It 'aint what you do it's the way that you do it - Michael MacAuley

Migration, migration, migration! Eat, sleep, drink migration...

Guess what my days are filled with? Right now, every waking hour is filled with migration of communities to Knowledge Hub. Every day, every evening and most of every weekend is filled with planning it, talking about it or doing it. And then there's the ultimate measure, my partner is complaining loudly about it. Well to be fair it’s mostly facial expressions or looks but hey I know what they mean!

If you failed to get the message i.e. you've been away on a trip to the moon for the last 6mths, Communities of Practice has less than a month to go before it closes. We are migrating every night and weekends to move circa 1200 groups. We are coming up on 500 as we stand.

This has led to a very noticeable upswing in enquiries about how things are done now in groups. In particular facilitators looking for information on how to do what they did before in the same way as they did before. I have some bad news I'm afraid....you can't.

That's not to say you can't do what you did before but that you can't do it in the same way. This might seem like a loss of control over CoP and that’s because it is. Your senses are correct. Knowledge Hub is Social and that means the individual has the control. Knowledge Hub is a re-balancing of the structures and processes toward you as an individual. That means a lot less work for facilitators and a lot more options for users.

For example, one of the features in the next release (due the end of the month) is direct messaging (DM). This allows you to send a short message (500 characters) to any user and they are stored as conversations together (like Gmail) so you can see all interaction with a particular person in one place. Facilitators will also be able to DM their group members. So on one hand we have removed the ability for facilitators to download the email addresses of all group members which on CoP they generally used to contact members by email. In many cases this was to send newsletters or give important information about something in a community. This was problematic for a number of reasons. Many complained about receiving these emails, some complained about their personal information being available in this way and not being able to opt out. DM allows facilitator to contact all members without the need for downloading personal data locally. A simple, quick and easy way to provide access to a newsletter if required. The same objective, done differently.The really big difference between these two systems lies with the question of how you find information and share knowledge. Let me ask a question, how do you normally, in your everyday life, find out about things you didn't already know? So, not researching stuff you know is there already but things that you didn't know were there in the first place? A friend of mine once said his social network was his filter on the world. His eyes and ears to all the oceans of content that found things for him and told him about them. The power of the social network is that it knows you and what you are interested in. 90% of my new information comes from people I know telling me about stuff. It’s the classic signal/noise ratio issue.The power of Knowledge Hub is in your network. So not like CoP which used communities to provide access to information, in which case you generally had to be a member of the right group. Networks permeate groups and transcend them. It’s a paradigm shift and one not everyone will be comfortable with in the beginning. It’s less hierarchical and more democratic.

Speaking of democracy, we’ve decided to add a way to view library files grouped by folder.

Now where was I…..