For years, I have heard that the web is becoming a platform, where one can easily use a website as a tool box. Community sites installed just with a few clicks and knowledge sharing communities are on their way. But as in most cases, there is always a hard point, and in this case is to get people involved. Although technology plays a less important role, it is still a critical factor whether people like to join and engage. Many ready-made-website fail to deliver the most important thing: To help people find stuff and help them exchange.
Technology constraints vs. user needs
Of course there are examples of simplified websites, which focus on user needs such as Gmail or Flickr. But knowledge sharing in a community is often way more complex if you have to combine different forms of media, a library of existing resources and so forth. I have tested numerous platforms and until today I have just been disappointed because each time I had certain needs and always had to put these under technology constraints. Although it should be the other way around and technology should help me make it better and easier.
Professional circles vs. passion driven communities
One big differentiation is important. I am talking here about professional communities, where people exchange about their work. These communities are much more difficult to establish. If people have a real desire to exchange ideas, for example, about their hobbies, a bizarre designed forum could work perfectly and would be more dynamic. There are many examples of dynamic communities that existed way before they were named Web2.0 or social media. To me, work related communities focus a lot on the knowledge management principle: Find the right information where and when it is needed.
Information seeking vs. engagement
I have less time. Nowadays, I can engage in so many communities, mostly when I am not even online. Why should I also join in your community? Perhaps because this community gives me the information I need: quick, easy and maybe even in high quality. From this perspective, for example, a Ning website is a disaster. Flashy, blinky things focus on a personal presentation instead of orientation, coherence and relevance. Have you ever tried to find something on a Ning website? How many communities are really active on Ning? Okay, to be fair, technology and a user centered website is one factor, but let me raise some more points:
- Most of these social network websites are features loaded and focus very little on plain people to people exchange.
- Although you have as a webmaster a set of options to change your network, it is not enough. You need to be able to tweak in detail to make a platform user-centered. Listen to your members and make changes according to them.
- Facebook, Linkedin, etc. are great tools to network and to mobilize, but offer almost no flexibility to build a community of practice. It is the Facebook way or no way. More important these big platforms have no interest in real exchange and learning. It is not their business concept.
- A questionable approach are widgets, where content is distributed all over the place. Photos here, documents there. A RSS feed is easily another information stream with little relevance.
- Each community has its own culture of exchange and different requirements. It is so difficult to find the right platform for that. Instead one needs to squeeze requirements to technology constraints.
- Confidentiality. Latest from Facebook, it is always a risk to give your data to such a platform. Also other platforms have a clear exit strategy for their users. You can leave easily and take your data with you.
- Community develop over time. It is impossible to foresee what is needed and what not for your platform in the future. Often a wonderful list of features is tempting, but so much is not really needed later on.
- If you want to make information finding for users the easiest possible way, the whole information structure behind a site becomes easily complex. The more is done through intelligently tagging in the background, the easier it becomes for users to find something.
Alternative?
Either you are lucky to find a service that offers you what you need or you opt for the usual stony way to build your own website. I know it is not a great alternative, but I believe we have to realize that so many web technologies are still in its infancy and we have just started to focus on the users as the center point of such technologies. I know it is not the best to shot at Ning as an example alone, but their latest turn in their payment policy shows a typical dilemma. Nobody knows where such providers are in a few years time.
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I think that, if you do not need to share “downloadables”, wikis (and especially MediaWiki) are a very interesting option.
Yes, wikicode is tough, but once you’re comfortable with it, deep linking and categories work really well to share knowledge, be it creating a “who’s who” or a place where to share projects, or both.
Yes Ismael I agree Wikis can be a great tool to exchange knowledge if (a) there is an open culture for exchange, where people do not mind if there texts (ideas, thoughts, opinions) are changed and (b) can manage deal with the open structure for such a tool. In my experience it is a really advanced tool to use.
Funny, I had just started to write nearly the same blog post, but I had tentatively titled it “I hate wikis.” Not to say they are 100% bad – my smartphone earns its keep with spontaneous wikipedia access and I have found many other legitimately useful wikis. They’re great for sharing lists of resources and other easy to edit things, but like ning, they are frequently poorly organized and the high cost of entry makes them suitable for KM professionals and other ICT-leaning folks. I foolishly tried establishing one within my Peace Corps group a few years ago and precisely three people used it (out of 50ish). Ning networks and wikis establish themselves easily among the digerati and the kind of people who gravitate to these things (check out the wikia sites for ANY computer game – exhaustive!), but do not do well with professional circles, especially in fields like international development where most are not used to incorporating these things into daily work life.
Without beating on wikis and ning endlessly, I applaud the sentiment of the post. My orgs approach was a simple Q&A style approach with tags for searching, built on StackExchange. Check it out if you’re interested, via the site linked through my name.
The findings of your post are exactly the reason why my organization decided to take money into their hand and build their own social networking platform, adjusted to the needs of the organization. I wish there would have been another way (especially for all the organizations who just don’t have the budget), but at this point it was the only option for us.
I think really good searches are still underrated. People love to search for things, not only when they are on a website, also on their desktop (and maybe in their lives): documents, experts, projects – in the end they search for knowledge. So as you say, information architecture and a good tagging structure, facilitating these searches, is crucial to providing this information. I will be implementing SharePoint 2010 which has quite some strong tagging and meta-tagging functionality, and will hopefully be able to use the Fast Search MS bought recently. Let’s see how that works.
This obviously doesn’t make the sharing part of the knowledge sharing exercise easier. This, I hope to tackle putting a strong focus on enabling people to talk to each other. As you call it, the people to people exchange. As we know, the best knowledge exchange happens when people can get together to talk to each other in person. In the end, social networking is just a way to try and simulate this.
@Georg yes indeed of search engines can be much better. But in my opinion they are the last option when the information structure does not help me to find the information I need. I think Sharepoint is a usability and knowledge management disaster. I would rank it even worse than Ning.
@Leland Great point about a simple Q&A service. I also had great experiences with it. Over time you can develop a great demand orientated information service and archive.
@Johannes How often did you already change things during developing the platform? Do you anticipate many changes on the way?
Great insights! Just started the Wikis, and dont like them much!
Chris, I’ve come across so many organizations who turn to building their own platform, re-building all the (expensive) mistakes of the last ten years. I think we have to be very very cautious in advising people to build their own.
Another thought about advising organizations on the platform or suite of tools. Designing or configuring tools should not be separate from conversations about the facilitators, summarizers, technology stewards, community co-ordinators who are as much part of the road to engagement as the tools.
The many Ning failures: Knowledge sharing in professional circles http://bit.ly/a8maVV #socialnetworking
Hi Chris an others.
I donot hate NINGs nor wikis. Tools – by being awkward or complex – can discourage people to exchange but they are in my experience rarely critical in generating a dynamic exchange. People connect with tools, not because of tools. So I tend to agree with Bev. Large organizations may easily find money to build sites but it is often still very complicated to ensure that the site actually fits the needs of a diverse crowd of users. I have seen at least in two cases that technical people dominate the building process and the beautiful, custom-made platform ends up with painfully few active users. A suitable package of standard tools may be a much better option to explore what kind of knowledge culture and practices an organization or a network really has and to develop that potential by setting examples together with some key people in the organization.
“to get people involved”
I’m guessing there a ‘critical mass’ issue there: a certain number of contributors are needed before a tool / site / space becomes effective. There may also be sustainability issues as well. (The difference between professional and passionate.) Two years ago, the Canadian adult literacy field had an apparently growing on-line conversation with degrees of resource sharing. But brick & mortar changes reduced our numbers until we became a few separate voices.