The Great KHub Bake-off - Liz Copeland

As a keen baker, I found myself enthralled by the most recent series of the Great British Bake-off. In case you’ve never seen it, it’s an amateur baking competition judged by the great Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood. Between them, they munch their way through a whole load of wonderful looking bakes by people who profess to be amateurs, but by all accounts could be professionals. My baking never looks half so good!

Here's one of my better bakes - last week's hot cross buns! (I can recommend Paul Hollywood's recipe!)

Anyway, despite my decidedly homemade-looking attempts, I came up with the idea of running a Knowledge Hub bake-off…

We were thinking about ways to celebrate the fact that it’s Knowledge Hub’s official first birthday this month. Yes, can you believe it folks? It’s a full year since Knowledge Hub was finally totally live. And what a year it’s been! We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’ve stuck at it and I think (recently especially) we’ve put some features in place that have improved the site a great deal.

I was recently talking to the Knowledge Manager at Schlumberger, one of the world’s leading oil drilling companies, who’ve won awards for their knowledge sharing approaches. He told me that when they celebrated an anniversary recently, they asked all their employees worldwide to hold parties and send photos via their knowledge sharing platform. That way they all felt part of the wider celebration. This got me thinking… “Why can’t we do the same on Knowledge Hub?” After all, it’s really all of you reading this – the members of Knowledge Hub – who make it a success, so it would be great if lots of people could be involved in the celebration.

So, the Great KHub Bake-off was born!

Here’s the plan:

Throughout April 2013 we’re encouraging all Knowledge Hub members to do a charity bake-off in their own organisations and then share a picture with us all in the Welcome to Knowledge Hub group.

We’ll be running our own bake-off here in the Digital Communications and Knowledge Team at the LGA on Friday 5 April. I’ll be coercing some of my colleagues into baking some cakes (I’ll do some too of course) and we’ll be raising money to sponsor our very own Michelle Rea, who will be running the Paris Marathon on Sunday 7 April. She’s raising money for Battersea Dogs’ Home.

We’ll be sharing our pics in the Welcome to Knowledge Hub group and we’d love it if you’d take up the bake-off challenge and share your photos too as part of the celebration.

Over the next month or so, we’ll also be sharing some stories from Knowledge Hub members about how they’ve been using Knowledge Hub and what a difference it’s made to them in their work.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed in some way to building Knowledge Hub over the last year. Keep sharing! (And keep baking!)