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Dear Collaboration Colleagues,

July came and went with our editorial staff on holiday, so for those with an eye on calendar integrity – yes, we skipped a month. But we’re back with the introduction of a new feature called “Collaboration in Action.” Here we feature mini case studies that take us out of the theoretical and into sharing experience first hand. This month you’ll read about how two of Canada’s leading health organizations went about selecting a collaboration platform for public engagement.

The International Association of Facilitators has two exciting events on the horizon. The European Conference takes place in October in Edinburgh. The North America Conference is scheduled for April 2008 in Atlanta. Read more about them and consider taking the opportunity to submit a speaker proposal.

And as always, we ask you to participate in our community of interest by engaging in online discussion in our Situation Room. This month we pose the question:“How do you survive your worst meeting nightmares?” Don’t let the summer blahs keep you from being an engaged eNewsletter participant! And, feel free to peruse and add to any of our Situation Room topics by clicking here.

Enjoy the last weeks of summer,

The Beach Blanket Bloggers at Facilitate.com

 

Collaboration in Action

Choosing a Collaboration Platform for Your Project

Editor's Introduction: With the myriad of collaboration solutions in the market today, it’s more important than ever to know what you’re looking for and why. In our experience, work groups will accept new technology if it helps them better complete the tasks for which they are accountable. Simply put, they will adopt if they see the benefit; if they don’t, you’ll encounter resistance at every step.

With this in mind, if you are in charge of selecting a collaboration tool or platform for your team you’ll need to develop a rationale for technology that supports the objectives of the project. Some of the questions to ask:

  • What are the desired outcomes for the project? How will you measure success?
  • What is the setting? How are the users going to work together?
  • What type of decision process needs to take place?
  • What activities support the project goals? What are the must-have functional capabilities to enable these activities?

The following case study illustrates a process that resulted in the thoughtful selection of collaboration tools to support this organization’s objectives.

 

Selecting the Right Collaboration Platform for Public Engagement in Health

Laura Heller
Centre for Global eHealth Innovation

Health research and service provision are two of the most important and costly components of modern life. But they are fraught with profound ethical and priority setting issues which complicate decisions about what research and services are in the overall public good. It is critical that citizens be allowed to participate in these decisions.

Two leading health organizations in Canada, The Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto and the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, University Health Network, decided to implement a state-of-the-art Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platform to facilitate citizen engagement in the Canadian health sector. With financial support from several government agencies, we set about analyzing the functions and tools available to support public engagement in the broad arena of health research, decision making and service provision.

The Rationale for the Platform
The platform had to support the three principal objectives of public engagement:

  1. Decision making, including participation in planning, resource allocation, and policy development.
  2. Action, meaning citizen participation in the implementation of programs, for example, direct involvement in gathering data and evidence; participating in advocacy efforts, surveillance and implementation of public health campaigns.
  3. Accountability, allowing the public to monitor and evaluate public or private sector compliance with decisions taken.

For each one of these objectives, engagement can be measured along a continuum that has been loosely defined as having five levels:

The collaboration platform had to support all five levels of engagement. This meant that the technology had to enable the following capabilities:

  • Sharing information in electronic data and audiovisual formats
  • Allowing citizens to gather and submit research or surveillance data in a variety of formats from structured data to open-ended or unstructured information.
  • Bringing people together to support dialogue, decision making, and different sorts of group processes, in both real-time and asynchronous settings.
  • Support for groups of varying sizes
  • Accessibility to a wide range of people with varying levels of experience with and access to technology.

Selecting the technology
For each activity the platform had to support, we developed lists of the required functions; created online wiki-based surveys shared with all members of the project team; and used their input to help select among the thousands of tools available in the marketplace. We chose to purchase a suite of hardware and software tools from different providers rather than an enterprise solution from one provider. We also favored, whenever possible, open-source options but were not limited to them. The result is a collaboration technology platform that includes:

  • A content management system (CMS) and web casting tools to enable information sharing (Jahia and ePresence respectively).
  • Mobile data collection devices such as PDAs, kiosks, and web-based survey tools to engage citizens in gathering data.
  • Webinar and decision support software for collaboration and group dialogue (Breeze and FacilitatePro).
  • Physical facilities for face-to-face meetings enabled with full multimedia and computer capacity (including the infrastructure to support over 100 wireless devices at a time, videoconferencing, multimedia production and post-production, and electronic whiteboards)

Results from Implementing the Platform
The platform has been in place for just over a year now and has been used in a variety of innovative research and public action contexts.

  • A 21st century town hall to validate a decision-making tool related to end-of-life decisions.
  • Town hall meetings where health professionals and consumers discussed priority setting for distribution of scarce vaccines during a pandemic
  • A major public education and information initiative around innovations in agricultural and food research related to healthy eating and lifestyles
  • A peer-review process that feeds into decisions about publishing, membership, and grants integral to the knowledge transfer process that underlines all health research.
  • Webcasts to engage secondary school youth in discussions about public health goals
  • International discussion forums on various public health issues
  • Virtual focus groups with health providers to develop a program to increase understanding of and participation in cancer clinical trials

 

In short, our preliminary experience has led us to conclude that the ICT platform has enhanced the capacity for meaningful public engagement in decisions and services related to human health. And, ICTs greatly increase the ability to easily document and evaluate such public engagement for accountability and research purposes. But this experience also brought home to us that that clarity of purpose and choosing the proper tool for each activity is also fundamental, and that facilitators play an important role in bringing the platform to life.

Laura Heller is a Knowledge Management Consultant working with the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, University Health Network, Toronto. Laura has supported numerous knowledge management and public engagement initiatives, both in and outside the health sector. She is particularly interested in helping to develop the use of ICTs outside Canada, with a focus on Latin America, where she has lived and worked on many occasions. She can be reached at lauraheller@sympatico.ca.

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Situation Room

Making new technology a no-brainer

Reporting back on last week’s interactive discussion, we asked you, our readers, to talk about the best way to get a group to adopt a new technology. Frankly, we think there's more to be said on the subject, so click here to view the whole discussion on our interactive flip chart and add your own comments. Let's hear from more of you!

A common theme we've heard so far is that technology that really adds value to the team tends to quickly"disappear into the background as we get on with the work at hand." Creating opportunities to use the technology before the actual event is key to making this happen. Some suggest a fun online demonstration, others suggest assigning pre-work that allows people to try out the technology on their own time. Another reader posted a gentle reminder about checking in with your team individually to make sure they are ready to roll -- the personal touch goes a long way.

Leaving the topic of technology aside for now, we invite you to share your tips on how to handle some common meeting mishaps.

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Be an interactive reader - join this month's discussion!

Surviving those Meeting Nightmares
Preparing a focused agenda, inviting the right participants and communicating ground rules up front all set the stage for a successful meeting. But there's no guarantee that issues won't arise amongst your group that require some on-the-spot intervention. People are human, after all. We pose some unpredictable meeting hazards -- How would you handle them?

Click here to add your ideas and comments.

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Buzz About Collaboration

Crossing a Line: An Interdisciplinary Conversation about Working Across Disciplines

We've been alerted to this free webinar, offered on Trainerspod August 23rd, 11 a.m. EST. The two hour webinar draws on primary research conducted by Janet Salmons and Lynn Wilson for their forthcoming book, A Handbook of Research on Electronic Collaboration and Organizations Synergy, and asks: What happens when partnerships, teams and projects require us to work with people who come from disciplines different from our own? How can we make it a success? This interactive webinar will provide an opportunity to explore interdisciplinarity in theory and practice.

http://www.trainerspod.com/info

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Facilitate.com: Of Interest

International Association of Facilitators
Festival of Facilitation

The IAF has titled its European Conference the “International Festival of Facilitation,” and it is taking place October 5-7, 2007 in Edinburgh. Our own Julia Young is running a conference session there called Getting Great Results from Virtual Meetings (including a pre-conference virtual session and a half day workshop at the conference). Consider a visit to this historic city and give your facilitation skills a boost. For more information visit http://www.iaf-europe.org/conference.

Call for Proposals! IAF NA 2008 Conference Atlanta

Submit a session proposal to the 2008 North America Conference in Atlanta April 8-10. Due date for proposals is September 4th. There is also a Save the Date sale until August 31st for the best conference pricing. The Conference web site is http://www.iafna.org.

Welcome to New Client

California State University Fresno

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