I consider editing (and administrating) GCPEDIA a part of my job, and I always have.  If you read the wording of your job description, there’s probably some significant wiggle room for creative interpretation, provided that your primary product or goal continues to be produced or achieved on time.

For example, do your duties specify that you must:

• Work as part of a team that provides advice, recommendations, and information to project officers and middle and senior management.

Can you use GCPEDIA as a development platform to draft advice or recommendations?  Are you part of a working group that shares discussions, suggestions and findings?  Do you produce reports that could be of interest to public servants across the country if you published them on a wiki?  Could your division benefit from a GCPEDIA presence in order to share information about its purpose, and provide the answers to common questions?  Mention GCPEDIA in your Performance and Learning Agreement.

If you can’t justify it as a tool that helps you to accomplish a primary work objective, or a supporting technology that you need to fulfil performance expectations, add it as a required or developmental learning objective.  You’ve got support in high places.  The Clerk of the Privy Council has repeatedly spoken and written about the importance of GCPEDIA:

• In the Seventeenth Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada as a collaborative technology for enabling workplace renewal;
• In the 2010-11 Public Service Renewal Action Plan as an innovation allowing us to work with greater effectiveness and efficiency; and
• As a knowledge-base for capturing best practices and experiences so we can all learn from them.

“GCPEDIA and similar wikis are vital to the public service of today and tomorrow.”—Wayne G. Wouters

If it’s vital to the public service, it’s a vital component of your learning.  Add GCPEDIA to your Performance and Learning Agreement.  It isn’t taking time away from your work, it is your work.  It isn’t cutting into your value and productivity, it’s adding to it.  It’s an important component of the future public service, but it also provides increased  value to the Government—and ultimately, the taxpayer—here and now.

Let’s face it: few of us (if any) are completely consumed by our prescribed duties 100% of the time.  That said, the Government of Canada is paying for my time and my skills whether I am in the midst of high stress and high volume workload, or in a period of relative calm.  At minimum, donating my spare minutes to GCPEDIA gives the Government more value for their money.  I’m not playing solitaire, doing my banking, or making personal phone calls.  I’m working for Canadians and for my fellow public servants… and on those occasions that I am daydreaming, it’s about “How can I make this work even better for everyone affected?”

Which brings me to the last benefit of editing GCPEDIA: engagement—to purpose, and to people.  GCPEDIA keeps me productive, while allowing me enormous personal satisfaction, creativity, and choice.  “What can I fix today?  Who can I help?”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: GCPEDIA’s value includes but extends far beyond merely storing the knowledge of those employees that the Government has lost (or will lose). Its hidden value is in capturing and retaining the knowledge, involvement and interest of current and future employees.  In the inventory of qualities that make for an attractive workplace, money isn’t the highest consideration on the list.  In terms of long-term retention, ranking higher is the quality of the workplace, satisfaction with the work, and highest of all, satisfying relationships with co-workers—a perception of connectedness and belonging.

GCPEDIA.  People & Knowledge.  Gens & Savoir.  It’s all right there, under the logo.

Your PLA Homework:

Developmental learning (career path: 1 to 3 year outlook)
Objective:
(1.) To increase my knowledge of Web 2.0 and social media, and their emerging application to the Public Service Renewal initiative.
Learning Resources / Activities:
- Learn and use GCPEDIA, the Government of Canada’s Web 2.0 document collaboration platform.
- Learn and use GCconnex, the Government of Canada’s professional networking platform.
- Attend relevant workshops, Armchair Discussions, meetings, etc. whenever possible.

Back in September of last year, sometime after I was already entirely swept up by obsessive compulsive wikignoming—grafting and pruning the site in a way I hoped would make it prosper—it occurred to me that a similar role should exist to help users grow and prosper.  I created the Peer helper category on GCPEDIA, made a shiny new badge for myself and pinned it to my homepage, then did almost nothing to promote it, short of maintaining a high-visibility presence in the recent changes log, and jumping in to help whenever I saw someone in need.

I have this tendency to do a lot behind the scenes, but say little about it.  This probably explains why I was made an administrator on GCPEDIA, but also why no one from Communications has called to ask if I’d be willing to leave my job as a policy analyst and come work for them.

If you need another example, a colleague of mine recently expressed surprise that accounts for @GCPEDIA and @GCconnex exist on Twitter.  I wasn’t surprised.  I started them, and still manage them.  Other than a couple of (arguably self-serving) #FollowFriday announcements, I haven’t done a lot to promote these either.

In my own defence I can only say that the accounts are highly unofficial.  I took the initiative to reserve them because I felt they would (and should) eventually have future official use by the Government of Canada. For now, I use them to transmit information on service outages and new content, although they were also allegedly responsible for rickrolling nearly 60 of you this April Fool’s Day.  Unofficially.  But I digress…

Recently, I attended a meeting where it was announced that, at present, about 100 new users create accounts on GCPEDIA each day.  I’m pleased with this growth, but also greatly concerned about retention.  Ultimately, active usership is more significant and meaningful than total users and volume of new signups.  Who’s caring for these people?  Technical support is critical, and as far as I know, the project has experienced a recent staffing shortage.  How many users will GCPEDIA lose in short order if recent signups can’t find dependable, accessible, timely assistance with their problems?  What percentage of our collective intellectual assets are failing to be captured by the wiki because fear or lack of knowledge about editing content outweighs the desire to share?

I’ve been a wiki administrator since 2005, and a user for far longer, but I think many of us assume a comfort and ease of use of wikis, and a common knowledge of wikimarkup that doesn’t exist.

Not long ago I provided group instruction for about 40 people.  It was productive, but I had difficulty meeting the combined needs of the participants at both the speed and the technical level that they individually demanded.  Some were ready to dive into complex design and formatting, while the majority were extremely anxious about attempting even basic text entry.  The more experienced group was bothered by the interruptions to discuss fundamentals, while the less experienced users became overwhelmed by complex discussions.

This was the Government of Canada in microcosm—a shared desire to contribute professional knowledge, but a greatly variable level of technical knowledge.

This doesn’t need to exist as a barrier, nor do staffing and funding levels need to remain a critical determinant of our ability to retain users and capture their ideas.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that Jesse Good, Suesan Danesh, Amy Thorne, and Paula Ibbotson have joined me to assist users who need individualized support to help them achieve their personal or group goals on GCPEDIA.  I will continue to remain available as well, to the greatest degree that I am able, to provide training and support to groups or individuals in person, by phone, and over the wiki.

I’ll conclude with an excerpt from my blog on GCconnex, posted last September.  It’s written in the first person, but consider it an invitation to contact any one of us:

If you’d like to get your knowledge up on GCPEDIA but are unsure about the markup and layout, please contact me. If you’ve got a good start going, but things are becoming tangled and complex, or you need to add something new, just write or call.

I’m more than happy to help you to whatever degree you’d like, from a bit of coaching to taking a lead in structure, design and coding.   I can teach you the markup, show you by example by formatting and arranging the data as you need it, or even edit it with you live and in tandem during a phone call.

Don’t feel like you need to be an expert to get started on GCPEDIA.   This is, above all else, a collaborative tool.  Those with content but no software knowledge can help and be helped by users with the technical knowledge but no new content to share.

So… let’s get started helping each other.

“Facebook has devolved from a social networking platform to an operating system for third-party applications.”

I cringe at the mention of it.

It’s more contemptible than “free”, with all that’s been done to make that word utterly meaningless—if not borderline fraudulent—mostly from the lips and keyboards of marketers.

It’s more despicable than “f*ck”, which despite its inappropriateness in polite company is at least both honest and passionate.

Facebook is neither. Even the most casual media consumer must realize by now that it’s a privacy nightmare.  At least that’s my hope.  Perhaps my fear?  I think therein lies the fulcrum, pivotal to my annoyance with this company and its user base.  Are people oblivious of the risks involved, or simply comfortable with them?  Neither side of that seesaw is particularly enjoyable for me.

While I have no right to tell you how to govern your own personal information, I’m going to butt in anyway.

You should honestly re-evaluate whether Facebook has any value in your home life, and more importantly, in your workplace.  Governments and public servants in particular, should quit lusting after it.  I work for the Government of Canada, and my near-breaking point for writing this post came yesterday: sitting in the most recent of what has been a large number of discussions, focus groups and conferences where the absence of Facebook access to government employees was bemoaned.  The absolute breaking point?  Another complaint this morning broadcast on of all places, the government’s own professional networking platform: GCconnex.

There’s probably nothing I could write that could make you completely withdraw from Facebook, particularly if you’re one of those Mafia Wars or Farmville junkies.  It shouldn’t need to be said, but the proliferation of games and useless applications makes it a near certainty that Facebook will never we welcomed across the Government of Canada.

But if you won’t quit or cut back, in the very least, audit your own account.  Closely examine all your profile information.  Consider the data and content you share, and consider whether some of it is unnecessary or inappropriate to be viewed or otherwise electronically accessed by casual acquaintances, strangers, companies and applications.  Separate your contacts into groups, and customize privacy levels for each.

My withdrawal from Facebook has been gradual.  Back when it was still just a meeting place for university students, I began with the premise that I wouldn’t post anything that I wouldn’t risk having made public, whether by deliberate hack or casual redistribution between my contacts and theirs.  At the time, my criteria for making that distinction were probably more generous than they should have been.

Later, I rejected the third-party applications that demanded unlimited access to my personal information, regardless of whether or not this information was necessary to make their software run (it never was).  Then I began tightly managing access to different types of content  to my different groups of friends.Separate friends into groups, and customize privacy levels for each.

When Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada, began working directly with Facebook I held out legitimate hope that there would be improvements to protect the privacy of users of all technical prowess.  But then Facebook’s improvements introduced a host of new complications:

OTTAWA, Jan 27, 2010 (Reuters) – Canada’s privacy czar, who got Facebook to agree last year to better protect users’ personal information, will launch a new investigation over complaints that the changes sometimes make things worse.

It had become apparent that the company was no more sensible and trustworthy than the third-party developers that I had shunned long before.  Gradually I began deleting anything which I didn’t see an immediate need to share anymore.

Today my profile is mostly empty.  Outside: a name, a city, a network.  Inside: an email address.  About the same amount of information I share on Twitter.

Am I over-reacting?  It’s your call.   Read some of the recent press.  What I find most disturbing is how they treat long-standing privacy issues like brand new developments:

• Privacy chiefs keep watch over Facebook
• Facebook: Privacy Enemy Number One?
• Facebook users lose privacy to developers when they add new applications
• Facebook Flub Leaks Private E-mail Addresses
• Secret Facebook app installs and other privacy snafus
• Facebook’s privacy changes: When will it go too far (and will you even notice)?
• European privacy battle looms for Facebook, Google
• Facebook to Add Location Info to Updates
• Facebook Messaging Glitch Raises Fresh Privacy Concerns
• Facebook Denies ‘All Wrongdoing’ in ‘Beacon’ Data Breach
• Canada investigates Facebook again over privacy

But if Mafia Wars and Farmville is really what you want most—and as I’ve said before, Facebook has devolved from a social networking platform to an operating system for third-party applications—just open a dummy account for that purpose alone.  Share nothing; play freely.

Additional Reading:

• Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

In my last GCconnex update about the recent user survey, I encouraged everyone to contribute their opinions about the look, feel, and usability of the Government of Canada’s internal professional networking platform via the GCconnex Professional Network Pilot Working Group forum.  I’m pleased to say that changes have already been rolled out, with more in progress.

Paul Jackson said:
“I just noticed that there are colour contrast issues with the layout and design. We should be achieving at least 4.5:1 colour contrast ratio (between foreground text and background colours) to avoid excluding people with poor vision.”

…and in less than a week, a new theme with sharp text and high contrast was rolled out.  User response on The Wire was immediate and overwhelmingly positive.  On the very high end of praise was Kurt Conroy who gushed (tongue firmly in cheek), “OMG I LOVE GC-CONNEX I THINK I’M GOING TO DELETE MY FACEBOOK ACCOUNT B/C THIS ROX.”

I concur.

Thom Kearney reports that the number of widgets in the default profile page has been reduced, ostensibly to minimize the complexity of the user interface as new widgets are being added.  According to Charles de Grasse, GCPEDIA’s “technical lead infrustructure go-to guy”, the new widgets may not be bilingual. This is temporary.  (For the technically curious, the developer log of installed modules and other GCconnex changes is here.)

Some new users continue to express a bit of system shock upon signing in, while others find the system more intuitive than Facebook.  Should you find yourself in the first group, it’s safe to say that there is more than enough community support to help anyone in need.  I’m available by email or by phone to help you any way I can.  Just drop me a line.   My contact information is on my profile pages at GCconnex and on GCPEDIA.  Additionally, help files exist at both sites.

If you’ve ever doubted that feedback can lead to tangible and timely response, the progress at GCconnex is heartening.  Login or sign up today, and for some guidance on how you can help make the platform better, check out Thom Kearney’s recent blog entry about how to report bugs and make feature requests.

Recently, GCconnex (the Government of Canada’s professional networking platform) conducted a 14 day survey (October 20 to November 2, 2009) to gather user impressions. Now, Thom Kearney has posted the results of the 253 completed responses, along with an invitation for users to share their thoughts on the GCconnex Professional Network Pilot Working Group forum.  If you have an opinion about the look and feel or usability of GCconnex, the ELGG software it runs on, or the findings of the survey itself, I strongly encourage you to join the group.

If you’ve yet to register with GCconnex, the best way to form an initial impression to share with your fellow public servants is to sign up immediately.  Alternately, if you were an early adopter who hasn’t dropped by for a look recently, you might want to check out the current state of the platform.  As George Wenzel reported on The Wire recently: “Haven’t logged into GCConnex in a while – wow, things sure have changed!” 

The November 10, 2009 meeting minutes of the Government of Canada professional networking pilot group posted on GCPEDIA indicate that CIOB will keep running GCconnex as-is at least until end of the current fiscal year, but that “CIOB will not fund next year at [the] current level”.

Your feedback and participation in GCconnex is vital.  And, if you need a hand moving in, call me.

UPDATE:  Thom Kearney has released additional details on his GCconnex blog.

In March of 2009 David Eaves suggested that GCPEDIA will save the public service .  As a public servant and a GCPEDIA administrator, I’d like to believe he’s right.  His main argument was that GCPEDIA has the potential to become the repository of much knowledge that will be lost (or at least not conveniently accessible) once the baby boomer generation retires.

Has this been happening in the time since his article was originally published?  While I can’t claim to be familiar with every article produced on the wiki in the last 7 months, I’d have to say: not obviously. I’ve watched with interest as Mitch Bloom has been toiling away at “Things you wish you knew as a new public servant‎” but I haven’t noticed other similar examples (note: GCPEDIA is only accessible from the Government of Canada computer network).

Whether or not you agree that there is value in capturing past and present ways of doing for posterity (and given some of the reader comments to Mr Eaves’ article, it’s a contentious issue) I still believe that GCPEDIA will save the public service.

GCPEDIA is as valuable for what it is as it is for what it represents.  As a public service renewal initiative, it functions as a collaboration tool that can aid government employees in their work across federal departments and provincial boundaries.  And as a public service renewal initiative it proves tangibly that the Government of Canada sees value in Web X.x technologies by providing these tools to public servants nationwide — tools like GCPEDIA, GCForums, and GCconnex.

As a relatively new addition to the public service, I can honestly say that until recently I had serious doubt about the government’s ability to move into the 21st century.  I never doubted there was interest in doing so, or a belief in the necessity, but as far as actually achieving this… well, the mantra I heard recited by many senior employees was a reminder of the glacial speed of government.  From my own early experiences, I was inclined to agree.  I arrived in 2007, and was promptly delivered a computer running Microsoft Windows 2000, Office 2002, and Internet Explorer 6.  Not exactly the recency that I was accustomed to from my experience in the private sector…

Don’t misunderstand, I love the public service, but nothing really excited me about it until GCPEDIA.  I blogged about this excitement recently on GCconnex, along with my own pledge to try to help Mr. Eaves’ prophecy come true:

I returned to the public service in mid-August 2009 after 9 months parental leave and was amazed to discover GCPEDIA and GCconnex, which seemed to have been getting underway just as I was planning my escape vector to Babyland.

I say “amazed” because before I left I’d had some heavy discussions with Pierre-Luc Pilon (and others) at the October 16 and 17 2008 YMAGIN UnConference about how great these types of tools would be for the GoC.  I never dreamed they would actually materialize, let alone afford me an opportunity to be personally involved. So fresh back in my chair at HRSDC, and with ~4 years of MediaWiki administrator experience, I applied for and was accepted as a sysop on GCPEDIA.  I’m thrilled to be able to put my experience to work at work, and I’m eager to donate my spare work cycles to assisting your project or group.

If you’d like to get your knowledge up on GCPEDIA but are unsure about the markup and layout, please contact me. If you’ve got a good start going, but things are becoming tangled and complex, or you need to add something new, just write or call.  I’m more than happy to help you to whatever degree you’d like, from a bit of coaching to taking a lead in structure, design and coding.   I can teach you the markup, show you by example by formatting and arranging the data as you need it, or even edit it with you live and in tandem during a phone call.

Don’t feel like you need to be an expert to get started on GCPEDIA.   This is, above all else, a collaborative tool.  Those with content but no software knowledge can help and be helped by users with the technical knowledge but no new content to share.

So… let’s get started helping each other.

I can’t imagine I’m the only one who feels this way.

I believe that GCPEDIA will save the public service not merely by storing the knowledge of those employees that it has lost, but by capturing and retaining the knowledge, involvement and interest of current and future employees.  If you’ve done any investigation into the qualities that make for an attractive workplace, you’ll know that money isn’t the highest consideration on the list.  In terms of long term retention, ranking higher is the quality of the workplace, satisfaction with the work, and highest of all, satisfying relationships with co-workers — a perception of connectedness and belonging.

This is the difference that GCPEDIA brings, that differentiates it from just another GoC software rollout.  We talk endlessly about silos.  Now, finally something that allows me to meet, learn from and collaborate with colleagues across Canada.  This platform is vital to members of Generation X, Generation Y and the upcoming Generation Z who will come to here to discover a government that embraces forward thinking and transformation — a government that finally offers the allure that has lured away so many others to the private sector.

I’m filled with much hope about what’s to come in the next five years, but for long term prosperity into the coming decades, tools like GCPEDIA and GCconnex must represent only the current iteration of a progression towards an ideal.  Nothing we build today is capable of sustaining the future indefinitely.  In five years, what GCPEDIA has become and what it must change into should already be obvious to employees at every level.  If we can maintain, or even increase the momentum we’ve created today, we’ll already have prepared to make the turn ahead, even if the ship itself can never steer as nimbly as we wish.