efios     Efios home Weblog     The efios blog: "It's all about people and networks"       21 May 2003 Communities of practice in the e-government model Thanks to Margaret Rudolf from the Treasury of Canada for starting this open discussion - In an open group session at CP Week we have been talking about organization readiness within the e-government and the people side of the communities that form part of that. The discussion fell out in two conversations: the first one was about the federated government which has a lot in common with corporate organizations dealing with metanational issues. Though not leading to anything conclusive, the BP model for dual citizenship ignited further thinking in this area (which will be continued as an exploration in CP Square). The other issue came along when talking about control and power in the organization. I reflected to her that whereas in corporate organizations moving to the network-enabled structure the leadership is quite constant, this may not be the case in the (political) government organization. The consideration: when moving to a network-enabled or dynamic organization, the role of the middle management is shifting from gatekeepers to a leadership role that needs to guide the communities and act as a beacon for information and network structure and flows. This role, as identified in many communities that already exist, is very important. In the case of the government however exactly these positions are the ones that are most sensitive to political change (elections!) - which could potentially mean that the leaders of the community are actually being put in a very vunerable or maybe even instable situation. The community members or the bottom line of the community, is not so much sensitive to this change. That could mean that they actually have more control over the leadership functions than in the corporate situation, because the networked leader will be emerged in a community with a legacy which would be difficult to influence or even change. That possibility leads to the thought that the shift to the dynamic organization is actually going to shift power to the bottom line and community members, less affected by political change.An interesting thought that I'd love to further explore with the group. This happened at 10:48:57 PM  Ideas and comments to this [] or trackback [] Hyperdocument from Doug Engelbart Yesterday I had a compelling follow up discussion with Doug Engelbart - from the Bootstrap alliance - about his hyperdocument theory and the fact that pieces information can become networks itself. The concept is very old (1950's)and has been discussed by others as well, but understanding the potential is a true eye-opener. Once the slides have been emailed around they can be posted here in the blog. Interesting of couse is the opportunity to have information turn into contextual knowledge by seeing how information was created and in which ecosystem of considerations and other information snippets. For instance, you'd not be able to see what someone opinionates with information in a conflict situation, but also understand what construed this information that lead to the conflict. There are many more discussion items that we did not have time to, but he invited me to continue talking next week Friday in his office. Some issues to address - what can the hyperdocument (i-file) model contribute to the changing way of driving disruptive or even radical innovation? This happened at 10:32:51 PM  Ideas and comments to this [] or trackback [] © Copyright 2005 Erik van Bekkum. 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