Forum Aims to be Powerful Knowledge Exchange

Forum Relaunched

The LCS website Forum has been redesigned to help practitioners use it more effectively to find information, solve problems, air opinions and generally collaborate with the lean community.

The change will help it become a powerful knowledge exchange – a digital space for networking and discovery, for making connections, where the collective power of the community can be leveraged for the benefit of all users. It will complement an organisation’s in-house forum and social media, as it can add a valuable external perspective to information search, discussions or problem solving.

The technical term for such activity is peer to peer learning, which has seen significant growth, driven by the rise in the use of the web and social media in recent years. See the LCS article on the topic for more information.

Key Features

The Forum has public and private areas and users must be registered as members to participate, for example, as Guests or Practitioners. The private area is for discussions restricted to selected people, for example in the same organisation or who share a specific topic interest or who are part of a distinct group.

All LCS website published articles are automatically listed so that comments about them can be easily made and responded to.

A series of digital badges are included in member profiles to add some colour and visuality – for example, to indicate members’ roles and activity levels.

Encouraging Use

Of course, the power of the Forum will depend on users actively engaging and being proactive in initiating discussions. No doubt some experimentation will be required and tweaks may be required as we learn from its use – so everyone is encouraged to try it out and help build some momentum – and of course, provide feedback on the experience.

Members will earn an Active Member badge if they have made at least one post in the previous 10 days and a Top Contributor badge when they have made at least 10 posts in the previous 30 days.

To provide a little incentive to users to engage, anyone who gains a Top Contributor badge this year, will receive a glorious LCS enamel pin badge FREE (either a specific level badge or the logo badge)!

Registration

To sign up and find out more about making posts, visit the Forum Instructions page.