Collaborative Expedition Workshop #59, March 22, 2007, at NSF    (3H66)

Social Networking, Knowledge-Sharing and Organizational Change: Organizing Around Communities of Practice to Improve the Dialogue between Government and Citizens and the Delivery of Citizen-Centric Services    (3H67)

Draft Workshop Purpose    (3H68)

The President's Management Agenda (PMA) requires all federal agencies to transform the roles and relationships among people, processes, and technology in order to become a citizen-centered government. The PMA emphasizes bringing value and results to citizens, businesses, and government workers by "reducing the burden" and producing measurable improvement. The Federal Enterprise Architecture provides a blueprint for organizing lines of business around shared mission purpose.    (3H69)

  1. What are the potentials and realities for Networking among Intergovernmental Communities of Practice and Communities of Interest (CoPs/ CoIs)? What role(s) can these Communities play as Innovation Catalysts in a Services Economy?    (3H8F)
  2. How can conversations among CoPs/ CoIs “perturb” current understandings in ways that encourage the creation of new or different possibilities?    (3H8G)
  3. How can we establish new “norms” for collaborating together across institutional boundaries?    (3H8H)
  4. How can smarter “work-forms” such as CoPs/ CoIs help mature light-weight, innovative Web 2.0 technologies that offer significant transformational potential?    (3H8I)

Exploration of these questions will be framed by four contexts that will be presented at the conference:    (3H8J)

  1. Highlights of workshop related-outcomes and lessons learned over the past six years, and    (3H8K)
  2. Overview of the new economic paradigm of “intangible assets” that is rewriting the rules of business processes, including government. Based on the findings of Jonathan Low, the nature of corporate valuation is changing dramatically. Up to one-third of an organization’s value is now derived from “invisible” elements beyond the “bottom line” performance financials. These elements include innovative culture, leadership, strategy execution, and reputation. This paradigm has the potential to “reduce barriers to entry” and “level the playing field” by emphasizing advantage that is achieved and sustained primarily through an organization's ability to innovate.    (3H8L)
  3. Overview of the new social networking paradigm that recognizes multiplicative returns to institutions attuned to changing external conditions through trusted Cross-boundary CoPs and CoIs.    (3H8M)
  4. This workshop will demonstrate an organizing process that can be employed anytime a purpose cuts across organizational boundaries. This is timely for workshop participants who have come to appreciate that building trusted relationships is the essence of eGovernment. How people design the organizing process for potentially “collaborative” settings, existing beyond traditional boundaries, can spell the difference between “multiplicative power” and “no power” arising to achieve high performance results that matter to all.    (3H6A)

The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) is emerging as an important collaborative organizing process to promote the delivery of effective, efficient services. FEA Reference Models serve as catalysts for foresight and discernment around improved mission and business performance, including data and information-sharing. The Data Reference Model, along with the GeoSpatial Profile v1.1 will provide a concrete means for improving the capacity for mission-related sharing, across government boundaries, while also increasing the downstream value of strategic information assets.    (3I2E)

An emerging source of strength and stability in tranformational initiatives is the formation of Communities of Interest and/ or Communities of Practice. CoIs and CoPs seek to improve the common understanding needed to compose sound action in "deft formation" that yields congruence from multiple perspectives and an appreciation of the unfolding wholeness of situations. In this manner, CoIs and CoPs harmonize and amplify the creative influence of strategic leaders within institutions.    (3I2F)

CoIs and CoPs are a manifestation of the unity of purpose that transcends institutions and sectors, creating the conducive environment needed for the transformation of roles and relationships among people, processes, and technology to proceed. Appreciation of this "unfolding wholeness" (from Christopher Alexender, The Nature of Order) is a necessary condition for the evolution of agile governance and coordinated action in the "in-between space". Effective governance conditions "institutional boundaries" to respect "wholeness in relation to its parts" at every level, in order to accommodate the high-performance potential of net-centric approaches, i.e. Service-Oriented Architecture.    (3I2G)

As Communities of Practice form around priorities it is essential to gain experience in designing an organizing process to advance the human relationships that “power” the ultimate success of these endeavors. As Professor David D. Woods states, “In design, we either hobble or support people’s natural ability to express forms of expertise.” Reflections on what has been learned from the design of this workshop series over the past six years will influence how we design future forums. Individually and as a community, we’ll be better able to appreciate and tap strategic leadership from a wide variety of sources, including local, state and regional settings where quality dialogue yields the “line of sight” connection needed by all stakeholders to engage in joint action toward shared goals. We’ll be joined by individuals and members of Communities of Practice who have been practicing new ways of conducting high performance and distributed work over the past several years. In addition to learning from them, they’ll join us in sharing the goals we have been practicing:    (3H6C)

Draft Agenda    (3H6L)

8:30 a.m. - Welcome and Introduction SusanTurnbull, GSA, Co-chair, Emerging Technology Subcommittee, Architecture and Infrastructure Committee, CIOC and Co-chair, Social, Economic, and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development    (3H6M)

9:00 a.m. - Who is Here and Who is Missing? What is your Sense of Purpose in Relation to the Overall Workshop Goals?    (3H6N)

9:30 a.m. - Social Networking, Knowledge-Sharing, and Organizational Change GeorgeBrett, Manager Information and Knowledge Management, Internet 2    (3I2D)

10:00 a.m.- Understanding Collaboration Using Social Network Analysis, Diana Rhoten, Ph.D., Program Manager, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, NSF    (3H6O)

10:30 a.m. - BREAK    (3H6P)

10:45 a.m. - What are the Potentials and Realities for Open Dialogue that Advances Citizen-Centric Services?    (3H8N)

12:45 p.m. - Networking Lunch    (3H6X)

1:15 p.m.- What are the Strategic Priorities and Relationships that We Can Build Upon?    (3H6Y)

3:00 p.m. - Commitment to Action and Reflection: Will the Goals Achieve the Purpose?    (3H75)

4:30 p.m. - Adjourn    (3H7C)

Collaborative Expedition Workshop Series Background    (3H7D)

Purpose and Audience: The GSA Office of Intergovernmental Solutions leads monthly Collaborative Expedition workshops to advance the quality of citizen-government dialogue and collaborations at the crossroads of intergovernmental initiatives, Communities of Practice, Federal IT research and IT user agencies. The workshops seek to advance collaborative innovations in government and community services such as emergency preparedness, environmental monitoring, healthcare and law enforcement.    (3H7E)

The workshops serve individuals and policy-makers from government, business, and non-government organizations to practice an emerging societal form, Intergovernmental Communities of Practice (CoPs), in light of the Citizen-Centric Government goal of the President’s Management Agenda and the Public Information Access provisions of the E-government Act of 2002.    (3H7F)

Each workshop organizes participation around a common purpose, larger than any institution, including government. By learning how to appreciate multiple perspectives around potentials and realities of this larger “purpose”, subsequent actions by individuals representing many forms of expertise, can be better expressed in their home and collaborative settings. By centering around people and the "whole system" challenges they organize around, IT design and development processes can mature with less risk and greater national yield of breakthrough performance.    (3H7G)

Joint workshop sponsors in addition to GSA, include the Architecture and Infrastructure Committee and Best Practices Committee of the Federal CIO Council, and the National Coordination Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development, Social, Economic and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development Coordinating Group. These organizations value this “frontier outpost” to open up quality conversations, augmented by information technology, to leverage the collaborative capacity of united, but diverse sectors of society, seeking to discover, frame, and act on national potentials.    (3H7H)

Resources    (3H8P)