Local government agency to launch Knowledge Hub

The agency, previously the Improvement and Development Agency, plans to have the Knowledge Hub up and running in the spring of next year. Brendan Harris, director of knowledge and innovation for LGID, told GC News that a tender process has been completed and that "the Knowledge Hub programme has already been embedded into a number of programmes for local government". The LGID is planning for the hub to gradually take over from the existing Communities of Practice network. Harris said it will take the work done on the network "into a new dimension", with an intelligent search function and the capacity for users to post audio and video material. "If you're working in Communities of Practice you can't intelligently find information from other sources. The Knowledge Hub will help to join up communities intelligently," he said. The system will also have the ability to scrape information from PDF and PowerPoint documents, reducing the effort required of users to obtain useful information from the data sources. "We've identified the core datasets, of which there are more than 650, so that information and knowledge will be linked to the hub," Harris said. "It's everything from case study libraries, information, documents and datasets from across local government. "We're currently doing work to make sure the core information will be connected into the Knowledge Hub. But it will also enable the connection of data by users in the future. "There's a heavy focus that from day one we will have a massive store of information." He added that there is no limit on the volume of data to which the hub could be connected, and that it will be able to link to information from the private and third sectors. The LGID has a phased launch programme planned, the first stage of which will be the migration of existing Communities of Practice users to the Knowledge Hub in February and March. Launch dates for various functions are planned through to September of next year. "The Communities of Practice will stay open initially – it has over 60,000 users and 150 groups – and will take time to move them across," Harris said. "But we will close it down eventually. This may be within 12 months, but it depends on the users and communities and how quickly they want to move over."