U.S. General Services Administration

Leveraging Openness for Agile Performance: Collaborative Work Environments (Wikis) for Networked Improvement Communities

Susan Turnbull, GSA, Senior Program Advisor, Office of Intergovernmental Solutions, Office of Citizen Services and

Communications, Co-chair, Emerging Technology Subcommittee and Co-chair, Social Economic and Workforce Implications of IT and IT

Development, Subcommittee on Networking and IT R&D

U.S. General Services Administration

How Can We Overcome Unstable Conventions of Meaning that Thwart Information Sharing?

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Self-organizing for Information Sharing in the first hours after the Tsunami – blog, wiki, flickr

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U.S. General Services Administration

How can we Create Conducive Conditions to be Informed (not Overwhelmed) by the Combined Complexity of our Multiple Forms of Expertise?

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Vasa – 1628

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices

• Organize around common purpose, larger than any institution, to appreciate potentials and realities

• Improve quality of dialogue and collaborative prototyping at intergovernmental crossroads

• Participants, representing many forms of expertise, return to their settings with a larger perspective of the “whole”

– De Tocqueville “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions form associations. …In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends on the progress it has made.”

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices

• Create conducive conditions for “Breakthrough” Innovations

– Authoritative Communities of Interest/ Practice around Common Business Lines

– Agile Framework for Building Intergovernmental Services

– Emergence of Open Standards, Semantic Technology

• “In design, we either hobble or support people’s natural ability to express forms of expertise.” Prof. David D. Woods

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices

• Collaborative Expedition Workshops and Collaborative Work Environment Sponsors:

– GSA's Office of Intergovernmental Solutions.

– Architecture and Infrastructure and Best Practices Committees of the Federal CIO Council.

– National Coordination Office of the Subcommittee on Networking and Information Technology R & D (NITRD) and Social, Economic and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development (SEW) Coordinating Group, NITRD

• http://www.gsa.gov/collaborate

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices

• How can multiple Communities of Practice discover and organize around common mission needs to build shared understanding?

• How can shared understanding around several select, urgent cross-boundary scenarios be accelerated?

• What is the role of collaborative prototyping around emerging technology potential, in light of the Federal Enterprise Architecture's Reference Models?

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices

Key Findings:

• FY03 - Agile business components in innovative settings not easily discovered by e-government managers, resulting in lost or delayed opportunities for all parties.

• FY04 - Growing Opportunity to apply Emerging Technologies (web services, grid computing, and semantic web) to tune up Innovation Pipeline with better linkages.

• FY05 - Collaborative Work Environment expands effective networking across intergovernmental communities and complements monthly Collaborative Expedition Workshops; validated efficacy with Data Reference Model Working Group

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices

• Value:“Frontier Outpost" to open up quality conversations,

augmented by information technology, to leverage collaborative capacity of united, but diverse sectors of society, seeking to discover, frame, and act on national potentials.

• Results: Multiplicative Returns – in 10 months– 11 Expedition workshops, 1006 participants– 11 Communities of Practice, 805 participants– Data Reference Model WG: 30 agencies represented,

125 participants, DRM v2.0 issued by OMB in Dec. 2005

• Alignment: Networking among Communities of Practice

– Planning upcoming workshops together– Building common understanding of fundamental

concepts needed for communities representing diverse forms of expertise, to work together to leverage toward improved public service delivery at lower cost.

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