e-Catalunya: boosting eGov innovation by Communities of Practice

Acronym of the case:

eCatalunya

Web address of the case:

http://ecatalunya.gencat.cat

Country of the case:

Spain

City/region:

Catalonia

Posting Date:

2 October 2009

Last Edited Date:

02 October 2009

Author:

Marta Continente (Generalitat de Catalunya - Directorate General for Citizen Attention)

Communities of practice (CoP) | eGovernment Change Management | eGovernment Knowledge Management

Type of initiative

Project or service
Network
Strategic initiative

Case Abstract

The e-Catalunya project is an initiative of the Regional Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya intended to boost and secure a severe internal change management needed to develop and implement a new citizen-care-centric model of eGovernment.

The identified need to attract and mobilize all relevant stakeholders (internal but also external to the Regional Government) faced the natural barriers of resistance and initial lack of understanding but also the most important aspects of how to get their sustained involvement and active contributions.

The early ideas (Etienne Wenger, 1990's) on knowledge management and Communities of Practice (CoP) have been recently enhanced by the consolidation of new Internet technologies like Web 2.0 and the use of social networks.

The coined concept of CoP as "groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly" was seen as an opportunity to make all relevant stakeholders working and sharing together the process of innovating eGovernment services. The integration of social network platforms and Web 2.0 technologies into a single operational platform was also seen as a challenged option to enable connections among people across formal structures, thus overcoming substantial organizational issues.

As a consequence the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya decided to promote the e-Catalunya project, a methodological process and an operational platform based in mixing the theory and implementation of Communities of Practice with the most advanced and commonly used technologies in Internet's social networks.

The experience gathered during the three years of real operation is of an impressive success, showing the generation of many positive outcomes. The success is mostly motivated by the opportunity of having been able to think, work, learn and execute together on how to develop and implement a new vision of eGovernment, and has resulted into the compilation of very specific knowledge (left accessible under open Creative Commons licences scheme).

The original vision of providing an inclusive platform for knowledge interchange and community growth has resulted in the involvement of civil servants, but also of professionals and citizens. This is supported by the existence of already 1.100 CoP composed of a total of 15.000 members, getting access to 53 web portals in which the e-Catalunya platform has been implemented.

The transfer into operations of the knowledge generated by the join effort of these CoPs have already resulted in achieving significant savings by efficiency improvement. It has been estimated that some services were optimized by reducing their execution time up to a 15-20%).

The experience in facing the complexity of mobilizing a wide organization by the innovative use of CoP is now accessible to other European instances.

The use of this model of collaborative work has demonstrated that affect positively the efficiency of the organization, mainly, in four areas: data traffic reduction in the communications network, trip savings due to reduction of needs for face to face meetings (25-50 % less), reduction of time duration of project's definition phases due to the application of more standardized solutions (40-60 % less time) and cost savings in learning processes (50-100 % training cost reduction).

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

Sector

Start date - End date

September 2004 (Ongoing)

Date operational

April 2006

Target Users

Target Users Description

The case provides a thorough approach based on the experience and methodology of the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya to articulate the creation of knowledge creation and treatment based upon a sustained interaction among CoPs.

The target group is composed of all stakeholder and intervenient forming part of any Public Administration (this is typically civil servants and employees). However, this Communities of Practice are composed of a wider type of participants, as collaborators, professionals, personnel from other Public Administrations (at the local or national level), groups of experts and citizens, all linked under a very specific and shared domain of interest, where they are practitioners.

It should be noted that participating in a specific Community of Practice implies a commitment to its domain, which is always specific, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. Members of a Community of Practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, documentation, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems in short and shared practice.

The main target group was composed of all relevant stakeholders from the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya needed to develop and implement the new vision of eGovernment, irrespectively of their position and responsibilities in the formal organizational structure, broaden by the involvement of a significant number of collaborators, providers and also citizens. But this was not limited to the sole purpose of internal use, and the e-Catalunya platform has been made available to a number of other Communities of Practice, those linked with strategic on non-profit dimensions.

A typical example of a Community of Practice, coming from the experience of the e-Catalunya project, is mediation. Mediation is a form of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) or "appropriate dispute resolution", aims to assist two (or more) disputants in reaching an agreement. The parties themselves determine the conditions of any settlements reached- rather than accepting something imposed by a third party. Mediators use appropriate techniques and/or skills to open and/or improve dialogue between disputants, aiming to help the parties reach an agreement (with concrete effects) on the disputed matter. Normally, all parties must view the mediator as impartial.

The use of Communities of Practice in mediation processes allows for having the widest possible intervention of all needed responsible intervenient. This has been offered and used in the case of e-Catalunya to face gender violence, education, family, neighbourhood or elderly issues as well.

Scope

Local (city or municipality) | National | Regional (sub-national)

Status

Operation

Language(s)

English | Spanish

Other

Catalan

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The e-Catalunya project is an accompanying measure intrinsically linked to the evolvement of a new vision of eGovernment services. The case is focused on how to provide guidance, support and contribution to design, develop and implement a new policy paradigm where value is defined by the users and citizens. Knowledge in this new scenario has to be generated collectively, under a collaborative environment, and the technology to implement innovative public services will have to follow the advice and conclusions gathered by a wide number of Communities of Practice.

In this sense, the application of Web 2.0 concept is of paramount importance, and was seen from the very beginning as the base to create enabling social networks. Its focused application is characterized by deepening user's participation and interactions, thus directly aligned with the key aim of gathering and generating shared and common knowledge by the support of collaborative work and learning processes.

The Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya developed by year 2004 a strategic approach to innovate eGovernment services, where a change of paradigm resulted in the need to recognize the key importance of collective ideas as the root to promote better public services. That implied an explicit acknowledgement of the value of the implicitly existing knowledge to generate additional efficiency.

The impulse to create operational Communities of Practice was seen as a way to create knowledge and new learning processes, inducing also specific proposals on how to exploit it. It was also recognized the existence of this "implicit knowledge", normally hold in a non structured and not documented way (no paper, no digital record or support) by the civil servants, related professionals and even by the citizens themselves.

This knowledge was also identified as highly fragmented and non exhaustive, thus lacking rigour and completeness to be able to be transferred into design or operational processes of new services. The adoption of a specific platform supporting the creation of numerous Communities of Practice allowed facilitating a proper gathering, treatment and storage of this implicit knowledge, complemented by the dynamics of tight interaction among the involved stakeholders.

The main strategy was based in structuring and securing the generation of explicit knowledge, alleviating the impact of retirement or job rotation. Sharing knowledge and experience helps getting a better ROI in training and human resources, at the same time that improves decision-making processes by involving all related levels in the organisation.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Participation

Overall Implementation approach

Partnerships between administration and/or private sector and/or non-profit sector

Technology choice

Standards-based technology | Mainly (or only) open standards | Accessibility-compliant (minimum WAI AA) | Open source software

Funding source

Public funding regional

Project size

Implementation: €300-499,000

Yearly cost:

€49-299,000

Implementation and Management Approach

The e-Catalunya project has been implemented and managed based upon a number of well defined components:

Communities of Practice (CoP)
Community Managers, responsible for catalyzing each CoP
Sustained training and competence growth support to all community managers and members of each CoP
CoP evolution model, each CoP evolves through a sequence of maturity process
Online interaction, supported by reliable technology
Open dissemination policy, based upon the use of cloud computing applications
Metrics methodology, to evaluate activity, production and impact of each CoP
Reactive accompanying measures: organisational support, best practices conferences, leader's visibility
Proactive accompanying measures: advice on strategic alignment, incentives to participants, involvement of external experts

Each CoP is fully empowered, being directly administrated by their members themselves, without any interference from the e-Catalunya staff, who acts as facilitators.

The development carried out by the technical team of the Generalitat de Catalunya is supported by the involvement of the Polytechnical University of Catalunya.

The overall project is governed by a yearly roadmap intended to secure the production of at least 3 to 4 new versions of the platform every year. Those versions reflect all improvements and new functionalities having been identified by members of all the CoPs and also from an internal analysis carried out by the management team.

A key strategic dimension of the e-Catalunya is the sustained pace of the development of new Communities of Practice, which has resulted in a total of 1.100 CoPs in three years of project exploitation.

The frequent celebration of events and seminars is complemented by "get to know" events intended to cross experience and knowledge by facilitating networking among all responsible CoP's administrators and other interested stakeholders. These events are used to better frame the "technological flavour" of the project pointing out the very specific and more interesting dimension of its strategic role and impact in innovation and sharing of knowledge and joint experience.

When a new expression of interest for a new CoP is obtained from an area or department of the Regional Government, specific hands-on meetings are immediately organized to better identify the intended objectives and requirements.

The e-Catalunya project has developed an open virtual space in Internet (quÃ¨Cat) where documentation about the project and about the platform (blogs, RSS news, calendar, discussion forums) are available.

Technology solution

The e-Catalunya project is supported by a technological platform allowing for a secure, WAI AA-compliant and 24x7 online operation of all CoP, thus giving access to all needed functionalities to support online collaboration and members participation.

The e-Catalunya platform is a shared service platform, part of the corporate technological infrastructure of the Generalitat de Catalunya. The platform was designed in order to facilitate the easiest way to build instances for new CoP without having to incur in further developments, software licenses acquisition or changes in installations. CoPs benefits instantly of any new platform versions provided by the project, without having to devote any specific attention for platform developments or adaptations..

The technical platform is the results of integrating a combination of a broad number of open source software tools together with some ad-hoc specific developments, supported by open software architectures. Simplicity of use and security were taken as the key development principles. The overall advice and development support for this innovative platform was provided by the Polytechnical University of Catalunya.

The platform is running on the corporate data centre of the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya, fulfils all mandatory privacy and data protection dimensions and it is composed of the following components:

Management Tools

File storage space, organized in hierarchical folders
Distribution lists
Photo albums
RSS and alarms

Collaborative Tools

Blogs
Forums
Social networks and knowledge networks maps (providing a visual representation of relational networks and domain involvements
Participative processes (questionnaires, polls, and its related exploitation tools)
Tag clouds
Wikis

The basic infrastructure is supported by Linux OS, running on Apache web servers, Tomcat application servers, and using MySQL as database engine and OpenLDAP to secure authentication processes.

The portals are supported by the exoPlatform software platform, supported by JOSSO (Java Open Single Sign-On) an open source J2EE and Spring-based SSO infrastructure aimed to provide a solution for centralized, platform neutral, user authentication and authorization.

Collaborative tools for Forum are based upon phpBB software, toolbar text editing bar is based on FCKeditor, whilst distribution lists are supported by Sympa software, being the e-Catalunya searching engine based on Apache Lucene. The rest of software for Wikis, Weblogs Calendar, File Storage Space Management and Photo Albums was specifically developed and integrated for the project by the Polytechnical University of Catalunya.

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Showing 3 comments

Sandra Lotti

About communities of practice

14 October 2009 | 4676 Visits | Rating: 3 (maximum:5)

I'd be interested to know more about the strucutre you havedevised to have the communities working. We have started a similar process in emilia-romagna last year and are very enthusiastic . COuld be get in touch?

Emilio Castrillejo

epractice experience

15 October 2009 | 0 Visit | Rating: No votes

epractice organizes every while a workshop devoted to communities, especially oriented to facilitators or any other professionals involved in comunity building

Please have a look at http://epractice.eu/en/workshop/communities

There will be more workshops like this to come, I hope you will join