Recently in Collaboration Category

I've been spending some of my time here at University Libraries trying to figure out the best means for providing information on training material, training opportunities, and technical documentation, both Libraries-wide and University-wide, so that faculty and staff at University and the campuses will not have to search for it.

In this quest to find the best place, so many questions have come up.  Would it be better to use something the University is using like WikiSpaces?  Would it be better to use what University Libraries is using like our CMS?  Should I get a committee involved from the get-go?  Should I start something and then pull a group together?

I won't bore you with all the details, but I've been doing needs assessments to get input.  I've decided to do the beginnings of the site myself.  (Part of our Blogs and Wikis presentation is "Better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, form a committee, and have it killed by a thousand meetings...")  Then, I'll be presenting it to a larger committee for feedback and continue with my needs assessments.

Here's my rationale for this and any large project within an institution like Penn State:

Getting Started

If you work within a committee, especially a large enough one.  Or one with appointees placed there mainly for political reasons rather than functional ones, you are likely to have the project never to get started.

With the amount of meetings some of us have already, I have been on some projects where the project died simply because the committee was never able to find a meeting time yet insisted on meeting face to face.

Check out what Mark Linton has to say about sabotage and committees.

Getting Buy-In

If some projects die by committee some never get the chance to breed because they were conceived in a silo.  As much as I fear too many cooks in the pot, there is a danger in not involving anybody in a service that you want everybody to adopt. 

Why does a departmental unit create a redundant service?  Is it in answer to a feature not offered centrally?  Is it because information about these services not been made readily available?  Is it because they got tired of waiting for the central service's release that was held up by committee?  I wonder how many redundant services and redundant employee hours we could regain be doing more needs assessment with the people we serve.

I am, of course, speaking specifically of my project with centralizing training resources across University Libraries, but these questions could be applied throughout the University.  Is there a routine needs assessment for centralized services to see what features are needed, who is not using them, and why?

Do the needs assessment.  Take action.  Reassess periodically.

I spend a lot of time thinking about our departmental Intranets and what we should put in them versus what should go out on the public Internet lately.  Some of this has to do with my talks with Andrew Calvin, who is working on the Penn State University Libraries CMS Implementation team, as well as my own experiences transferring departments.  (I have noted in the past that some of our information choices are more cultural reactions than informed choices.)

Anyway, there are a number of things to consider before putting something on an Intranet:

1. Is there a chance you might want to present your work at a conference?

2. Could someone outside your department offer a potential solution or fresh, unbiased prospective to your problems?  (The IDD Exchange blog, put in place by Brad Kozlek back in the day, has always been out in public space, so when a departmental issue is presented, outsiders--including former employees--are free to offer their advice to internal problems.)

3. Could someone outside your department potentially benefit from the information you have discovered? (Even if your systems are internal to you, perhaps someone else int he University could learn from how you your systems are constructed in solving a similar problem in their department, or potential candidates could learn more about whether or not they are a right fit for your department.)

Obviously, you would not want information like passwords, financial data, student data, or other sensitive information out in the open, but before you assume that your internal documentation is "need to know" or only of interest to you and wall it off behind an departmental iron curtain, consider moving it to a public site.

Last week my twitter friends, @Robin2go and @bpanulla, and I had a conversation about deja vu and I (@NikkiMK06, follow me, if you want) alluded that perhaps it was the Matrix resetting itself.  Reading my RSS feeds, I stumble upon on of those "Matrix moments" courtesy of Bob Sutton and Penelope Trunk:

• Bob Sutton's post is a reaction to a New York Times piece about an experiment where doctors apologized for mistakes and actually found that claims in lawsuits dropped.  Bob Sutton has often talked about the virtues of admitting mistakes.  People needs to be free to admit they made them so they can take risks, analyze where they went wrong, and improve.
• Penelope Trunk's post was about the importance of self-knowledge. To do any real self assessment, Trunk argues that taking action is more important than taking correct action because overly-cautious people fail to act and bad decisions are good learning experiences.

I was at the Commission for Women's Second Annual Awards Luncheon today.

I co-chair the Wage Equity Ad-Hoc Issues Committee for the Commission for Women (CFW).  Our committee was charged with studying wage equity issues and looking into commission responses related to wage equity. One of the areas related to equity for on which I want to focus is information transparency.  (I won't go into to all the ways we'd like to go about doing this. If really you want to know, join CFW/the Wage Equity committee as an appointed or affiliate member.)

Before I talk about information transparency, let me state that my opinion is mine and mine alone (unless you share it, and I welcome you to reply with yours).  My words are in no way some official opinion of Penn State, CFW, Wage Equity, the Kauffman family, the Massaro family for that matter, or any other individual besides those that may exist in my head to rationalize what I say...

Now what was I saying? Ah yes, information transparency.

They say knowledge is power.  If that's true, how are you choosing to use it? Do you share power with every one in a virtual town hall or...