The site's about page states that the main philosophy of the site is that openly sharing knowledge & ideas and is good for individuals, Councils and Australia, and that openly sharing knowledge & ideas is easy.
But, where in an ideal world, would all this sharing lead?
LGAM's vision for the future of local government is for it to become a sort of electronically connected super organisation where unnecessary duplication of effort across the entire sector is totally eliminated.
That is for the (local government related) knowledge of all local government employees to be instantly and permanently available to all other local government employees around the world free of charge and encumbrance.
But how turn this vision into a reality? The key is finding a way of encouraging and enabling individuals to record their knowledge in such a way and place that everyone else in the local government sector can and will find it if it is relevant to their current task.
Below is a number of proposed actions that if implemented could help execute this vision:
- Every Council should create an Encyclopedic Knowledge Base and encourage its staff to:
- populate it with their existing knowledge and any new leanings they acquire;
- consult it before they embark on a new project or activity to see what other staff have contributed to the knowledge base on that topic.
- Every Council should also encourage its staff to contribute any generic knowledge or learnings that may be of value to the wider local government community to a shared sector wide knowlegde repository like the LGAM Knowledge Base.
- Any one updating a page on a Council knowledge base should be encouraged to check for any generic information on the shared knowledge base that could be incorporated into the Council knowledge base, and vice versa. If either article can be improved by adding or modifying content from the other, it should be.