Remember when you learnt cycling? The first time you stepped into a pedal and tried to balance the bicycle; the voice behind your neck telling you to keep pedaling and you will be fine. Learning cycling is a wonderful example of how difficult it is to “transfer” knowledge and that most of our wisdom is not just published in the Internet.

Have you ever heard of or read a book about how to learn cycling. I am sure there are books for that out there, but would you learn cycling from one? Without practice, patience and using all your senses, you will not succeed nor overcome the fear of falling down. Learning cycling shows how difficult it is to learn other than by just doing and experimenting.  About 80% of knowledge in our brain is tacit and cannot be written down.

I have recently stumbled over a nice article by Noam Cohen, in which he argues that the citation rules by Wikipedia, introduced as a quality mechanism, can also hinder knowledge sharing.

“In the case of dabba kali, a children’s game played in the Kerala state of India, there was a Wikipedia article in the local language, Malayalam, that included photos, a drawing and a detailed description of the rules, but no sources to back up what was written. Other than, of course, the 40 million people who played it as children.”

The same article also linked me to a great video called “People are Knowledge –  Exploring alternative methods of citation in Wikipedia” by Achal Prabhala.

At this point one could ask, what about social media? Knowledge sharing happens through conversations. But, let’s be honest, how many tweets would you need to explain sufficiently how to cycle? There is an inherent limitation in written exchange compared to face-to-face exchange. Ana what about video? Visual exchange can make learning easier; for example, I have read a dozen articles about how to repair my old espresso machine, but only the video explanation made me fully understand how to do it.
On the other side, Mike Davies argues in recent post:

“The lack of very local digital content is acute in Africa and is one reason even Google’s strategy is challenged here. Google Trader (among others) have offered cool new technologies, but without any real content they’re just not being used.” (http://blog.esoko.com/2011/08/mark-davies-part-ii-content-is-king.html)

But he also conludes that “we should also recognize that content can come from a multiple number of sources. Isn’t that the lesson we’ve learned over the last ten years? That content provided by your neighbour may be equally or even more relevant than that provided by your government, or by CNN.”

Through my experience with the hyperlocal open data platform in Frankfurt, I have realized how little information is available on the local level in Germany – information such as finding out why a red traffic light lasts longer or shorter (by the way,  there is a regulated framework called the “Richtlinien für Lichtsignalanlagen” – Guideline for Signal and Street lights). It is maybe a small detail, but that is what citizens care a lot about in Frankfurt.

So, it seems we need to work on two issues, making more knowledge explicit, particularly local content. And we also need to be aware that most knowledge won’t be on the Internet, and especially piles of opened data will not change that either.

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iPhone app to check the place of origin of eggs. Photo by Barcoo.com

As open data becomes more popular, I wonder where are the nonprofit and business models for open data? It is clear that somehow open data needs to generate revenues, because it will not only work with voluntary efforts. I did a little research to find interesting approaches to do more with open data.

A good starting point are existing open data initiatives, such as London or San Fransisco. One area of applications are all types of visualizations, which can help to highlight hidden information behind the data. A nice example is Betterflux, which offers a nice visualization tool for the open data World Bank API. Carolyn Mellor desribes in her post “Mining World Bank Data” how to offer paid analysis services using the World Bank API.

Fireworkers

Lorenz Matzat, a fellow blogger from the open data blog of the ZEIT magazine in Germany, wrote about an intriguing case to use open data at the Amsterdam fire brigade. Once a fire alarm starts, all sorts of data is collected about the location and the route to the emergency: Constructions on the way, latest updates from Openstreetmap, the type of house and if possible more data such as construction dates, materials, people living there, etc. A great case of how open public institutions themselves can benefit from open data. However, it is an example of how open data can easily collide with privacy. How many data should be freed for the sake of emergency.

Public transport

Everybody who has a smart phone might have already benefitted from a location-based public transport application, which gives you for example information on bus or train lines close to you. These applications would not have been possible without access to public transport information. In Germany, from my experience, in almost all cases the private applications are superior to the ones from public transport companies. An interesting example of what can be done with such data is the London Live Tube.

Also, ICommute takes the available data from the San Fransisco open data store and offers a mobility check tool. “ICommute SF helps you locate, organize and access route information and real-time arrival predictions for San Francisco’s Muni system. Get the most of public transit and improve your daily commute.” The app costs $2,99 dollars. I would be curious to know how many sales it takes to get at least the development costs back or even make a profit.

Kids life

Again, in San Fransisco an idea came up to provide better information for kids’ lives. “What choices are there as kids travelling to & from school”. After School provides a map for specific locations: Schools, libraries and playgrounds. It also offers places to eat – questionable places such as McDonalds. A commercial approach, again through an Iphone app, is done by MomMaps – It seems they do not offer a “Dadmaps.” Mommaps offers places such as parks, playgrounds, restaurants, museums in over a dozen cities in the USA. The app is for free, but I could not identify the business model.

Food

Nutrition is another interesting sector to use open data, which I discovered lately. Everyblock has for years food inspection data on their website and in the UK there is an Iphone app by the Lichfield district council: Ratemyplace. “Every time a council in the Ratemyplace scheme carries out an inspection of a food business’s kitchen, it’s listed on the Ratemyplace app.”

Another really interesting approach is Food Sprout. It combines different data sets to make transparent how the food is produced, up and down the supply chain. And they also come up with various revenue models. Check out the interview at the great Food and Tech blog. Interestingly companies seem to have growing interest to make their supply chain transparent in their corporate social responsibility efforts. These are the data sources of Food Sprout:

A last example for food is the whole potential behind barcode scanning – you take your mobile phone to the supermarket and scan products to get the information behind the fair trade certificate or behind the company. In the recent dioxin scandal in Germany, the company Barcoo took information from the ministry of agriculture in Germany, of which farms have intoxicated eggs and offer the info in their app. So, you can check in the supermarket the eggs that are fine and not with your mobile phone.

Conclusion

There are still very few business models for open data. Maybe because there is still little open data available and that might be hampering the development. Although if you look at Openstreetmap or CKAN, there are  large data sets offered. Besides Iphone apps, there is also no revenue model and any other is more of an experiment still. It seems way easier to start with open data as a nonprofit project.

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Let’s say one day you arrive at work – a mainly knowledge-driven organization, such as a consultancy, where you don’t have an office, not even a position, nor a particular function. So to start your day, you first get a selection of all projects, ideas and problems that your organization is dealing with at the moment.

Half of your working day is already subscribed to ongoing projects, and the other half you could jump into something new. You look at various open tasks, questions, ideas or requests for solutions – all these items have a chronology of contributions and interactions. You can see what has been already done and what is needed.  You find an interesting challenge, estimate the working time and send an invitation to a colleague, who has the skills and might be interested on working together on it.

Now, you have 20% of the day left. You take a look in your competence section and see several questions and help requests for topics. You pick a few tasks, which you can solve quickly and teach others how to do it themselves next time. The daily work plan is done and you go on to a workspace, where colleagues are gathered to work on your main project.

By the way, instead of having a boss, you have different scores you give yourself on your work performance. You might prefer the creativity score, which gives you a lot of time to find solutions and to push for innovations. Or you focus your work on your teaching score, which is evaluated by your colleagues. Or you pick another score, which fits best your working style. And to top it all, strategies do not exist either. This is done by a prediction market.

Is that absurd?

Quora also has an interesting solution to find information from within the ocean of questions. Words of questions become key words (tags), which are then associated with similar questions and clustered under one topic. Imagine such a thing in an organization. You would create organically an organizational wisdom. Why cannot whole projects be organized in such a fashion?

Of course that nice set of features does not automatically lead us to the utopian first part, but maybe it can contribute to it. If we look at the incredible inefficient and non-creative problem solutions capacities of organizations and companies and can overcome the cultural resistance, such open collaboration form would bring us closer to the utopian first part, where you work what you really want.

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How and where does most of our learning happens in our daily work life? The visualization above illustrates how intensively the learning process can be, as it can even happen in ordinary places such as the water cooler or the telephone.  At our most common daily places and through our daily used tools is where expertise or experiences (tacit knowledge) are exchanged, and so this is also how and where ideas are raised, e.g. during discussions in places such as coffee houses.

Social media offers some powerful new ways of knowledge sharing, but hence its often asynchronous exchange, it has its limitations with many technical barriers. Everybody using Skype conference calls can tell a story about the technical constraints that this implies. The filter problem is not close to be solved. Services such as paper.li give the impression that we are rather accelerating the information overload.

Social media can reach far more people (e.g. Twitter) and is often the only choice for distance exchange. But can it seriously compensate face-to-face learning? The visualization shall show that knowledge management with social media can support or extend existing practice of  sharing.  But technology-driven communication has many barriers we need to be aware of. It is these barriers we need to focus on more.

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Nowadays, if you want to start an open data project, you should rather check the availability of information first, and then imagine something useful because so little useful raw data is available. That’s why for the foreseeable future, at least in countries such as Germany, collecting documents is the way forward.

Frankfurt-Gestalten.de (OpenStreetMap Creative Commons CC-by-SA 2.0 Lizenz. Rendering © 2010 Cloudmade)

Although there are millions of documents available on the Internet, the most interesting ones are hidden in databases, protected as PDF files or only partially offered on websites. It often takes hours to get figures out of a PDF file to be used for analysis. For example, the budget of the city of Frankfurt is offered in a PDF page with more than one thousand pages.

How can you possibly draw different conclusions or see problems and even public misexpenditure? Even a local press paper does not have the resources (any more) to disclose the puzzle of large figure columns.  So I am glad to see my friends at Tactic Tools started a  project called Open Budget (Offener Haushalt) to shed some more light in the public budget of Germany’s government. Other great example comes from David McCandless, who presented them in a great TED presentation called “the beauty of data visualization”. However the remaining problem is that it takes a lot of time to extract  data, not talking about how to present it.

Number one and two are the perfect case. Number three can lead to incredible work. Imagine you copy and paste a PDF document of one thousand pages, which is probably printed as an Excel sheet version.  Number four is even possible with PDF files thanks to OCR, but scrapping can lead to a load of information.

Number 6 is a very different collective approach. For example, the widely cited Ushahidi is an instrument to offer new channels for data collection if one gets a critical base of contributors. The Guardian uses it these days to track the effects of budget cuts in the city of Leeds.

If you do not have the network or public relation budget to run such a crowd sourcing initiative, then you should think about collecting it from existing sources. For example, a lot of data is offered in RSS or XML format. An advantage is the way data is already referenced, such as date, key words and even locations if you are lucky. A nice tool in this regard is Drupal driven Managing News, which I use also for Create Frankfurt to geo-reference all incoming information.

Such aggregating tools allow automatic collection of data. So you can identify such information, subscribe to it and look at it from time to time. Two examples: Public transport congestion alerts or political municipality documents. A year of such data can give you some insights and might lead to interesting conclusions.

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A good list of keywords could be a ‘saviour’ while doing a research – it gives orientation, quick access and offers a cluster to find the right documentation. But such a simple list is often missing in most websites because it is not so easy to be achieved. And here a bottom up process, a crowdsourcing of a taxonomy, can be an option.

Image by Beth Kanter

The traditional way
Defining the keywords for a website, such as a navigation, often follows the logic of the organizational structure and hierarchy. It can work well finding information, but only with those ones familiar with the system, and it mostly ends with the ‘try on the search engine.’ After all, as Nielsen points out in his latest brief, users prefer logical structuring or prioritization by importance lists.

There is this wonderful example from the Steve Museums project, which years ago found out that 70% of the category defined by experts were not the ones that previous experts had put together. How is prioritization by importance possible when only 30% of keywords are overlapping?

Tagging through a folksonomy
Another approach is to let users tag content by themselves. Famous examples are tag clouds, which represent the most popular tags of users. Information junkies – like me – are big fans of them, but I have to admit that after various tests and interviews, they do not often work and seem confusing to most users although they are excellent to get a picture of the topics around your community.

Crowdsource your taxonomy
With the lessons learnt, I went to a different approach together with Fredrik Lassen using Drupal. For my open data project Create Frankfurt, we wanted to analyze and structure thousands of documents, so citizens can quickly find information next to the option of geo referenced data. The documents have to do with a variety of topics in urban development – a similar use case for an information management system of an organization.

So, first, we used an API called tagthe.net to automatically extract keywords. The results were more keywords than documents! Then, a tag cloud gave us an insight to major topics, but we had to erase 80% of tags, which did not help us, such as “implication” or “plan.” Here one could see the challenges of automated tagging – we still had more than 3,000 words left, so we started the crowdsourcing experiment.

We invited people with various backgrounds to crowd source a new taxonomy. We built a tool, where a user gets a random keyword that he needs to tag with a meta-keyword. We offered a few first meta-keywords, but left it open to users to create their own.

Over some weeks we had about two dozens of volunteers categorizing existing tags linked to thousands of documents. We are not finished yet, but we have already collected roughly one hundred categories. That is an easy list to deal with. You can merge similar concepts and get good working tags (often used) and less good ones.

Sure it is quite a process to undergo, but it can save tremendous search costs later on and might even involve less time when a few people have endless discussions on definitions.

Drop me an email if you want to know more about the tool and process.

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The same way the fishing industry has found more efficient methods to get most fishes out of the oceans, is exactly how we find more ways to digitze information that was previously only available offline. Imagine a massive fishing-net bringing us the greatest fishes, but emptying the oceans. What would be then the fishing-net or, in this case, the opportunities and consequences of digitizing all the information? Nobody really knows.

Thanks to the Internet, we now double every two days all stored information. The estimated amount is 5 exabytes according to Eric Schmidt (Google) and it took human kind 2000 years to get a similar amount of archived information. Traditional governments and companies collect information and stored it as digital data. The non-profit sector is increasingly engaging in such efforts because technologies have become more widely available in many cases even as open source software.

Text recognition (OCR)

Text recognition software has become very sophisticated and can understand even hand written texts. Cloud services such as Evernote analyze each note uploaded for texts, being it a business card, wine label or any other document. Thanks to such softwares the UNdemocracy.com project scanned thousands of documents by the United Nations and offered better search capabilities. Another project by HP Labs in Bangalore wants to offer an email service written by pen on paper. An image through a mobile phone and text recognition shall make it possible. And if it is not recognized by Optical Character Recognition (OCR), then our support through the well-known reCaptcha helps make sense of words. For Recaptcha we help decipher texts from medieval books.

Voice recognition is far from being new, but it has become much better over the years, and its services are much easier available. Latest voice actions make such a service available for all Android driven mobile phones, where you can read outloud, for example, the text of an email. Ushahidi text-based service is now also available by voice to report about incidents. They work with Cloudvox a voice service application. This and services such as Twilio make such voice affordable and available to low budgets previously reserved only to companies and government.

The open source solution Freedom Fon even offers an interactive voice response system so, for example, iliterate people can provide information.

In recent years a lot of mobile softwares for data collection have been developed. Here are some open source solutions. Mobile phones are in the hand of half of the world population and many collect data passively or actively. Google collects already data through a GPS, if users have accepted to join it, for traffic information. In remote areas innovative solutions try to bridge the 160 character limit of SMS. A simple paper wheel is used to report critical health information from the country side in Cambodia.

More and more cameras and particular mobile phones have a GPS functionality and increasingly the photos are uploaded to the Internet. Flickr photos in the world map gives a first impression. Flickr has already 117,025,830 geotagged items. In few years in most locations around the world a series of blog posts are available. Google Street view will then “only” have the streets. Talking of Google, their Goggles service tries to deliver additional information on physical objects. Take a photo from an object such as a restaurant menu or a sight seeing spot and it will provide you with information and store the image in a database.

In the next days comes another post with more examples and thoughts on consequences.

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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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What if you were in Ethiopia, walking by a school, directing your mobile’s camera to towards it and suddenly you get all the information available about the school, such as the development projects involved with it, the amount invested to build it, and the school’s drop out rate.

How transparent is development aid?

Is it only sciene-fiction? Welcome to augmented reality and the plans to use open data in the future. Owen Barder talked about the exact same idea in a recent podcast at the Center for Global Development. Of course, it is questionable whether concrete information stream is instantly needed; it might easily overwhelm us, but certainly this kind of transparency might have a huge impact on development aid.

Most people agree that the development aid world needs more transparency. It is not easy or almost impossible to get an overview of what really happens in a country or a sector. Senegal alone has 82 individual aid co-ordination forums, but that has not brought the transparency needed, and made it even more complicated, as Owen Barder writes in his thoughtful and provoking post: “The coming collapse of the development system”. A transparent overview on all activities, partnerships and financial involvements, could bring light in this unnecessary complexity.

Small first movers in the development aid world

Many organizations and some governments have started opening up their repositories of data to be accessed publicly, such is the example of the development sector, where first organizations have freed their data. The World Bank has an API to access data, and the UK Department for International Development  (DFID) has a new way to present its project data. Whereas the former offers statistical data, such as development indicators, the latter publishes project information to be monitored. But come on … is that all?

Initiatives to use open data

Ujima Website

Such open data could be used by external initiatives or watchdogs. A good example for development in Africa is the Ujima project, which shows project data from USAid and DFID. Unfortunately, the majority of organizations seem to be only discussing the move to open data, but until now, they rather enclose information. To be fair, many development organizations have a huge challenge – they have various different databases, formats and struggle to get them better connected as well. One example is the challenge around Management Information System.

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In contrast, in Africa the Internet might offer new and promising ways, particularly for the publishing sector, with implications for local content.

Photo by schmuela from Flickr (CC License)

Publishing in Africa works under constraints. The market is often small, few books are sold and little is invested in book projects. For example, in Egypt a book becomes a bestseller with only 10 thousand copies are sold. The great city of Cairo, albeit its wonderful book stores, there are not more than a dozen of them. Some years ago, the Arab Human Development report stated that there are more books translated into Greek language than to Arabic.

Muhtar Bakare, who runs an independent literary publishing house in Lagos, Nigeria, said on a recent symposium in Olso: “There are lively publishing enterprises in different areas of Africa that are not formalized in the European sense. But they exist, they are not cataloged, [they] don’t have ISBN numbers…” Muhtar says a big problem is a missing distribution network and argues that there is a lot of local content. He goes as far as calling the Internet “our own Gutenberg moment. The internet is going to democratize knowledge in Africa.”

Arthur Attwell, who runs Electric Book Works, based out of Cape Town, believes the mobile phone is game changer for digital publishing. “I think print on-demand has got a massive future for Africa, and developing countries in general, because of the way it caters to people with low cash flow and who just need a book right now.”

“I think that we will see an incredible growth of digital publishing in Africa over the next few years, we’re in the process right now of really just laying down the infrastructure that’s going to make that possible.”

Moses Kemibaro shares the same optimism in East Africa: “The local content gold rush is only just getting started.” He emphasis that the potential for promoting local content could be social media.  “We have many platforms through which local content can be published for free, or nearly free.”

There is a plurality of local content in Africa, but is often not available as digital content. Social media offers here new ways of capturing some part of information. Video, audio and text are some formats. Social media is increasingly in the hands of millions of people through mobile phones.

That is why Google has recently initiated a Wikipedia contest in the Swahili language.  “Swahili is a lingua franca of much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo” (Wikipedia). Google started this initiative for the main dilemma they are facing. The have to search technology within places, but there is not enough digital information to index.

Gabriel Stricker from Google said in an interview, at the Business Daily Africa: “The challenge for searches in many languages for us no longer is search quality. Our ability to get the right answer is hindered by the lack of quality and lack of quantity of material on the Internet.”

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Wouldn’t it be great if you had a question, you could find an answer in your network right away? Most of us are members of many communities – many people with a lot of expertise. Why is it not easier then to tap on that potential to get answers from peers? A main question of knowledge management is often note sufficiently solved through the social web.

Is the telephone still the best way for informal knowledge sharing? (Photo by splorp @Flickr)

The false promise of Linkedin and Xing
Take a look at Linkedin or Xing. Could you exploit the expertise found in there to use it, let’s say, on a daily basis? I have to accept that, unfortunately, for me the professional working networks Linkedin and Xing have been so far not so usefull. Of course, for recruting they play a role, but for other means they have little to offer. And this is the key goal for knowledge management. Yes, I have heard from people, who have gained a lot out of it, but these cases do not fall on the category of exchanging experiences or sharing knowledge on a daily basis.

Yellow pages have failed
So far, the most usual procedures are a quick search on Google, a request on a mailing list or a simple call. Those often work fine, but so many potential answers of your wider network are not tapped. And to get right away the person, who could deal with the specific issues is not easy. One attempt to improve this situation are yellow pages, often used in Intranets. The results are profile of colleagues delivering some information.  But the key challenge is that these profiles are mostly very specific and not rarely complex, which is not enough to describe the potential expertise of a person.

Twitter set a path for low barrier informal knowledge sharing
In some cases a sufficient answer might be written, but best is if you get in contact with a person directly to exchange and learn from each other. That is why Twitter is so strong. You can question your audience, might be lucky to get one or more answers and then can continue talking with a person directly.

Google Social Search a hint in the right direction?
Another challenge is that your networks are widely distributed and you do not have time to search or request an answer. You want to get it now. What a difference if you can tap into the potential of your wider network on a daily basis during your work. One interesting new approach to help you find the right person is introduced by Google’s new social search. If you join the project, which is currently in beta, you will see additional search results to your query from people in your network (twitter, google connect, friendfeed etc.) Here you can start it.

This is a new attempt to find information from your peers across your network. After the failure of Open Social, this now looks like a good alternative, which indexes blog posts, tweets and other tracks of your activities in the Internet. So, if one of your peers has already written about a topic, you will find it between your usual Google results. That is another interesting approach to make you aware of the expertise from friends and colleagues, you might not know of. If it works good, you suddenly can get connected directly to the person who might have an answer for you.

But, as usual there is a downside. The search works the better, the more information you give to Google, so the more stuff we publish the better results we get. Of course we do not want to publish everything, but I guess for the working context it is an interesting approach also acknowledging that most either automated semantic solutions, nor classical database, have succeeded so far in providing you the information you need at a certain point.

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Information research is performed in many different ways throughout the Internet. Once an information is found, the assessment of its relevance and trustiness happens through objective criteria and on the premise of subjective factors. What are such criteria and factors?  And how are they changing in a growing social connected net?

Photo by Scarygami @Flickr

A typical situation: You sit with friends together and discuss; a fact is cited, but you do not believe it and want to prove it is wrong, so you quickly check it  in the Internet. We increasingly rely on our digital backbone, which now it is even ubiquitous available through mobile phones. The net becomes our extended memory – not in any case it is easy to find an answer quickly, but is getting easier thanks to sources such as Wikipedia.

But how do we trust these sources? Sources can have very different approaches, trusted behind the information they offer:

• Wikileaks anonymously “publishes and comments on leaked documents alleging government and corporate misconduct.”
• Bloggers stand with their reputation behind an information.
• Demand Media attempts to deliver thousands of answers each month from amateur writers and film-makers.
• Wikipedia relies on voluntarily work and editors to deliver accurate information or highlight it if it is not the case.
• Newspapers have a reputation of professional journalism.

But how do we decide in our daily information research source whether it is trusted or untrusted? There are many nuances between these two poles and various personal criteria on how to assess a source. I am curious to know what is desicive for you.  Here is a list of questions, which might apply or not:

Source Criteria:

• Who is behind the source?
• Is it a well-known institution or person?
• Where does it originally come from?
• Does it indicate an author?
• Is the article old or up-to-date?
• Does it have comments? How many comments?
• Has the website a commercial intention or is the information service a common good?
• Is the article personally or objectively written?
• Does it have many or none citation to other sources?
• How well written is the article?
• How open is the person behind a presented page? For example, does the author have a biography or a Twitter account?

Network factor:

• Who has recommended the source? Is it a friend, colleague or peer?
• Is it a link from  a well-known or unknown blog post to the source?
• Does the source have many readers/subscribers?
• Is it often cited? Can it be checked for example through a Twitter search or Technorati rank, in case of a blog.

Appearance:

• Is the website professionally designed?
• Do you like the design? Would you trust an information source with an appalling design?
• Does it focus on content or rather advertisement?
• Can you navigate easily or are there obstacles to find your information?
• Is it a rather closed site or does it link to a website?

These are only some examples showing how tricky it is to evaluate a source and set the needed range of skills to assess an information from different angles. How can these skills be learnt? A topic for another post.

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Something has changed. Information sharing isn’t what it used to be. We are in a middle of a network transformation as information sharing becomes faster, more intensive and more interconnected. In terms of collaboration and innovation, it is exciting, but in terms of speed, we might reach our limits. Twitter is the gravitation center of these changes, showing us how things will develop further:

• Speed: Sharing and interaction becomes amazingly fast through real-time web.
• Intensity: An explosion in “fast food content” shared across networks.
• Crisscrossed: Networks are not only growing exponentially in size, but also in their density.

Speed

Not so long ago, information sharing in open and loose networks used to take days. One could see how the news or an article was bookmarked in Delicious, bookmarked by other in the next days and sometimes developed to a larger wave until bloggers picked it up and a conversation emerged here and there. It was the start of the social web, which now seems to be outdated if one looks at the breathtaking speed of tweets. Whereas before some waves were drifting through the ocean – nowadays the sea is full of waves wandering across networks in minutes. Welcome to the real-time web. Want to know what is going on somewhere right now?
Have a look at Twitter search and you may find out because most probably, someone will be there. For certain requests this search is excellent. Even Google has acknowledged it recently and started to include tweets into its search. The Internet turns into a central nerve system.
I have asked how people share and search information nowadays through Twitter and these are some of the interesting feedbacks I have got, most related to speed: (Thanks for sharing!)

On a scale from 1-5 how much quicker/ better information you get through tools such as Twitter, Friendfeed vs. blogs or social bookmarking?

Intensity

Amit Agarwal has an interesting comparison on how people used to share information and how drastically it has changed. Whereas in 2008 email was still leading with over 30%, it is now bypassed by Facebook for sharing links with nearly 30%. In second place come emails with 13,8% and then Twitter with 11%. It shows how information sharing across networks becomes a truly mainstream activity. But it seems as if sharing was being dominated by short content or “fast food content,” as Michael Arrington calls it. He mainly talks of aggregated content but also discusses “the end of hand crafted content.” The ‘read/write’ web offers an explosion in content creation and micro-blogging; as Twitter seems to the right channel for sharing information.

Crisscrossed

From my observations, the explosion in network connectivity is the most fascinating one. The exponential growth of networks can be counted everywhere, but more fascinating is the growing density within networks. Particularly on Twitter with its low barriers for connections and openness, new connections are being built easily and interaction is a core piece behind it. This can really bring people, expertise and ideas together. One such example is the ICT4D field. Two years ago there were more or less loosely linked communities  around the Internet. Now you can tap into a community within a short time through searching social networks a la Facebook or Twitter. I wish there was a study on what this new density of interaction and many links between people bring, in terms of collaboration and innovation.

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Here comes a list of statement you might (or not) avoid to say when you want to convince colleagues or clients for such changes. Please share more as I am sure you have plenty.

This is for all of you who share the daily burden of convincing people about the value of open knowledge sharing through the Internet for the benefit of all. The outdated hierarchies and top down work styles restrict free flowing ideas and creative work in self-responsible teams, so what can you do?

Here comes a list of statements you might (or might not!) avoid when you want to convince colleagues or clients to make such changes. Please share more as I am sure you have plenty.

• Yes sure we can measure the results of online knowledge sharing and prove value for money for each invested penny.
• Tell the IT people that there are stuck in the 80′s, far from reality and will soon be obsolete.
• We will not implement a website. It will be a mashup consisting of social networks, blogs, wikis, widgets, tagging, maps and much more.
• Let us move the informal conversation online. We will have real-time interaction from all employees tweeting 9-5.
• Forget about email. It is oudated and we will share openly information across departments and hierarchies.
• Inside – outside does not matter anymore, so re-think your Intranet and open it.
• Let’s give up the documentation management system and let all employees tag files how they think best.
• Your employees will have full control of the website themselves and we can turn off the workflow function.
• Forgot about desktop solutions. Outsource your applications to external providers.
• We should do it in the wiki fashion – everybody will add their knowledge and expertise across your organization web.
• Have you heard of Firefox and Skype? They are dangerous tools luckily blocked by your firewall.

Your thoughts?

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Next to information overload, probably comes network overload. Each day a new social network website appears. Another temptation for information and exchange, and again: new registration, same profile and more information to lock up. But with every new social network come along the questions: What about the filters? How do I get relevant information from my community? And, how do I manage all these memberships?

Illustration by Hugh MacLeod

Challenge 1: Managing networks
One easy example are profiles. Can you remember all of the websites on which you have created a profile, and which may even be long outdated? Why is not there a mechanism that allow you to include only one profile across social network websites? One such failed and disappointing attempt was Open Social, initiated by Google about two years ago. Some neat widgets can be integrated across social network applications, but altogether, social network sites often remain walled gardens. Unfortunately, open source solutions are not offering such mechanism (standards) either. Please let me know if you know of one.

One small solution – albeit only half step – to at least avoid working with countless logins is called Open ID, which works with several websites. You have got your login information on one server and can connect other websites through it, which theoretically can see only the information you want them to provide.

Challenge 2: Getting the information from networks

Who has got the time to log in to all different social network sites?

It becomes a hassle to log in and search for the latest information. I find that in many communities only bits and pieces are really relevant and interesting to me, but to only have access to that information is quite tricky – one way is to subscribe via RSS or emails. At Ning, you get a feed telling you each little nonsense detail: “A is now friends with B”, “C commented here”. The result is information overload. With emails you only need to persistently scan email content. I wish there was a dashboard of all of my community, which allowed me to filter all the information and stay on top of the news.

Challenge 3: Loose networks
What I love about blogging is that – on the contrary to social networks – each blog is part of a network, and bloggers and commenters create meaning through linking posts from different blogs. Relevance is something social networks are missing. For example, if I am interested in waste water projects in Eastern Africa, I would love to discover the given networks across websites, but more often I have to search countless islands of well intended social network websites. Websites such as the social bookmarking website “delicious” still create more relevance through a simple tag; what countless social network websites have not yet achieved.

Where are the brilliant solutions to link better relevant information?

You still need to find your human information hubs for best information. Technical help is not offered yet. Unfortunately there is now a lot of emphasis on real-time solutions and too little work on filters and creating relevance. As a result some of my friends and colleagues are leaving Facebook. Too much noise, too little benefit.

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Imagine we do not only use our mobile phones to make phones calls and SMS, but to contribute to science. How does that work? We can directly engage in micro-voluntarism or contribute valuable information without doing much more than carrying our mobile phone with us. Just as volunteers share computer processing power or look out for new galaxies, so can mobile phones become tools that collect valuable data.

Cairo traffic jam by tronics on flickr (CC)

How does that work?

Newest mobiles phones have global position system (GPS), which shows on a map where you are at the moment. Google and TomTom have developed – independently from each other – an initiative to use location-based data to gather real time traffic information. It is quite simple and genial. GPS can determine whether you move fast or slow, so if you are probably in a car or walking.  So, if feedbacks are sent from an area of slow or non movement where the map indicates a highway, then it is much likely that there is a traffic jam.

The Swiss datenvisualization.ch blog has a nice image to show how it works. (By the way a great resource!)

Location services through all devices

By the way Google offers location position system also for non-GPS enabled phones and browsers (Firefox). How? They have a huge database of mobile tower locations. Computers have an IP address, and a wifi access point delivers another proximity. A bit scary if you think of privacy.

Mobile phones sensors

But that is just the beginning. Nokia has developed a mobile phone with sensors to gather results from your environment, such as noise level, pollution, personal health, weather monitoring, etc. Scientists from MIT call it “Reality Mining” and “provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior.” The Economist has an interesting article called Mobile Phones: Sensors and Sensitivity.

“Eric Paulos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, predicts the rise of “citizen scientists” able to measure and sample their surroundings wherever they go. He foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism,… Dr Paulos has already equipped street sweepers in San Francisco and taxis in Accra, the capital of Ghana, with sensors to measure pollution levels, which he then used to create a map of each city’s environmental landscape. He plans to do the same with cyclists in Pittsburgh.“

This information can then be offered again for mobile phone users through applications with augmented reality, the latest hype around mobile phones. Tim Boucher has post, where he outlines a critical way augmented reality can lead to:

Privacy and surveillance

The flip side of the coin is privacy and potentially larger surveillance of citizens. Iphone owners already can get a taste of it. Pinch Media Spyware can be implemented by any Iphone-application-developer and can send your location and much more to the developer. Potentially, a programmer can develop profiles of movements. As long as a mobile is not really turned off, it continuously sends information and therefore can be located. In countries with authoritarian governments one can imagine, how easy it is to monitor exactly where dissidents are moving if they do not protect themselves.

Technology driven volunteerism?

Step by step mobile phones develop to a much broader instrument. It can help to valuable data for development such as another project described in the Economist article:  “A good example is the study of well-water contamination in Bangladesh conducted by Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University. His project combined readings from remote water-sensors with queries and data which villagers keyed into their mobile phones.“

In particular in development projects a sufficient data base is often not giving. Ushahidi has shown the potential for mobile crowdsourcing. Eric Paulos “foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism, the 21st-century equivalent of cleaning up the neighbourhood park.” However, it has to secure that this information guarantee privacy and are a free public good.

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Does social media or Web 2.0 flourish from itself?  Will Internet users consequently adopt social media? Lately, I have had my doubts and on the contrary, I see a widen gap between the social media contributors and enthusiasts and the “normal” Internet users, who conform the part of the Internet community which still has a majority in the web and moves through the Internet over Google search results. The difficulty is that it is too often underestimated how much one has to learn, how much time needs to be invested to engage in social media and to find or create own online social networks.

For a few years now, I have been participating in the social web, trying to figure out the newest cutting edge tools and enjoying a wider network of creative and inspiring people. But I often forget that the rest of the world is not necessarily as deeply involved in the Internet. A recent study in Europe found out that one third of Europeans have not ever used the Internet. Not rarely some argue that this is a generation issue, but I have my doubts.

I recently trained a group of young people and as a result experienced that only a small minority of them where involved in anything like social media. One can argue that it may be the German scepticism towards new technology. At a conference with many different workshops, I experienced that Web 2.0, as a topic, did not appeal many youngsters. In the past trainings I experienced once again how complex it is to be able to use all these different tools, let alone finding out which are the most useful ones. I thought back to the times when I had my learning curve and how long it took me to understand all these different concepts and opportunities.

So, I am sharing the statement of Howard Rheingold that social media literacy will be a next major challenge, or how he calls it, the 21st century media literacy. Tools are not that simple and self-explanatory. One major breakthrough are websites and communities such as Youtube, Facebook and Flickr, which have brought million users to the participatory web.

But are there so many other possibilities which can be achieved without training or the help from a friend? One huge challenge is the limit of appropriate training material or tutorials for complete beginners. There are of course fantastic videos in plain English and countless valuable stuff on the web, but the latter is mostly for already experienced users and rarely for “normal” Internet users. I am contemplating how that gap can be “small-en.” There are so many unanswered questions.

Some questions for example:

• Where and how do I find information through the social web?
• What are these clouds of words and what do they tell me?
• How do I know which information is accurate or right?
• Where shall I blog, for what audience and for which topic?
• How can I easily filter all this information?
• Why shall I communicate with strangers with just 160 characters?
• What happens with the profile I create on a social network website?
• Why shall I make all that stuff public, when I can privately exchange it all by email?

I could come up with many more questions, which are often tricky to answer, but it is essential to persuade more people engaging in the social web for knowledge sharing, learning and open innovation.  Of course there are countless blogs and growing twitters, who contribute great value and help, but they are all scattered around the web and rarely written for beginners.

Do you share my concern from the widen gap due to the fast pace to the web?

What do you think are the ways and means to reduce the gap?

Is there any great training material or tutorial available, which do not justify my critic?

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Accurate data is key for development work. Opening data sources can enhance transparency and improve collaboration between development projects. Surprisingly, development organizations show few signs of opening up data to create new channels to link information across organizations.

The age of the typewriter: Data exchange in developing organizations

Information exchange is a major activity between development organizations, but unfortunately it is still done manually – typing up data from different sources or, even more advanced, copying figures from an Excel sheet to a Word document. Such is the case of reports, where a great amount of information is gathered. These reports have valuable and high-quality content, but they need huge efforts to be done and time tends to be lost between writing and publishing. This is just one example of how in many cases data is exchanged or used. Each time the wheel is reinvented.

Simulating a project content in real-time

A website can be a report simulated in real-time, which combines data sources across organizations and research institutions. On it, you cannot only see the latest status, but also the latest developments and updates seen from different perspectives depending on various indicators. So, in a health project, a survey taken with nurses from one region is fitted into the system, as well as new results from a scientific research about the latest drop rate of vaccinations. All project actors involved contribute to a common database for better transparency, real-time reporting and potentially better decision-making.

Is that all future music? No.

• AKVO is experimenting with Really Simple Reporting. Gathering data and using mobile phones for real-time (live) reporting.

• Also, you can check my post on open API at the web2fordev gateway with the example of the world bank. A key role can be played by open API (Application Programming Interfaces). A good example is the API of the World Bank, where you can access 114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos. But of course photos can only be the beginning. Project data is way more important to enable different actors in the same field to benefit from data.

• An Open development camp is taking place in July in Washington.
  “There are a number of emerging activities focusing on improving the transparency of aid and allowing organizations, projects, researchers, practitioners, and clients in developing countries to have improved access to aid information, data on outcomes, knowledge, and tools.  We are getting closer to the day when anyone can easily determine who is doing what, where they are doing it, what they have learned, and who is funding them.”

• Check out data.gov with extensive data from the USA government or the projects of the sunlight foundation.

What is hindering an opening?

• Focus on proprietary closed software environments, which have just discovered open standards. The Sharepoint invasion, thanks to many IT departments, underlines this one way road.
• Internal websites from development organizations are focused on top-down communication. The Intranet represents information silos, where little data is combined.
• There are many playing fields from different departments using all kinds of solutions with little focus on interoperability. Many databases with different standards are often incompatible to work together.
• Development organizations focus more on securing confidential information than looking at the majority of data, which can be offered publicly.
• The disappointment after the hype of the 90′s where information management was a great solution. But things have changed during the last few years in terms of open standards, mashups and API’s.

Consequence: There are huge amounts of valuable data which has been little exploited. Data cannot be exchanged between development organizations and each organization collects its own data and reinvents the data wheel over and over again.

Surely, data alone does not make a project or an organization succeed and does not guarantee transparency. But open data could improve project work and planning a lot. It can certainly improve aid effectiveness. In older times, databases were often difficult to deal with and offered little output. Nowadays, potential for mashing data are different. A first step to take can be easy: Persistently work on offering data openly and work with simple common standards such as RSS. Sometimes it just needs one person: UN Democracy is an effort to give better access for UN Security council data.

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Google presents a new tool and a new hype is born. This time it is about online collaboration and promises nothing less than the end of email. Although the tool has clearly some great innovations, I cannot share the great enthusiasm and again the belief that a tool can change things for better. We are moving from one hype and tool to the next, but still, we do too little to drive the necessary core changes within organizations make it even possible to use tools such as Google Wave.

I have been reading so much euphoria about the new tool, which leads me to write this piece and mention a few enthusiasts, whom blogs I have continuously read and which I always enjoy.

“The Wave is not just another application, it’s a whole new way of using online information…  The Wave takes collaboration to a whole new level,” says Maish R Nichani. while Martin Koser writes, “Google Wave is poised to reshape (rewires I say) the nature of communication (yes, more face-to-face real-timelineness communication), improving the web experience.”

Real-time collaboration – what a nightmare!

Most excited was Lars Rasmussen, the developer of Google Wave, about the real-time collaboration. You can see changes made on a page within seconds. I have heard for the first time that the online collaboration’s biggest challenge was real-time changes, but on the contrary, that is the smallest problem. Bringing people to collaborate online is a huge challenge because of trust and the habit of a meeting culture, just to name a few. More importantly, I would argue that the growing speed of the Internet through life streams and tools such as Twitter and Friendfeed is made for a minority. Isn’t collaboration a process over hours, days and weeks?

We are witnessing more and more divides on the web

Who can and wants to master all this information every minute. How can you possible still work productively, on top of the ringing telephone and colleagues interrupting you. So, real-time collaboration can be great in a session, but if that is the future of collaboration, then it means that one has to collaborate 24/7. We have to ask us if instant communication really makes us more productive. Typing quickly a message in a smart phone in a go is perhaps not the greatest contribution. I argue that online collaboration, exchange and creativity needs time and breaks. I also doubt that this is a will change with the younger generation.

People, unlike tools, bring change

I wrote many posts about how different tools, such as blogs and RSS, can make a difference for information sharing and lead to more productivity and creativity. No doubt, Google Wave, combines here in an innovative way previous tools.

But all my experiences in online collaboration showed me that when a certain need has to exist. If that is the case even trivial mailing lists or a forum from the post web2.0 times can work dynamically. A fancy tool alone will not convince colleagues to share more information online. The tool can help and support interaction, but does not deliver interaction per se. Google Wave combines in an intelligent way many different streams knowledge worker have to deal with every day. But email is still seen as a core way to communicate and it will take many more years before this will change at large. Will new tools make it easier for that change to happen? I doubt it.

Lee Bryant makes a good point in this regard: “There is an echo chamber of voices confirming each other in the newest tool. “When they switch tools, the previous tools are “dead” and the new tool is “the future”. Meanwhile, millions of people continue using Outlook as a primary interface to their work, just as they did a decade ago.”

Luckily at least Google Wave is open source, which allows to be runned on an own server. Online collaboration takes a culture shift towards openness and trust to work online. In most organizations that takes a long road – even firms, who are the frontrunners such as IBM, face the same internal struggles, a colleague has recently told me.

A tool for one part of the world

Lars Rasmussen pointed out rightly that email is already forty years old and it is time for something new. But I am not sure that is the way forward because of one other reason: bandwidth!

Jonathan Goshier outlines this point nicely: “Of course, I have to point out that all this real-time communication stuff only matters to the fraction of people on the planet with good bandwidth. Here in Uganda, I’m so glad when an email actually makes it out of the queue that I don’t even bother to think about ‘rewinding’ conversations and dragging and dropping video! In all seriousness, it’s this reduction in basic utility for all users that worries me. Most Google’ products are by-in-large accessible no matter what kind of computer you’re on (except maybe Google Earth). With Wave they seem to be going down a path that might be a little more exclusive in nature. Not a deal-breaker but a concern none-the-less.”

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One of the greatest things about the Internet is that you can get in touch with people worldwide. I remember that back on the day I chatted for the first time and read from bluemoon11 that the sun was shining in Sidney. Twelve years ago that seemed breathtaking, but today it is rather amusing. Simultaneously, in the past, time volunteer engagement in other countries was a job quite difficult to tackle. You either knew someone or had friends from within, who were involved in a project, or got convinced by the volunteer in the pedestrian walk to donate money to their organization.

This has changed quite a lot, with fascinating new ways to individually engage on a peer to peer basis. Nowadays you can not only choose your donor, but also get yourself involved and follow the whole project and its outcome (e.g. Globalgiving or Kiva). There are also many more ways to engage such as the global neighbourhood Nabuur, where not everything is just about money, but also about the expertise that thousands of volunteers worldwide bring to the community. The social web has unleashed a huge wave of massive collaboration for social good already difficult to oversee. Being it science without borders, or working jointly on the first open source ecological village, or individually start their own little fundraising project, a small Facebook group, and ask for further action.

That brings up the questions: What organization will and can play in the future? We are slowly moving into ad-hoc peer-to-peer voluntarism independent from organizations. A nightmare for a classical fundraising approach. Certainly, organizations which depend on personal donations and mobilization of members will have a tough time if they do not include their audience.

But lets come back to new ways of volunteering. No doubt it is and will always be difficult to come up with new projects to fund, but there are now many existing projects which developed around all types of volunteer work efficiently. In many of this cases, costs are minimal and the output much higher thanks to all the expertise from participants. This is the case for a project outline not only written by two experts, but in a Wikipedia kind of fashion by numerous volunteers, which highlights all kinds of experiences. Will the chances of success be higher, or is the complexity of the project setting overwhelming? I imagine the more expertise there is, the better the project can be implemented. Look at the Katine project by the Guardian, where suddenly a project is portrayed from all different angles.

Another promising aspect of micro-volunteering can be seen on pages such as microvoluntarios.org and extraordinaries.org. In the first, volunteers can contribute with small tasks, which seems also attractive to companies, who donate the time of their employees. In the second, you can even donate through your mobile phone from wherever you are. Giulio Quaggiotto wrote a nice blog post about it.

Waiting for the bus and have nothing better to do than play around with your phone? Games are no longer the only options – now you can volunteer. The Extraordinaries (hat tip: Chris Kreutz) “delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot.” Here’s some examples of what you could do while waiting for your doctor’s appointment: translate micro-finance loan applications (Kiva); transcribe subtitles for human rights videos (Witness) or help immigrants improve their English (Phone ESL). A nice example of tapping into the collective “cognitive surplus” for social innovation purposes.

So, not mass, but micro-collaboration might be next big thing. There are many examples which show that this could have working results even though, so far, only a minority knows about these new ways of engaging. Donating was yesterday, engaging yourself is next.

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