Still, I am determined that 2012 is going to be the Year of Awesome, because it bloody well has to be. To stop myself from just sliding into pessimism, I thought I’d jot down a few of my goals for the coming year here: goals, mind, not resolutions. It doesn’t matter so much if you don’t meet a goal, but there’s something very crushing about not having kept a resolution!

1. Complete CILIP Chartership

I will do it this year. I WILL. Pretty sure I can, too: I’ve got quite a lot done already, it’s just a matter of bringing it all together.

2. Run more networking events Up North

I was really pleased with how well the first LIKE North event went, and I’m keen to get on with organising some more. We’ve got some ideas already, so should have some news on that soon! There may well be another SLA Europe event in the works too, watch this space…

3. Have more fun

2011 was distinctly lacking in fun. 2012 will be better. What I mean by this is really just doing less of the things I feel like I have to do, and doing more of the things I enjoy. That means being selective in what I say yes to, and knowing when to say no – which I have actually managed to do a couple of times lately, so I must be getting better at it!

As much as I love my job, and my other professional activities, I cannot spend all of my free time on it. I’d like to rediscover some neglected hobbies: I really got a lot out of dedicating last November solely to writing, and plan to do much more of that. I’ve set up another blog for writing about writing, and reading, and really anything else that catches my fancy – so there’ll be less of my personal witterings on this blog! I thought it was about time I made this a properly professional blog. I’d also really like to get back into photography – photography was actually my first career, but I rather fell out of love with it after attempting to do it for a living. I’m starting to enjoy it again now, so plan to be out with my camera much more in the coming year.

So, those are my goals. Too high? Too low? Would love to hear what others are planning for the coming year!

People equate both “search” and “online” with “google”. However, Google’s relevancy is declining: they have no more commitment to advanced search options, and are cutting options that information professionals appreciate. Using alternatives to google can give you an edge.

Bing

• Has advanced search as refinement option – that actually works!
• Most innovations start in the US, and don’t always reach rest of world – so you won’t always see their newest, most advanced options
• Field searching – more extensive than google
• Now powers yahoo search in most countries

Country-specific search engines:

• Baidu (China)
• Yandex (Russia)
• Check searchenginecolossus.com for more

Blekko

• No spam, no content farms
• Custom search
• User created, crowdsourced
• Use slashtags to customize your search, monitor subjects

Duck Duck Go

• Privacy – doesn’t save searches
• Crowdsourced, user generated content

Google search options

• E.g. Blog search, Scholar, Images, etc. Amazing how many people don’t know about the separate databases within Google
• Be wary of Google News – your results are filtered
• Google Scholar – useful for academic articles, but we have no idea what coverage is like! Google won’t tell us.

Image and video search

• Flickr, Picassa
• Chromatik
• Multicolr
• Offers options such as search by image, by colour, by copyright status

Paid search tools are still the best option. They offer transparency, precision, repeatable results, consistency, no SEO manipulation. This all gives info pros an edge over those who think they can find everything on the open web.

Where will innovations come from?

• Only google will kill google! They are losing track of their original mission
• Innovation happens in the margins, not big search engines
• Algorithms change all the time. Results you see one day may not be there the next
• Semantic search – not new, but not mainstream. Main potential is in enterprise search.

To sum up, Marydee stressed that the most important thing to remember is to keep up with changes, and to choose the right search engine for the job at hand – don’t just use one search engine for everything. And be prepared to ditch an old favourite if it isn’t really working for you any more, or if you can find something else that works better.

Next up was Arthur Weiss, on specialist search – finding people, news and numerical data. This should be simple, but isn’t. Optimized search is not helpful for specialised data, as it is optimized for what the majority want: based in keywords, not content. Ordinary search engines struggle to classify what is a name, what numbers mean, what counts as news.

News search:

• Search engine sites, e.g. google news – but beware of filtered personalised results!
• Specialist news sites, e.g. nlsearch.com, congoo, newsnow.co.uk
• Real time sites, e.g. twitter, topsy – good for a snapshot of what is being discussed at the moment
• Aggregators, e.g. silobreaker – next best thing to paid search! Also try Evri – not as good as silobreaker, but good for images and social media.

Numeric and structured data

• Statistical data – Google Public Data (allows visual presentation), offstats (run by Auckland University), Open Data Directory (some very odd content! Government and local authority sources )
• Wolfram Alpha – structured data. Good for quick calculations but doesn’t give source details, so you don’t know where the data is coming from, or how old it is.
• Zanran.com

People

• Go to LinkedIn first! Very powerful, but does rely on people having entered profiles and kept them up to date
• Xing is like LinkedIn but much smaller. Good for German-speaking areas
• Jigsaw doesn’t have the same depth as LinkedIn, but is good for stats/numbers (e.g. how many sales people at certain company)
• Various people search engines, usually not very accurate. Yatedo, ZoomInfo, pipl, 192, yasni, etc. Better to go directly to LinkedIn etc.

The final speaker was Karen Blakeman, on what search engines know about us. She promised we’d all be very paranoid by the end of the session!

Recommendations, personalised ads, personalized search results are all commonplace – all major search engines and shopping sites do this. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but can cause privacy concerns – and can mess up your search results! Most sites can tell a great deal about you from your browser – try Panopticlick to find out what information you are giving away.

Geolocation – Google and other services can generally tell where you are, which can be very useful for finding local services etc. However, this is less helpful if you’re doing professional search, e.g. researching the distribution of a certain company across the whole of the country. You can use location search proactively if you’re looking into industries/services in a particular country or region – try using the specific country version of a search engine.

Search engines and social networks know what you’ve searched before, what you’ve clicked on and what you’ve “liked”, shared, etc. Your web history will alter your search results in Google whether you are signed in to your Google account or not. This will be used not only to filter your search results but also to show you targeted adverts. You can see what google thinks you are interested in on their preferences page – you can also edit your preferences or opt out entirely from this page.

You can’t completely block out all personalisation, but some “damage limitation” is possible. For example, make sure you are logged out of your Google/Facebook/Bing/etc accounts while you are not using them. Regularly check your privacy settings on all accounts – Facebook in particular has a nasty habit of changing them without warning! Delete your browser history if you don’t need it, and regularly review things like your Google ad preferences and dashboard. Remember though that personalisation is not always a bad thing – you need to weigh up how useful it might be to you, versus how much information you want to give away.

Marydee started her talk by outlining the various different approaches to names used by different social media sites. Some, like Twitter, allow you to call yourself whatever you want. Others, like Facebook and Google+, require real names – although this is very difficult to police! There are numerous examples of people being banned from Google+ for using what looked like fake names but were, in fact, their real names; and conversely, people using fake names that look enough like real names that they’ve escaped detection by those policing the site.

Problems can arise when you are maintaining a profile on behalf of your employer or a group you represent, or when your online identity is closely linked to an employer/group. What happens if you leave the group/change employer? Who owns the name, and who owns your network? Marydee gave the example of a journalist, Laura Kuenssberg who’d had a twitter account called @bbclaura when she was employed by the BBC. She built up a substantial following on Twitter, which the BBC were more than happy about – until she left for a job with ITV, changed her Twitter name to @itvlaura, and thus effectively took all of her followers with her to a rival channel. Should the BBC have had some kind of policy in place to prevent her from using their branding on a personal profile, then taking all the followers she’d gained with her when she left? As Twitter is officially a personal service, and Laura was using it in a personal capacity, the BBC had no recourse to stop her doing this.

Marydee then listed some of the things that can go wrong when using social media:

• Misinformation is common, whether intentional or not, e.g. panic started by false rumours on Twitter of a shooting in Oxford Street
• Unverified accounts – these may be malicious or helpful, ranging from deliberate spoof accounts to fan pages – e.g. when fans of the brand found that Coca Cola did not have a Facebook page, they set up their own. Luckily for Coca Cola this is benign, but it is out of their control
• Using name that sounds like someone else – e.g. a lawyer named Mark Zuckerberg was kicked off of Facebook because, having the same name as Facebook’s founder, it was assumed that his was a spoof account
• Violating employer policies on posting – e.g. making disparaging remarks about your employer, giving away confidential information, or using sites for non-work purposes during work hours. These could all cost you your job!
• Incorrect tagging, e.g. people on Facebook tagging you in photos that aren’t actually you – these can be accidental, done as a joke, or with malicious intent. Be vigilant – check what other people might be posting about you!
• Intemporate remarks – e.g. the head of a UK housing trust boss who posted anti-gay marriage remarks on Facebook, lost his job over it even though his account was personal only, and not linked to the housing trust.

To lighten the mood, Marydee went on to list the ways to avoid some of the above problems:

• Remember why you are using certain sites, stick to purpose. Don’t post stuff about your job on a personal-only site, and keep overly-personal information off professional sites.
• If posting in personal context only, NEVER mention your employer by name
• If you’re managing multiple professional and personal accounts on one site, always check which account you’re posting from before you hit enter! Think of it like double-checking you haven’t accidentally hit “reply all” when sending an email.
• Be civil, accurate & kind
• Recognize that social media encourages a sense of humour. Ask, is this a joke?

Tips for employees

• Find out who owns your name/followers
• Know & follow policies
• Question the policy if you think it’s too stringent/likely to be ineffective.

Tips for employers

• Accept that people will use social media, whether you know about it or not! Banning social media doesn’t work, people will find ways around it
• Have a policy in place, and make sure it’s one that can be easily followed and that works for all parties.

Finally, Marydee emphasised that this is an evolving space – there will be problems caused as people negotiate their way around this unfamiliar territory. Social media encourages professional and personal identities to converge, so much depends on your own common sense.

David started by explaining the rationale behind his knowledge cafes, which are mini workshops he has run in various locations and workplaces around the world. The idea from them came from attending various management seminars and lectures, and noticing that after they’d sat through the usual death-by-PowerPoint, all the attendees would decamp to the nearest pub – and the conversations that happened there were invariably the most valuable part of the evening. The idea behind the knowledge cafe is to facilitate that kind of post-lecture conversation, without having to sit through the dull and unhelpful lecture first.

David obviously believes very strongly in the importance of conversation. He quoted from the Cluetrain Manifesto: “Business is a conversation… Knowledge workers are those with the jobs of having the most interesting conversations”. Knowledge management is about understanding, not knowledge. We are more inundated with information than ever, but understanding has not increased. We understand the world through stories – storytelling was the first form of knowledge sharing. A true “learning conversation” must be a dialogue, rather than one person seeking to impart their ideas without learning anything in return.

The process for a knowledge cafe is as follows:

• Set the context for the conversation, most usually with a speaker, talking for no more than 10 minutes
• The speaker asks open-ended trigger question
• Small group conversations at tables – max 4
• Whole group conversation at table – max 20-30
• Share actionable insights

The outcomes are intangible, but valuable nevertheless. Knowledge cafes allow you to engage with a subject, articulate ideas, gain better understanding of others, and strengthen relationships. These are all incredibly valuable outcomes, but unfortunately their intangibility can make knowledge cafes a hard sell to management, who will generally want to see more measurable outcomes!

Some common problems when running knowledge cafes are if the process feels too rigid, too much like work. For example if someone is sat opposite their boss, and thus feel inhibited from speaking their mind; or if people feel under pressure to report everything back once they are back at their desks. Issues like this would capsize a knowledge cafe, but the format is designed to avoid them.

After David had delivered his spiel about the purpose of and rationale behind the knowledge cafes, we split off into groups of four to discuss the talking point: what is the role of conversation in the workplace and how do we encourage more of it? We had 5-10 minutes per group to discuss this, then everyone had to move around to form new groups and speak to different people. We did this a few times, then all arranged the chairs into the room into a big circle, and chatted among the entire group about how we’d found the process, and what had come out of the conversations. Some of the points discussed:

• How conversations were initiated in the workplace varied according to cultural differences. For example, one of the groups I was in discussed the differences in lunch breaks between England and France. A French member of the group discussed how appalled he’d been when he first came to England and saw people just eating lunch at their desks – in France, everyone takes a proper lunch break, and this is a great opportunity for conversations with people who you might not see ordinarily. He said he didn’t know how often he’d talk to people outside of his department without the opportunity presented by the social lunch breaks.
• Physical space also makes a big difference. The trend for hot desking and open plan offices can encourage conversation, but there is also a need for private spaces. I mentioned my firm’s London office, which is entirely open plan but has phone cubicles for if you need to make a confidential phone call, and comfortable chairs set around the office with low screens around them, which allow up to 4-5 people to have a semi-private conversation. This seems like a really good compromise to me, and from the time I’ve spent in the London office I think it works really well.
• Generational differences came up, with several people mentioning the trend for “generation Y / millennials” to have multiple conversations at once through different devices. There was a bit of debate around whether people who are simultaneously talking to someone in person, tweeting, and keeping an eye on the TV, can really be engaging in conversation. Are the millennials’ habits of using several communication channels at once harming their ability to concentrate, or are they just better at concentrating on multiple things at once as they’ve grown up with this kind of communication?
• How do we encourage conversations without making them compulsory? Part of this comes back to cultural attitudes – if conversation comes naturally within your organisation then you probably won’t have a problem facilitating it, but if stilted meetings and solitary lunches at your desk are the norm, it will be very difficult to encourage people to have conversations without just ending up with more meetings.
• Someone ventured the opinion that meetings are for discussion not conversation – the goal is to make a decision, so not conducive to free-flowing conversation. If this is the case, and I think it probably is, then how do we encourage conversations outside of the formal meeting structure?
• Does twitter count as a conversation? Does email? Most of the group, including David, were of the opinion that if it isn’t face-to-face, it isn’t really a conversation. I disagree. I don’t think email really counts as a conversation, I think largely because it is asynchronous, and is designed to allow someone to impart big chunks of information – it isn’t designed around the free-flow exchange of ideas that defines a conversation. However, I do think talking on Twitter counts as a conversation. I’ve had plenty of fascinating conversations on Twitter, many of which have led to interesting projects and new ideas – the Library Routes project and the Echo Chamber presentation both arose out of conversations on Twitter.

Overall, I really enjoyed this session. The small group conversations were fascinating: changing groups several times meant that I got to talk to lots of different people within the room, and each of the groups I was in took a very different focus on the question – I never had the same conversation twice. I still don’t really know how much of this could be applied within my own work – the points above about cultural barriers seem very pertinent to the field I work in – but I certainly came away with a fresh perspective on the topic, and lots of ideas that would never have occurred to me without having spoken to some of the people in the group.

The session opened with a presentation from Sandra Ward and Ian Wooler on what was meant by proving value. The usual point was made that value is subjective, so there is a need to differentiate between concrete and abstract value. Value is gained at the point of use, not at the point of provision – what did people actually do with the information you provided?

Key challenges:

• Demonstrating activity is not the same thing as demonstrating value
• Difficult to engage other staff in collecting metrics
• People you need to prove value to are generally not those who use and value your service

Demonstrating your value shouldn’t be thought of as a last-ditch attempt – it should be ongoing, not just when you’re trying to defend yourself. Don’t let yourself get backed into a defensive position.

One framework for demonstrating value was outlined as: “we enable… leading to… and to… resulting in…”. For example: “We enable in-depth research, leading to better informed staff and to higher quality decisions, resulting in risk reduction”. You could also use the framework from right to left – start with the outcome you want and work back.

One recommended technique was to enlist the help of an “organisation champion”. They  should be:

• A senior manager
• Info/knowledge aware
• Sounding board
• Prepared to be a partner & communicate value
• Strategic link between information services and the wider organisation and stakeholders

Another tip was to make sure you have in place a benefits plan – i.e. that you know what your customers actually expect from the service and how you will measure that. This seemed fairly self-explanatory to me – surely at some point, you’ll have actually asked your users/stakeholders what they actually want from the service? – but I guess it bears repeating. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of continuing to do things you were asked to do years ago without actually asking if they’re still needed!

Next up, Ceri Hughes from KPMG spoke about how the value of the knowledge management team was measured in her firm. The KM team’s objective is: “to harness the knowledge of our 140000 people to help them deliver and create value to their clients”. Everything KM does must relate to this, or they don’t do it. The nature of KPMG’s work means that they are not easily differentiated from their competitors, so must find ways to prove that they are the best by adding value. this ethos extends to all support staff within the firm.

Their outcomes are measured by mixture of qualitative and quantitative measures, including metric dashboards, surveys, and focus groups. One tip I thought was very useful was to send out targeted surveys, rather than a massive mailshot to everyone – select who would be useful to ask and just invite them. People are more  likely to complete a survey if they know why they, specifically, have been asked.

They also use measures directly related to KPMG’s  strategy,  including reduced spend. Reducing local investment was a priority – there was lots of discrete spending happening, with local purchases not being shared with the firm. They changed focus to “spending time and money once and well” – i.e. buying one report, etc and making sure it was shared within the firm so it could be accessed at point of need.

One slightly controversial point Ceri made was that another of their success metrics was increased size of offshore Knowledge Centers of Excellence. This caused a bit of a murmur in the audience – outsourcing and offshoring are generally unpopular terms to use among librarians! I did think there was a bit of a contradiction in what she was saying – possibly I misinterpreted, but there seemed to be a bit of a switch from talking about the high-quality work the KPMG KM team does, then going on to say that one of their objectives was to save money by offshoring this work to India. It strikes me that you can generally have good or cheap, but usually not both, so I didn’t really think the offshoring objective fitted with the overall emphasis on high quality work.

Next up was Gwenda Sippings on adding value by aligning services to the organisation’s strategy. She started with some tips on what to assess when you first join a new organisation. To understand the current picture, look for signals and indicators of potential for greater efficiency and effectiveness. For example, what are people spending the most time on? Are people working at the correct skill levels? You can do more in-depth analysis, such as an information audit, user needs and service levels, levels of professionalism.

Strategies for increasing value:

• Develop services that visibly support the organisation’s objectives. Articulate this and manage expectations
• Streamline work flows to increase time spent on more valuable activities
• Make sure people with the right qualifications and experience are delivering the service
• Ask for feedback! Make use of available channels to communicate success stories.

Gwenda did acknowledge that success usually breeds more work, and you probably won’t be given more staff or resources to handle this! The only solution to this really is to learn to work smarter. See what you can streamline, what you can drop, and think carefully about what you agree to do in the first place.

The next speaker was Pauline Blagden, talking about demonstrating the value of information services within the NHS. She explained that imperative in NHS is the pressure to justify the existence of information services – demonstrating value is a survival tactic. The ”critical few” are incredibly difficult to engage: they are the ones who don’t use IS, don’t see them as important, and are unlikely to mourn their passing!

Lessons learned

• Need to harness organisation structure for dissemination – who do you report to? Who do they report to? Make sure your messages are going along the right channels
• Importance of peer support
• Target the critical few rather than important many – existing customers are already positive and willing to speak up, so need to encourage that good will up the hierarchy to where the critical few live
• Choose measures carefully – what will have the most impact?
• Alignment with the organisation’s values/strategy is hugely important in the NHS as elsewhere
• Marketing is still vital

Finally, Peter Griffiths spoke about government Knowledge and Information Management (KIM). The main challenge within local government is in proving value when the concern is for the state of public finances during time of recession. You have to balance “soft” measures against the accountants’ wishes for hard financial data.

Government KIM guidelines state:

• Focus on professional skills that save time and money, avoids mistakes and liability
• Focus on tasks that add value, i.e. don’t automatically say yes to new tasks
• Explore potential new ways of working, e.g. shared services, collective procurement
• Explore dynamic new KIM roles
• Partner with other professionals e.g. IT staff, procurement, legal advisers etc.

Reflections

• Success comes from arguing wide benefit to funding bodies
• We need to be seen as valuable for what we do, not the stuff we look after!
• Government librarians are frequently embedded in their departments, which seems to be a successful strategy
• Importance of proactive communication, using the clients’ vocabulary

As I mentioned, there were two more speakers at the end, but as I didn’t take any notes from that point I really couldn’t tell you what they said! My sincere apologies to the final two speakers, who I’m sure had fantastic, insightful presentations – I can only plead information overload.

One thing that really struck me in this session was that every speaker kept coming back to the idea of alignment: i.e. making sure that your goals and the work you are doing aligns with and supports your organisation’s overall strategy. This is an idea I am quite familiar with through SLA’s work on the subject, and I’m really pleased to see it gaining some traction over here too as I do think that it is vital to ensuring the survival of the profession.

He started with the bold statement that a truly collaborative organisation can make the world a better place. He went on to explain this: a collaborative organisation allow people to work smarter, reduce stress, and spend more time with their families and doing non-work stuff; hence, can change the world! He mentioned a US company that is aiming to move 30-40% of its workforce to full-time home working – unfortunately I didn’t catch the name of the company.

Jacob drew a distinction between social media and enterprise tools: are we trying to build social organizations, or collaborative organizations? He used an interesting quote here: “Social is what happens when you remove the business value from collaboration”. I’m not quite sure I agree, I think the social side of enterprise collaboration can be very important in building relationships within a company, but I get that a “business collaboration tool” is an easier sell to management than “social media”!

Some of the key findings of the report:

• Most important business drivers: connecting geographically dispersed teams, increasing productivity, fostering employee engagement. Engagement = how fulfilled are you? Would you recommend your employer to a job seeker?
• Traditionally these initiatives come from IT, but increasingly business units are bypassing IT. Possible due to cloud computing. Most commonly, input comes from both business units and IT.
• Trend towards full feature products – i.e. covers blogging, microblogs, wikis, etc. Use one tool for everything rather than a suite of products for different tasks.
• Smaller companies are more likely to use collaborative tools for business development and sales. As companies get bigger, focus moves towards marketing. Bigger still, shifts towards IT. Biggest companies are involved in innovation and product development.
• Most effective approach uses a combination of structured and unstructured – i.e. providing guidelines to staff, but not being too restrictive in what people are aren’t allowed to do. This approach resulted in the most engagement.
• Resistance to new tools/approaches came from managers (21%) and users (20%). 30% of those surveyed said they’d encountered no resistance – seems unlikely!
• Most organisations put technology ahead of strategy. This is where many problems come from: what are the tools actually for? This was the main source of resistance from managers.
• 60% had no KPIs in place before implementing enterprise tools. Of 25% that did, more than half didn’t know whether they were met. Value paradox – managers expect to see measurable results, but haven’t done any of the work necessary to be able to measure that.
• Solving a business problem seen as just as useful as demonstrating financial ROI. Anecdotal evidence seen as acceptable, so KPIs don’t need to be data driven as long as you can demonstrate a problem solved.
• “Busy” metrics are not useful – e.g. how many comments left, level of traffic on a platform. That tells you how busy your employees are, but not how engaged they are. To know how engaged employees are, ask about staff morale. Also ask for anecdotal evidence – how have the tools made your work easier?

The second speaker, Stephen Dale, talked about his experience of building a knowledge hub as part of a local government knowledge management strategy.

Stephen was involved in a 3 year local government KM strategy, starting in 2005. The strategy was aimed at connecting people with people, rather than relying on websites for info dissemination. Communities of practice hub was set up, the idea being to share knowledge without hierarchy. Wanted to integrate legacy enterprise infrastructure, web services and social media, and to find a way to leverage information already existing in silos, particularly that locked away in email.

Some of the problems with the current state of social media: social networks have proliferated, leading to social networking fatigue! It’s ever harder to know which network to join to get in on the conversation. When you do join one, you then have the problem of finding which conversation to join. If you join LinkedIn, there are so many groups – which do you join? Where do you go first to ask a question? If you start using Twitter, your first problem is going to be finding people to follow, and finding ways to join conversations that are already happening.

(I should note here that the above is just a report of what Stephen said – I actually don’t agree. I am firmly of the “just dive in and give it a try” school of thought when it comes to social media. I think that if you’re so hung up on which network to join, what groups to join, who to follow, etc, then you’re really missing the point. The beauty of social media is that it is unstructured – there’s no right or wrong way to do it. Just give it a go!)

In addition, the conversations getting more granular and disaggregated – are we just creating more silos? Thousands of communities of pratice exist on the local government hub, but many are talking about the same thing, just not to each other.

Changing the email paradigm is still a huge problem. People still send info “because you might need it some time”. Need to move to the social model where everyone shares what they know, so you can trust that the info will be there when you need it.

• Knowledge hub requirements:
• Easy to use, intuitive and guided
• Powerful semantic search
• Greater permeability with external net words
• Seamless integration with email
• Support for mobile platforms
• Mashup tools and apps
• Useful analytics

Should:

• Connect with people with similar interests
• Help me answer questions
• Surface relevant info
• Encourage participation

Stephen noted that the obvious question is why develop a knowledge hub when there are free alternatives? He explained that if you’re using a free product, the data does not belong to you. Always remember: if it’s free then you are the product, not the customer. Also, getting locked into a proprietary format can cause problems down the line. Open source can be a better way to go if you want full, ongoing control.

Conclusions:

• Increasing social network fatigue – desire for one place to do business
• Enterprise solutions must integrate with internal and external networks
• Enterprise must be seen to add value
• Mash-ups and apps offer new opportunities
• Mobile is overtaking desktop in popularity – MUST develop for mobile, can’t be an afterthought

The first day opened with a keynote from Craig Newmark, founder of classifieds website Craigslist. Craig is, in his own words, a self-described nerd and social philanthropist. He sees his work as being largely about social inclusion, and using the web to bring a voice to those that don’t have one. Very lofty goals, I thought!

He described the background to Craigslist: inspired by the community spirit and altruism apparent in early online communities such as usenet groups, he wanted to find a way to facilitate this on a wider scale.He started a simple mailing list in 1995, notifying people of events and interesting things around San Francisco – the original “Craig’s List”. As it got bigger and grew into a brand, he eventually had to set up an actual business. He was advised at this point to monetize the list to get investors, but didn’t like the idea: didn’t fit with the ethos of the list. As a compromise, he started charging advertisers – with the rationale that they would normally pay much more elsewhere. The community-spirit ethos of the list remained as it was still free to use, you just had to pay if you wanted to promote a commercial service. Craig described his business model as “doing well by doing good”.

What I thought was very interesting about Craig’s approach to running what is not a very large business is his stated committment to customer service. He says that he makes a point of still involving himself in day-to-day customer service in order to keep in touch with what’s actually happening with the customers. He said, and I agree, that too many people at the top of their businesses have no more connection with the people using the service – he wanted to avoid this.

Craig went on to talk about how Craigslist has ended up acting as a connector between multiple non-profit groups, leading to the launch of craigconnects, a service specifically for facilitating those connections. He described the goal as getting everyone connected to the internet working towards what they see as the common good. A large problem with non-profits and charities is the “sea of goodwill”: lots of organisations want to help on similar issues, but they don’t talk to each other. Craig hopes that craigconnects will help to solve this problem.

Craig covered several other points in his keynote, including the lack of trust in traditional news outlets due to the decline in fact checking, which many news organisations have discarded as too expensive and time-consuming (not to mention axing their libraries/information units!). This struck me as a very important point for information professionals – if you can’t automatically trust what is printed in the newspapers, where do you go for reliable, unbiased information? I would think it is obvious that our profession has an important role to play here. He listed a few independent organisations who are involved in news fact-checking, as this is one of the issues that he hopes to tackle through craigconnects.

Craig also noted, in response to a question, the role that social media has to play in encouraging collaboration in the workplace. In a point that came up several more times throughout the conference, he argues that social media is vital in maintaining connections between ever-growing numbers of people, many of whom may be geographically dispersed and/or have little day-to-day contact with each other. Once an organisation gets over around 150 staff, people stop talking directly to each other. People at the bottom don’t talk to those at the top, messages are filtered through several layers of managers telling each other what they want to hear, so messages don’t get through. Social media allows you to cut through this, go directly to the people who need to know. I thought this was a really valuable point to make, and I was glad to see it repeated throughout the conference.

The afternoon was split between Michael Martin, talking about the Framework of Qualifications; Jane Walton giving the mentor’s perspective; and Jo Norry giving the assessor’s perspective. A previous chartership candidate also led a discussion on her experience of chartering.

Here’s the notes I jotted down, from what I felt were the most useful points made – apologies to all speakers but I didn’t actually record who said what!

What is your portfolio actually for?

• Gathering and presenting evidence
• To aid evaluation and reflection
• Also useful for appraisal/career change
• Demonstrate professional judgment
• Evaluation is more important than content

What should your portfolio contain?

• CV – this is your chance to add extra info that didn’t fit in your evaluative statement, e.g. voluntary work, courses attended, past employment, anything else that doesn’t fit under the assessment criteria but that you would like included
• PPDP – this should be different from the version you submitted at the start of the process, to show what progress has been made. Should also include an element of forward planning, i.e. what will you do next?
• Evaluative statement – you only get 1000 words for this, which is not much!
• Organisation structure chart and aims & objectives of your organisation – including these can allow you to save space in your evaluative statement, as you can spend fewer words on explaining your job
• Evidence of participation in mentor scheme – this can be a simple meeting log, or something more detailed

Types of evidence for portfolio:

• Certificates
• Staff reviews/evaluations
• Contributions to professional press
• Project briefs/reports/surveys
• Evidence of active membership of professional bodies
• Evidence of training you’ve delivered, e.g. evaluation forms, workbooks, etc
• Bibliography & list of visits made – both should be annotated. What did you get out of them?
• Evidence of work-based learning, e.g. responses to enquiries from clients/colleagues, testimonials
• Web pages – include screenshots as well as URL
• If including collaborative work, be clear about what you contributed

Writing your evaluative statement – how do you know if you’re evaluating?

• Not describing
• Measuring effectiveness
• Demonstrate how learning has been put into practice
• Asking questions and answering them! E.g. why did I do that? What did I learn? Did anything change? What would I do differently next time?

Most common reasons portfolios are rejected:

• Insufficient reflection
• Failure to evaluate the aims & objectives of your organisation
• Not relating issues to other sectors
• Not addressing how your CPD has affected your work, how you have applied learning

What went well

• Lots of people turned up – thanks to everyone that came! There’s a Twitter list of attendees (the ones that are on Twitter, at least!) – if you were there but you’re not on that list, just tweet @LIKENorth and we’ll add you
• Really good conversations – never felt stilted or like we were scrabbling around for stuff to talk about
• Got some great ideas for future events – and may have roped in a speaker or two!

What went, um, not so well…

• The sodding pub we were supposed to be at gave our room away, so we had to explore Leeds to find a new place to go! Luckily found a decent student-y bar nearby that had space, but still absolutely livid at the Victoria for messing up our booking (that we’d made weeks ago! Weeks!!!) Don’t think we’ll be going back there again!
• Although we’d tried to get out the message that we’d had to go somewhere other than advertised (sent email via Eventbrite, tweeted, texted those we had numbers for), inevitably there were people who didn’t see the message. Very, very sorry to anyone who couldn’t find us! Apparently the staff at the Victoria sent a few people on to the wrong place too, which didn’t help…
• All the confusion at the start of the evening meant that we never got around to doing proper introductions with everyone, sorting out name tags, etc. Still, that’s not necessarily a bad thing – I think we’d all bonded through adversity* by that point anyway, so maybe we didn’t really need all of that!

Next time…

• First of all, find a different location – one that actually honours room bookings**!
• Get to the venue much, much earlier, to make doubly sure that everything is ok and have time to organise a plan b if not! I was first at the pub but I didn’t get there until just after 6, with the event due to start at 6.30, so once I’d learned the room situation and argued a bit with the pub staff about how to fix it, people were starting to arrive. Had we learned of the problem even half an hour earlier we might have been able to let more people know sooner about the venue change, and the whole thing would have been less stressful!
• Not much else we should do differently, except that I think it would be good in future events to have some kind of structure for the evening. Our only plan last night was “get some people together in a pub, have a chat, come up with some ideas of what to do next” – and I think we succeeded admirably in that! For the future though, I think some proper CPD stuff with a speaker and a topic (even if only very informal) would probably be more valuable to people.

So, on to planning the next one now! We’re not sure yet when it’ll be, but hopefully it’ll be reasonably early in the New Year. Thank you to everyone who came along last night, and a massive thanks to my two co-organisers @libmichelle and @theatregrad!

*Adversity in this instance = desperately battling through wind and rain in search of a pub

**Am rather cross about this. Does it show?

I’ve written more about this on my other blog, but I thought I’d jot down a few transferable lessons learned here. ‘Cos I am all about the reflective practice: it’s just how I roll.

Lessons learned:

1. You have more free time than you think.

Part of what stopped me doing this in previous years was that I was convinced I just didn’t have the time. I mean, writing 50,000 words in a month? When would I fit that in?

This is actually a pretty easy one to get around. I spent October being super-organised, getting as much as I could crossed off my to-do list so I wouldn’t have to worry about it in November. I made sure writing was my top priority as soon as November rolled around. Evenings were set aside for writing, and nothing else (as far as possible). Anything that kept me from writing, I either did in my lunch break at work, or I asked myself: do I really need to do this? It’s amazing how many things I manage to fill my time with that weren’t actually that important.

I’d recommend everyone to do something like this, actually, whether it’s writing or something entirely different. What is it that you’d love to do, if only you had the time? How could you make time? Could you watch less TV, spend less time messing around on the internet, redistribute some of the tasks that fall under your responsibility (whether that be at home or at work)? Once I made myself really think about what I was spending my time on, and how I could rearrange that, I had a lot more time available than I’d ever thought. I’m certain I’m not the only one that’s fallen into this trap.

2. Peer support is invaluable

Planning a big challenge, that you’re not sure you’ll finish? Tell absolutely everyone. Knowing that if I did give up, I would still face questions from my sisters, co-workers and Twitter friends about how my novel was going, and have to admit that it wasn’t, was a large part of what stopped me giving up the first time I hit a difficult patch.

3. Not sure if you can do something? Try it!

This, for me, is the biggie. I’ve wanted to write for years, but this is the first substantial piece of creative writing I’ve done since I left school over a decade ago. Part of the reason I didn’t try for so long was simply that I was scared of failing. The fact that I never tried meant that I actually had no idea if I could do something like this or not. I didn’t know if it would be loads easier or loads harder than I was expecting, because I just didn’t know what to expect. It wasn’t until I threw myself in that I could even tell whether it was going to be possible to complete or not.

Soundbites along the lines of “the only way never to fail is never to try” and similar have been bandied about until they’ve become cliché. Nevertheless, I’ve found that I thoroughly agree with the sentiment. I haven’t written a good novel. I’ve written a terrible pile of derivative garbage, and I’m not sure if there’ll be anything left to salvage once I’ve been through it with a red pen. But, I have proven to myself that I can do this. I’ve made a ton of mistakes that I can learn from, and next time, I’ll do better.

So, those are my main non-writing-specific lessons from all of this. Pretty good lessons for life in general, I think