows:

LibraryThing is conceptually equivalent to del.icio.us, used to tag web resources, produce tagrolls, see how others have tagged similar content, etc.; but for books.

Today, LibraryThing announced how it intends to solve a problem that has plagued librarians and giants like Amazon.com: how to relate comments, recommendations, reviews, ratings, etc. not only to one instance of any given book, but to all instances of the same book, published by different editors.

LibraryThing leverages the power of the masses: any LibraryThing user can associate "works" together. The response has been very strong:

Starting three days ago, I announced a trial project to let users determine what books belonged together, the first time anything like this has been attempted. Using simple check boxes, users could go through a favorite author's works, combining and separating editions as necessary.

The response has been startling to say the least: In three days, users have combined 17,000 times, mashing together 42,000 works! Users have spent hours at the task, and debated the nuances in a blog post that now sports 182 comments.

More information on LibraryThing is available here.

Answers.com Goes Legal

2006-02-22T18:14:00.000-05:00

Thanks to LibrarianInBlack for reporting this: answers.com has incorporated two new legal resources - legal biographies and a legal encycopedia.

Law
Online

coCommenting and Managing All Your Comments

2006-02-22T14:15:00.000-05:00

After I read a review by Michael Arrington (see the original review and the update), I have decided to try coComment.

With CoComment, you enter your comments throughout the blogosphere as usual, with one exception: just before you submit your comment, you click on the coComment bookmarklet. This sends a copy of your comment to your coComment account. You can then keep track in a central location of all your comments and, more importantly, you can view subsequent comments from others in the same conversations.

In addition, if youhave a blog, coComment offers you the option of adding a widget that shows recent comments.

Unfortunately, coComment does not (yet?) support trackbacks.

Lawyers Are... Are Not Knowledge Workers?

2006-02-21T22:10:00.000-05:00

Just finished my contribution (on slaw) to the subject issue. Comments welcome, preferably over there!

Employees Are the Most Precious Resource... Do Something About It!

2006-02-21T20:38:00.000-05:00

The notion of employees as the most precious resource of government and corporations is widely known and accepted. Surprisingly, many employers do not leverage the creativity of their employees, even if the ability of expressing one's creativity is increasingly important.

Fortunately for employees and employers alike, there are ways to engage employees in expressing their creativity and to meaningfully translate ideas into better services, products, profitability. Case in point in a recent post by Toby Ward (as reported by James Robertson): the British Telecom (BT) online idea jar (savings of U$173M over 4 years) and IBM's IDEAS program, generating approx $17M in 2001 alone.

National Library of Australia Teaming With Flickr!

2006-02-21T20:28:00.000-05:00

What a great concept: a public institution, namely, the National Library of Australia (NLA), is teaming up with flickr.com in order to increase the number of contemporary images in PictureAustralia. Thanks to LibrarianInBlack for reporting this interesting "web 2.0 Public Service / private sector partnership".

As reported in the original NLA post:

Now you can contribute your images to PictureAustralia by loading them into our two groups available on FlickR, PictureAustralia: Australia Day and PictureAustralia: People, places and events.

The PictureAustralia: Australia Day group is a collection of images relating to this day of national significance.

The PictureAustralia: People, places and events group is a collection of images depicting the people, places, and events, which make Australia unique.

Why not search PictureAustralia for a streetscape or town as it looked in the early part of the 20th Century and then capture it as it looks today.

Each week we will collect the metadata (descriptive information) and the thumbnail images from our groups and load them into PictureAustralia, enhancing its value to researchers and the general public. The first load will occur the week following Australia Day 2006.

Back to Canada - Where Is the Snow?!

2006-02-05T16:28:00.000-05:00

Well, taking one week off in Dominican Republic has a way to make you think about early retirement!!

We went to an all-inclusive resort called Natura Park Resort Eco & Spa, one of the best resorts in the Punta Cana area of Dominican Republic.

What a great time we had! I have temporarily added a flickr badge of our vacation on this blog home page (side bar menu).

Going Offline and Away!

2006-01-27T14:59:00.000-05:00

Gone away to Natura Park Resort Eco & Spa for a week, it's a tough life! Enjoy the snow, if applicable. ;-)

Contributor to Slaw.ca

2006-01-25T11:06:00.000-05:00

As of today, I have joined the slaw.ca team of occasional contributors. From time to time, I will post on slaw.ca some of the content that appears in this blog, edited for the legal profession community - here is an example: "The Uneasy Lawyer and IT Dialogue".

Web 2.0 and Law 2.0

2006-01-24T17:13:00.000-05:00

I have recently come across a very interesting roundtable (from Law Practice TODAY) with Dennis Kennedy, Tom Mighell, John Tredennick, Stephen M. Nipper and Frederick L. Faulkner on the following topics:

What is Web 2.0
Examples
Wikis
Blogs
RSS
Web 2.0 Applications
What does it mean for lawyers

The authors used writely, a self-styled web word processor, to create this article.

Pandora v. Last.fm

2006-01-24T15:51:00.000-05:00

When I wrote earlier about Pandora, a reader (thanks Mike) suggested that I try last.fm. If you're interested in a comparison between Pandora and last.fm, take a look at the review by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch. Although the post is short, there are lots of insightful comments.

IMN: Three Subscriptions Are Now Available

2006-01-23T19:20:00.000-05:00

Navigating to the end of the right side menu of this blog, on the main page, you can now find three different RSS or email subscriptions for this blog:

Only blog posts: ; or email subscription
Only blog comments: ; or email subscription
Only resources tagged for this blog: ; or email subscription

If you want, for example, only to receive posts and to be kept informed of new resources tagged for this blog (I tag a lot of good stuff that I do not necessarily comment upon in this blog); you need to subscribe to each service by clicking on the corresponding links, above.

Note: posts are also tagged resources - they will show up in the "resources tagged" feed too.

Building Better Communities Awards (for Libraries)

2006-01-23T18:22:00.000-05:00

I once characterized (for fun!) Librarians as "Librarians: I go on managing my collections and serials mindsets", well, think that no more: I really like SirsiDynix new "Building Better Communities Awards", for Libraries (official press release here).

The award recognizes Librarian technology leadership, in service of communities.

It would have been even a better award, I think, if eligibility had not been restricted to "SirsiDynix-powered" Libraries. Although it may seem strange if SirsiDynix were to award a prize to a "non-SirsiDynix" powered Library, on second thoughts, it would make a very lasting impression on the winning Library and would enable all Librarians, proud of their achievements, to apply... Two cents worth from a non-Librarian.

Library

An Excellent Library Catalog Interface: NCSU Libraries

2006-01-23T18:03:00.000-05:00

I recently came across the new NCSU Libraries Catalog system (thanks to LibrarianInBlack) and found it the best library catalog interface I have come across to date.

This online catalog is powered by Endeca.

Library

Wikis In Large Corporations

2006-01-19T23:34:00.000-05:00

Since I wrote recently about "The Death of Enteprise Software", I came across an article titled "Wikis: Enabling Effective Knowledge Sharing Across the Organization", by Graeme Foux. This article is symptomatic of a larger trend of moving away from large, cumbersome enterprise software platforms to agile combinations of web-based applications.

I liked Graeme' s article for several reasons, the first being because he offers a simple definition for what is a wiki:

A wiki is an online tool that allows users to update and publish content collaboratively. Anyone who has access can edit the content, using a very simple tool and an ordinary web browser. Wiki usage is known as ‘collaborative authoring’.

The article has a clear focus on wikis in corporate settings: how can they be useful? What is the added value? What can you do to make wikis successful? The theme of this article underscores the trend alluded to earlier, that is, web 2.0 technologies - including wikis - are poised in 2006 to be assessed for their usage in large corporations and governments, replacing in part or completely several traditional content management systems.

In addition to wikis, more generally, web based applications are also ripe for specific evaluation by large corporations and governments. When comparing the bottom line of well designed Ajax applications as opposed to monolithic enterprise applications, convincingly done by Dion Hinchcliffe in "Why Ajax Is So Disruptive", it is easy to understand why momentum in that direction is building up. Follow the latter link for the full explanation of what Dion considers the "disruptive influences" of Ajax applications on the traditional software world:

The End of Software Upgrades, Fixes, and Security Patches;
Software and Data Available Wherever You Go;
Isolated Software Can't Compete with Connected Software;
Deprecation of the Traditional Operating System; and
Software That Is Invisible.

Having been confronted with the spiraling IT costs associated with traditional IT and software delivery, I can't help having a feeling of elation! I can start to see a business environment unshackled from a much too long hijacking of itself by IT undelivered promises.

IT and its Total-Cost-of-Ownership (TCO) might even represent, again, a fair proportion of the total budget. What an interesting perspective. Web 2.0 and Ajax offer large corporations and governments a genuine strategy for IT rationalization, even resulting in a better information environment for end users. When was the last time that rationalization in large organizations resulted in something better at a lower cost?

U3: Take Your Computing Environment With You

2006-01-17T17:07:00.000-05:00

Have you ever wondered how to take with you, on the road, in a tiny USB drive, all your favorite software and files without the need to install anything on the computer you will connect your USB drive to?

Search no more! Take a look at U3. I especially recommend the clear presentation of U3 CEO Kate Purmal, available at the latter link.

U3
Software

Yet Another Angle on Web 2.0

2006-01-16T17:02:00.000-05:00

In the "Must Read" section, I have provided several links to Web 2.0 articles. I have just added another one, by Barb Dybwad, titled "Approaching a definition of Web 2.0". It has more focus on the conceptual aspects of Web 2.0.

Web2.0

The Relationship Between IT and Business

2006-01-14T10:53:00.000-05:00

As I read two recent posts on the subject topic (Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New "Web 2.0" Tools by Dennis D. McDonald and Jeremiah Owyang and The Lawyer-IT Dialogue by Simon Fodden), I realized how much of a universal challenge the relationship is.

All too often, we have an unproductive corporate dialogue that looks like this:

This relationship eventually ends as follows:

Not very productive! It might be more appropriate to insert an intermediary function called "IM" between business users and the IT staff, giving us:

These "models" (thanks to Doug O'Brien, manager at Natural Resources Canada, for sharing his insights on topic in that simple and humoristic form) make several assumptions:

By "IM", we mean a corporate function that looks at Information Management holistically in which all IM facets are integrated (see Standardized IM Frameworks here), including, for example, records management, access to information & privacy, library services, research services, standards, education, training, so on and so forth;
By "IT", we mean a corporate function that represents the more traditional Information Technology activities, technical and "problem solving" in nature - networks, hardware and software fleet management, application development, etc.

Going back to the White Paper published by Dennis and Jeremiah, they approach the issue by asking "how should IT be involved?" The challenges they evoke (Chicken & Egg problem, Ownership Policy, Technology Trends, Employee Responsibility - on that topic see related legal issues, Crisis Management and Influence vs. Control) are all real challenges. I suggest that their paper points to a missing piece in the organizational picture: an intermediary function, or person or Department, providing the necessary interface between IT and the business. Such people know the language of the business and of IT. In a law firm, for example, this person might be a lawyer with a strong IT background, knowledge and interest. This allows business users to remain focused on their business and IT staff to remain committed and engaged in IT problem solving without the unfair added responsibility to tackle the whole IM Problem Space.

Simon Fodden raises a similar challenge in the context of a law firm here. I wholeheartedly agree with one of his remarks:

Ideally, there might be a CIO or CKO who has the status of a partner, whether or not she/he is in fact a lawyer-partner. This person would understand both worlds enough to know what questions to ask, what issues to pose, and what policies to impose or recommend. If this truly important mediation role is left to chance, such as when it's dependent on the fact that Mary or Ali, otherwise a librarian or an associate or an office manager, happens to have a background that facilitates things, the firm is vulnerable and may not be putting things on the best footing.

Considering knowledge-based organizations and their users thrive on information, it is well worth the investment to have a dedicated IM function and to position IT as an enabler of IM and, in turn, IM as an enabler of the business. The dialogue will improve and rationalization opportunities, matching business requirements, will be easier to identify.

Lesser Known Books on KM

2006-01-14T00:05:00.000-05:00

I do not write much about Knowledge Management, but I found this list of "lesser known books on KM" by Larry Prusak, available here, interesting and informative.

HR: Blogging As A New Required Ability?

2006-01-13T23:59:00.000-05:00

As Web 2.0 technologies become more prevalent, I would not be surprised to see the ability to "blog", or to contribute to weblogs, appear in job offers as an ability increasingly sought after... once the legal issues are sorted out. See for example how ZDNet is Looking for a Few Good Bloggers, in a recent post by Bill Ives.

An Example of a Public Law Wiki

2006-01-13T23:27:00.000-05:00

Found an interesting law wiki by the Cornell Law School "Legal Information Institute":

Wex is an ambitious effort to construct a collaboratively-created, public-access law dictionary and encyclopedia. It is sponsored and hosted by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School (http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/). Much of the material that appears in Wex was originally developed for the LII's "Law about..." pages, to which Wex is the successor.

Wiki
Law

The Death of Enterprise Software

2006-01-13T21:28:00.000-05:00

As reported by James Robertson in his post titled The death of enterprise software, Joe Lamantia has written an interesting piece on "turning away from monolithic and expensive systems with terrible user experiences" (the original post can be found here).

As users increasingly turn away from enterprise systems, they are likely to turn to new trends and technologies that have a proven track record, in particular, solutions that espouses what Dion Hinchcliffe calls "The Timeless Way of Building Software":

There is one timeless way of building software. It is decades old and is the same today as it's always been. And because it is timeless, it will always remain this way.

The great software of our time has always been created by people who were close to this way. It isn't possible to create great software - software that is satisfying, and useful, and makes itself a natural extension of life - except by following this way. And as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to elegant, vibrant software which is itself timeless in its form.

It is the process by which the function of a piece of software grows directly from the inner nature of people and naturally out of the raw bits, the otherwise meaningless digital medium, of which it is made.

It is a process which allows the life inside a person, or a group of people, or a community to flourish, openly, in freedom, so vividly that it gives rise, of its own accord, to the natural order which is needed to be contained within it.

If large, neutral and "good for all" enteprise solutions do not obey the above great software characteristics and, at the same time, carefully selected web 2.0 technologies do; the workplace is poised to embrace web 2.0 technologies sooner or later - provided such technologies are carefully selected and orchestrated for deployment in corporate settings. In particular, for large corporations and governments, I agree with Joe Lamantia's prediction:

For enterprise software, I think organizations will turn away from monolithic and expensive systems with terrible user experiences -- and correspondingly low levels of satisfaction, quality, and efficacy -- as the best means of meeting business needs, and shift to a mixed palette of semantically integrated capabilities or services delivered via the Internet. These capabilities will originate from diverse vendors or providers, and expose customized sets of functionality and information specific to the individual enterprise. Staff will access and encounter these capabilities via a multiplicity of channels and user experiences; dashboard or portal style aggregators, RIA rich internet applications, mobile devices, interfaces for RSS and other micro-content formats.

End-user experience is not the only driver for this change. The commoditization of IT, a concept coined by Nicholas Carr in "Does IT Matter?", coinciding with organizational self-awareness of massive IM/IT sustained investments as a portion of overall budgets; are pushing for considerable IM/IT rationalization. In one Department for example, the federal government is hoping to save approximately $150M on a yearly basis on the basis of IM/IT rationalization.

Expect an increasing number of conferences exploring how web 2.0 technologies could well serve the workplace, such as this one, and expect a better collaboration between IT staff and business units, as described in this White Paper by Dennis D. McDonald and Jeremiah Owyang (reported here by James Robertson). Finally, Web 2.0 solutions will increasingly target corporate settings, such as Alfresco - an open source, open-standards content repository.

Exciting times ahead in 2006!

The Cool Musical Side of Web 2.0: Pandora

2005-12-31T19:50:00.000-05:00

Who said that web 2.0 stuff needs to be dry and boring and... and...?

See this: Pandora, created by the Music Genome Project. Pandora answers the question "Can you help me discover more music that I'll like?"

By entering a song or artiste directly on the web page, Pandora automatically creates a radio station filled with similar music. Let the station run and work away! It's free. Each added song to one station brings in approximately 100 similar songs, so if you want to adjust the kind of music on any given custom station (you can create up to 100 stations), add songs progressively. By giving a thumb up or thumbs down to any song being played, the selection will improve over time...

Great idea!

Creating Customized Search Collections, or Search Engines

2005-12-31T18:03:00.000-05:00

The notion of customized search engines, or "search collections" as defined in an earlier post, already exists and is available to end users - see for example Rollyo, which allows you to "create personal search engines using only the sources you trust".

It shouldn't be too hard to implement a similar concept at the organizational level, For example, in a legal office, good Knowledge Management would imply that a process exists to centrally create, update and maintain subject based search collections. All lawyers using these collections instantly benefit and they can suggest additional search resources to be added to search collections, etc.

PS: On a personal note, I have switched from using Google to Jux2... Search results are more interesting (try it!). A Jux2 Firefox plugin is also available here.

Web 2.0 Momentum and Update

2005-12-31T16:20:00.000-05:00

Before large corporations and governments start to include web 2.0 technologies in their operations, they have to be convinced that web 2.0 stuff is no fad. Rich Karlgaard of the Forbes magazine has eloquently made the point that a key web 2.0 technology called "blogs" is no fad:

Blogging is not overhyped. You may be forgiven for thinking so, as no day goes by without a story on blogs. But blogs are no fad. They are cheap and easy to do. And blogs fulfill that deepest of human needs as defined by psychologist Abraham Maslow: self-actualization. People write blogs because they want to know themselves and want to be known by others and because they want their lives to count. When a communications medium is both riding the Moore's Law cost-capability curve and tapping into a deep need, it's no fad.

Understanding web 2.0 at a basic level only takes a few minutes if you start with this introduction.

If you know what web 2.0 is all about, you may wonder if executives have found blogging worthwhile, considering several advantages associated with blogging. You may want to know which Fortune 500 companies are blogging: see the list here and the context here, in an article recently posted by Ross Mayfield.

Now, turning to a fundamental question, as reported by Tom Davenport in his post Was Drucker Wrong?:

Are companies doing anything about this?

Tom offers a few reasons why companies are slow to adopt web 2.0 technologies, and these reasons equally apply to government. To his reasons (1 to 3), I would add a few (4 to 6):

It’s hard.
It takes a fair amount of up-front investment.
Knowledge workers, like Greta Garbo, like to be left alone.
Bureaucracy as an obstacle. Large corporations and governments have intricate processes to follow, subjecting the adoption of new technologies and tools to the willingness of many, many public servants, not all of them educated on web 2.0 and its potential. Adopting the technology and authorizing it for use is not the same as leveraging it. For example, the Canadian government has implemented a variety of RSS feeds, but these feeds are seldom updated, because a number of corresponding changes to governmental operations have not been made, in all likelihood due to diffused information leadership, covered next.
Diffused Information Leadership. Because web 2.0 technologies represent new ways to convey, collaborate with and exploit information (see for example the following link collections on web 2.0, RSS, wikis, Ajax, Aggregators, Blogs, Syndication and Reviews), they literally cut across a significant portion of the Information Management ("IM") problem space. The vast majority of organizations do not have a single point of leadership for the entire problem space, as depicted in the latter link. This prevents a concerted and focused assessment of web 2.0 potential as a key business enabler for the organization. Until such time as Chief Information Officers (CIOs) truthfully own the entire IM problem space, as opposed to merely managing Information Technology, the adoption of web 2.0 technologies will remain slow and painful.
Information Management Confusion. Lots of people get excited about Ajax, RSS, XML, Web 2.0, KM (Knowledge Management) and other buzz-acronyms. By contrast, Information Management ("IM") does not generate the same excitement and attention, probably because it is so pervasive and vast, especially when approached holistically. This is too bad, because IM, at its root, is (or should be) the key enabler to all knowledge-based organizations. IM does not benefit from standardized tools, methodologies and frameworks. IM does not benefit from a standardized body of knowledge, as project management benefits from the Project Management Body of Knowledge ("PMBOK"), for example. Short of a comprehensive IM discipline, organizations are left to their own ingenuity in tackling that huge IM problem space. Even if a comprehensive discipline and associated integrated IM frameworks were to be deployed, it would take time to assess how to best exploit web 2.0 technologies.

By way of conclusion and update, if you are interested on good reviews of web 2.0 software, Dion Hinchcliffe has updated his previous 2005 Review of Web 2.0 Software with this new post. He also provides a useful list of Web 2.0 explanations and definitions. I also liked Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without, by Michael Arrington.

Syndicating Web Content and Standard Feed Icons

2005-12-31T15:56:00.000-05:00

Tired of actively monitoring web content? Would you rather have that content delivered by way of subscription? How can you quickly know that your favorite web sites offer such "subscriptions" or, in other words, offer syndicated content?

Web sites offering "syndicated content" is just another way of saying web sites "making content available to users via subscriptions". Up to recently, syndicating content was typically done via offering email subscriptions. Now, a web 2.0 technology called RSS feeds enables web sites to easily syndicate web content.

A standard icon has emerged for identifying RSS feeds. You can find what the icon looks like by following the previous link and the icon is also displayed on the home page of this blog, in the subscription area. This standard icon has been adopted by Microsoft and will be implemented in Microsoft Outlook 12 and Internet Explorer 7.0 (see also this post by the Microsoft RS Team).

Executive Director - Information Management - Treasury Board Secretariat

2005-12-31T10:25:00.000-05:00

If you are in the Public Service of Canada, you can access the following job posting from the governmental intranet. The subject position is currently open to members of the federal public service at the EX-02 level, bilingual imperative and you must apply no later than January 16th, 2006. The position is in Ottawa.

Government

Christmas Season Upon Us - Going Offline

2005-12-18T23:48:00.000-05:00

No posts from now until early January 2006, time for family, friends and downhill skiing! Enjoy your holiday season. Will be back in early January.

Wikipedia Vindicated - Cult of the Amateur, Not

2005-12-15T22:57:00.000-05:00

In a famous post titled The amorality of Web 2.0, Nicholas Carr argues that many web 2.0 technologies in general, wikis in particular, promote the "Cult of the Amateur". He even refers to wikipedia as follows:

In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper.

In a recent post by Ross Mayfield on The Nature of Wikipedia and Britannica, referring to a special report by Nature titled Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, we find that wikipedia is faring much better than what could be expected from the previous quote:

Yet Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

New Google Firefox Extension - Blogger Web

2005-12-15T22:49:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Evan Williams for pointing out the new Google Firefox extension in one of his recent posts:

"Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you're viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you're on."

Tagging, Tagging, Tagging... Books!

2005-12-15T22:26:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Stephen Abram for pointing LibraryThing in one of his recent posts. LibraryThing is conceptually equivalent to del.icio.us, used to tag web resources, produce tagrolls, see how others have tagged similar content, etc.; but for books. Since August 29th, over 1,115,000 books have been catalogued in the system.

Makes you think of Yahoo purchasing del.icio.us and how that purchase was characterized by one commentator: "Yahoo just offered itself 300,000 human free internet resources taggers" (us!). LibraryThing is doing something similar!

What I like about it: the possibility of producing a bookroll. Watch for one, in upcoming weeks, on this blog...

Make sure you check this Firefox extension too, called SelectThing, used to add books to your LibraryThing account.

In A Nutshell: Integrated Information Management

2005-12-14T20:20:00.000-05:00

I often get asked what do I mean by "Integrated Information Management (IM)". Here follows a brief answer.

Integrated IM turns on three concepts: Integrated, Information and Management.

Management is concerned with six functions:

Planning
Organizing
Directing
Controlling
Evaluating
Reporting

Information, on the other hand, is best defined in context of data and knowledge:

Data: series of facts
Information: data given context
Knowledge: information internalized

Considering users of information (creators, consumers, etc.) experience information through information activities, it helps to provide a sample list of such activities:

Information activities: find, create, receive, acquire, monitor, classify (for records management), classify (for index management), safeguard, organize, use, publish, collaborate, disseminate, archive, dispose, transfer... The list goes on. Any information related verb is, potentially, an information activity.

This leads us to the following definition:

Information Management: "the planning, organizing, directing, controlling, evaluating and reporting of information activities in order to meet client objectives and to enable corporate functions"

In a governmental context, "client objectives" can be replaced by "program objectives". Typical corporate functions are Financial Management, Human Resources Management, etc.

Finally, information management also deals with processes, systems and environments to the extent they encapsulate any information activity.

Graphically:

Now, what about integrated IM?

Integrated Information Management occurs when organizations integrate the following 18 facets of IM:

IM Vision
IM Principles
IM Directives
IM Architecture (9 components and 6 input categories)

These 18 facets are logically grouped into Standardized Information Management Frameworks (SIMFs).

A methodology must be associated with the framework in order to ensure the following:

The 6 input categories are well researched and documented, providing, for each category, an inventory of IM "considerations". Categories are: Compliance (e.g. considerations would be IM related statutes, regulations, policies), Business Mandate (e.g. business lines), Empowerment (i.e. what end-users want and need), Interdependencies (i.e. leveraging other initiatives or projects), Constraints and Opportunities (e.g. web 2.0 technologies).
Each consideration must be analyzed. In addition, each consideration must result in the identification of the impact on any, many or all of the following nine (9) IM Architecture components: Information Context (the Business Context), Information Requirements, Information Resources, Information Activities, Information Roles / Services / Products, Standards / Education / Training, Recorded Information (i.e. data, publications and records), Information Technology and Architecture Optimization.
In addition to having an impact on the IM Architecture (9 components and 6 input categories), each consideration will influence the shaping of the organization's IM Vision, the choice of its IM Principles and the development of its IM Directives.

Voilà!

IM
SIMF

CSPS I310 Course - Integrated Information Management - Day 3

2005-12-14T18:41:00.000-05:00

Third and last day of training delivered today at the Canada School of the Public Service. See also Day 1 and Day 2. We started with the following syndicate exercise (please refer to the case study scenario at the end of this post for context):

Why the PAAO should introduce Integrated IM;
What would Integrated IM look like in the PAAO;
Suggest how to transform the PAAO from its current IM posture to Integrated IM.

Participants also prepared a proposal and presented it to a senior executive in the afternoon. Doug Rimmer, Assistand Deputy Minister (Programs & Services), Library and Archives Canada, was our guest executive for this course.

Alexa Brewer, Director of the Information Management Division (and also IM Forum Co-Chair), Treasury Board Secretariat, presented and explained to course participants the Government of Canada IM Program. Finally, I explained at which level Standardized IM Frameworks - SIMFs (explained here) - are best introduced in Departments and how Departmental Resource Centers could help local organizations design, develop and implement SIMF's.

Not surprisingly, I think what participants liked best was the opportunity to submit a proposal directly to a senior executive - in this case, an Assistant Deputy Minister (Doug Rimmer). The useful and precise feedback offered by Mr. Rimmer helped significantly in providing participants with a memorable learning experience.

Most participants thought this course should be a three day course, because there was so much material to cover and not enough time for the case study and exercises. I agree. In early January, now that the pilot is completed, the course will be reviewed and adjustments made accordingly.

2005 Review of Web 2.0 Software

2005-12-13T21:41:00.000-05:00

Great review by Dion Hinchcliffe of 2005 Web 2.0 software, by category, with runner ups, lots of useful comments and trackbacks.

Using Del.Icio.Us Creatively (Tagging Content)

2005-12-13T20:37:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed new categories on the home page of this blog: the category list is a del.icio.us tagroll. The Slacker Manager has a great article, titled The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users, explaining how to best exploit tagging. I have added this article in my short "Must Read" link section. Del.icio.us will not be a fad - it has recently been purchased by Yahoo.

Tagging
CM

CSPS I310 Course - Integrated Information Management - Day 2

2005-12-13T18:53:00.000-05:00

Today, I delivered at the Canada School of the Public Service (CSPS) Day two of the subject three day course. We had four periods:

Syndicate exercise. It included this problem: If the total cost to Canadian taxpayers of your organization is $75M annually and you estimate that two thirds of the sum can be assigned to information products and services delivered to external clients, what would be the organization information capital asset value after the initial five years, given the following assumptions: about one fifth (1/5) of the total information output, on average, constitutes material of precedential value from which you expect future economic benefits; the average retention period of this information is only five (5) years; and the information asset value is amortized in straight-line over its retention period.
Strategic Information Management Frameworks - Part I - Vision, Principles & Directives. That period covered how organizations develop their Information Management (IM) Vision, how they can select and update their IM Principles and how they can select, develop and maintain their IM Directives.
Strategic Information Management Frameworks - Part II - IM Architecture Components. In this period, we discussed the nine (9) necessary and sufficient components of the IM Architecture. An IM Architecture consists in all that you need in order to enable integrated information management. The following nine components were explained: Business Context, Information Requirements, Information Resources, Information Activities, Information Roles / Services / Products, IM Standards / Education / Training, Information Technology, Recorded Information and Architecture Optimization.
Strategic Information Management Frameworks - Part III - IM Architecture Inputs. In order to develop sound Strategic IM Frameworks and, in particular, sound IM Architectures; participants were introduced to the following six (6) standard input categories: Compliance, Business Mandate, Empowerment, Interdependencies, Constraints and Opportunities.

CEO Blogs (other than Information Technology Related)

2005-12-13T18:12:00.000-05:00

I have covered in an earlier post how governments could exploit enterprise blogs and wikis. By way of a follow-up on that issue, see this article by Bill Ives: he refers to a number of "well known organizations outside of technology" with senior executives blogging. I look forward to the day when I will compile a similar list for Canadian government executives!

Two Must Reads About Web 2.0

2005-12-12T22:55:00.000-05:00

I have added two "must read" items to the links menu:

If you do not have much time on your hands and want to be selective about what you read, and want to learn what web 2.0 is, I suggest these two resources.

CSPS I310 Course - Integrated Information Management - Day 1

2005-12-12T21:08:00.000-05:00

Today, I delivered at the Canada School of the Public Service (CSPS) Day one of the subject three day course. We had four periods:

Introduction, ice breaker, overview of the manual, introduction to the case study (see at the end of this post)
The "what": Information Management (IM) as a Unified Discipline
The "why": IM Value Propositions
Individual Exercise

The IM as a unified discipline covered the IM Problem Space and the following semantic clarifications, among other topics:

What is Data? Series of objective facts.
What are Opinions? Subjective statements reflecting beliefs, not necessarily based on facts.
What is Fiction? Works derived of imagination, the storyline necessarily not based on facts. Elements of the story may embody data and opinions.
What is Information? Data, opinions or fiction given context. Giving context to data happens whenever you correlate data, for example, a graph plotting cancer risk as a function of age and gender (correlation of data). Giving context to opinions happens when several opinions are presented and either contrasted or related to each other. Giving context to fiction, similarly, happens when the work of fiction is discussed in terms of its significance, impact on other authors, etc. Giving context to data, opinions and fiction provides added value not apparent from the underlying data, opinion or fiction. This added value, together with the underlying data, opinion or fiction; is information. Information can therefore exist physically or in electronic format.
What is Knowledge? Information internalized. To internalize information, one must study it, apply learning skills and derive significance from the information. As a result, knowledge only resides in people (and animals). Knowledge is subjective. Knowledge cannot exist on paper or in electronic format.
What is Knowledge Management (KM)? KM is concerned with the planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, controlling, evaluating and reporting on the acquisition, sharing, use and transfer of internalized information, hence, for example, issues of succession planning. In the organizational context, for example, succession planning deliberately plans for and encourages the transfer of knowledge from departing employees to other employees.
What are Information Activities? Whatever you do (verb) that is information related - find, create, receive, acquire, monitor, classify (for records management), index (for content management), safeguard, verify (for accuracy), organize, store, access, use, collaborate, send, route, disseminate, publish, transfer (alienate), archive and dispose are all non exhaustive examples of information activities.
What is Information Management (IM)? The planning, organizing, directing, coordinating & controlling, evaluating and reporting of information activities in order to meet program objectives.

IM value propositions covered the "why" organizations should invest in IM: Is it worth investing in IM when so many other funding pressures compete with it? (in government) To answer that question, we covered a few basic accounting concepts (as some participants would say: yikes!) in order to come up with a method to quantify the affirmation that "information is an asset". Let's just say that many participants did not expect to be faced with accounting right after lunch!!

I have posted, below, the initial case study given to participants. Throughout the courses they will also be given incremental case study information and each participant will assume a role (Librarian, Records Manager, IT Team Leader, Consultant, Information Manager and PAAO Desk Officer).
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"In Year 2015, you are part of the new federal Special Operating Agency called the “Program Activity Architecture Office” (PAAO), created in 2013 under the leadership of Deputy Prime Minister Reg Alcock. The government decided it was important to have a permanent and distinct agency supporting the Privy Council Office and Treasury Board Secretariat in their respective governmental roles with regards to Program Activity Architecture.

The mandate of PAAO is two-fold: first, to continuously update and maintain federal program activity architecture information; second, to translate this information into a comprehensive dynamic web site for the Canadian public and facilitate the access to program activity information.

Note: Each department’s Program Activity Architecture consists of three main elements: (a) clearly defined and appropriate Strategic Outcome(s); (b) a complete program inventory that links all departmental programs and program activities to these Strategic Outcomes; and (c) annual business plans & performance reports.

The PAAO has been given time to cope with its awesome challenges. Expectations are high: Members of Parliaments, the Office of the Auditor General, Privy Council and Treasury Board Secretariat bureaucrats are all looking to the PAAO not only for accurate program activity architecture information, but also for related business plan and program cost information. In addition, the media and the public have discovered, in the PAAO web site, a wealth of information never before so freely disclosed to the public. This openness has created the foreseeable effect of creating more demand for quality information on the web site. Web site users are also pushing for a more friendly user interface environment, as the site is currently little more than a collection of static pages and links to web sites and documents.

Typical services provided by the PAAO to federal government clients include program activity architecture mapping and documentation, support to develop their business plans, support to develop their balanced scorecard performance measurement frameworks and support on how to link their financial departmental data to an activity-based costing framework aligned with their programs.

Typical services provided by the PAAO to the Canadian public include the provision of program activity architecture information linked to financial information in documents published on the Internet site. Each document can be accessed by a link on a static web page.

The PAAO has three divisions.

The corporate services division of the PAAO serves its parent organization by managing all corporate functions, including accommodations, finances, Human Resources, Information Management and, of course, business management of the PAAO itself.

The PAAO, in addition to the corporate services division, has two main divisions aligned with its two main business lines. The Federal Government Liaison division provides to client departments and agencies a number of desk officers, typically on secondment from other federal departments and agencies. They provide the services described above.

The Canadian Public Liaison division includes an Access to Information & Privacy (ATIP) section; a call center providing similar information as found in the PAAO web site; a section of desk officers maintaining the web site, monitoring the content, answering queries from the public and providing quality assurance services.

The Head of the PAAO is a Deputy Minister level bureaucrat, reporting to the Deputy Prime Minister, as specified in the Program Activity Architecture Act, S.C. 2010, c. P-2.1.

In recent news, the PAAO has come under attack for its antiquated web technologies, incapable of providing near real time information to the public. In addition, the Head of the PAAO has shared with the senior staff of the Office that she is unhappy with the loss of corporate knowledge every time the rotational staff in the Federal Government Liaison changes and that this loss created a significant risk of inaccurate program activity information."