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Blogging, next to Wikis, is the most popular instrument of new social software in an organization. A blog itself is quite a simple application. The value of blogging comes by the engagement of its authors and readers. Implementing blogs in an organization is not an easy task and needs time, resources and patience. I have worked with blogs within an organization for over three years and this pretty much summarizes my key experiences (I previously posted this on one blogging project).

Blogging examples
Blogs can be used in different contexts and for different purposes. Once again, they are just a tool, which has to be embedded in the organizational culture. So, for example, if a blog is just an add-on to existing tools, then will you quickly hear the information overload argument. These are some ways to use blogs:

• Project management: A project history with milestones, document references and discussions.
• Public relations: An external blog to engage to different audiences.
• Stakeholder management: A blog to keep a network together and communicate on transparent on peer-to-peer basis.
• Employee: Let the experts in your organization speak on their behalf and create their own audiences or spheres of interests.
• Department: A channel to communicate relevant information. A supply for all those emails and a forum to get together. Who knows what is happening three doors away?
• Thematic: An overlapping blog for specific theme. It involves all employees who are interested or working on that particular theme.
• Process: Use it for quality control to involve all employees in certain processes, to highlight problems and elaborate solutions.
• Customer-relationship-management: Let your internal customers, for example of the accountancy department, engage openly, to send feedback and discuss with them potential improvements.
• Do you know of any others? I am sure there are more additional examples.

Blogging success factors
Each of the above listed examples need a slightly different approach, but I want to highlight general success factors, which I separated into four different phases: preparation, marketing, engagement, sustainability. I have put in some vague percentage to show the kind of effort (time and resources), which have to be taken into consideration. Do you agree with this figures?

Preparation (30%)

• In essence, to set up a blog is technically easy.
• Emphasis on design: It is important that your authors and readers like the look of the blog.
• Do not use the standard blog templates. Blogs are flexible applications, so design or adapt them to your specific needs. Embed carefully additional widgets (different information boxes).
• The front-page is key to set incentives for engagement: Focus on well elaborated categories for orientation or offer tagging, highlight the recent comments, offer a search field and different ways for subscription.
• Do not plan too much and wait too long! I know it is a contradiction to the points above. Most things shall be changed through feedback from your audience. Blogging is an ongoing experiment.
• Think about a policy or some points for motivation to set a framework. IBM and Sun have some good examples.
• From the start up leave the blog open to as many authors as possible and of course for any reader to comment.
• Calculate long term resources (at least two years) for bloggers and to facilitate the endeavour.
• Do not be afraid of user administration. It is very easy to do.
• Elaborate how you can reduce other communication channels such as email for blogging.
• Discuss with the management, what could be the incentives and obligations to engage.

Marketing (20%)

• Get together a critical mass of motivated bloggers. These are the ones that bring your blog alive, particularly in the starting phase — best are multipliers. You should have at least 5 dedicated bloggers.
• Create a little vision or story about why you create this blog and focus on the benefit for its users. For example, highlight synergy effects and public personal knowledge sharing.
• Do a little road show in your organization to bring employees on board. Although word by mouth propaganda is in my experience the strongest success factor for this community driven endeavour.
• Include, when possible, short trainings. We often use already existing frequent meetings for a half hour presentation. That was in most cases enough to start.
• Establish a little help section with frequently asked questions and if possible a screencast of how to use the blog.

Engagement (30%)

• Particularly in the beginning, it is important to motivate people to join. Comment on blog posts. Propose to publish content only sent by email.
• Practice an open style of writing and set incentives for different writing styles to lower the barrier for participation. For example, formal announcement next to personal stories.
• Think about the best way to let readers be notified about a blog post. Best would be a RSS (feed) option, but consider also classical email notification.
• Give answers in blog post through emails instead and send only links to the post.
• Encourage for discussions and pick up interesting developments happening on other communication channels.
• Leave the blog content development open to discussion and the audience as an incentive.
• Technical difficulties were mostly around missing tags or categories, file upload and large size photos.

Sustainability (20%)

• Do not underestimate the facilitation throughout the blog life span.
• Think about regular evaluation to get detail feedback. Why are users participation and why not?
• Fluctuation is often high, so scheduled regular presentations or trainings are necessary.
• Answer user requests and registrations as quickly as possible.
• Integrate your blog into other existing web tools (e.g. Intranet) for example, though feeds.
• Include other wanted features such as document folder, event calendar, etc.

This is a blog post series about my experiences on web2.0 in an organization, consisting of at least 26 different blog posts highlighting potentials and challenges and focusing on success factors. Please feel free to comment, contact me for further information and/or let me know which other topics within this context you would be interested on.

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Three years ago I started experimenting for the first time with web2.0 at my organization (GTZ). In Egypt, we implemented a blog to link different projects of GTZ. Since then, I have been taking part in several initiatives and joined many discussions with the IT, communication, knowledge management and other departments. I have learnt a lot about the complexity of organizations and the opportunities and obstacles to engage in social media.

Therefore, I decided to share the different experiences and challenges we have encountered and try to identify success factors, hoping this can help others who are also dealing with social media at an organization and encouraging them to implement it. I will write about this in a series of blog-posts over the coming months.

It is not the tools

To begin with, being a bit critical, I think there is a risk to believe just tools such as wikis or blogs can achieve something that was not there before. Because it touches quickly the core of an organization, namely its culture. If the organizational setting is based upon strict hierarchy, information silos and a very formalistic approach, then clearly open sharing and a horizontal communication is difficult to be implemented, with or without web2.0. Some would argue that new forums for this kind of transparency and openness can have an impact on the organizational culture, though.

What is the character of your organization?

Identify the right scenarios!

However, before implementing web2.0 tools in an organization, it is very important to analyze the already existing instruments, the organization communication behaviours, the degree of openness and trust of knowledge sharing, and the social setting. Most important web2.0 is best used where the quickest win is possible particular at the beginning.

So what are the usual scenarios where employees exchange knowledge?

• Is it mainly in the cafeteria, on the telephone or mainly through email?
• Does the organization rely on a dense meeting culture and direct contact?
• How many different tools for communication already exist, other than telephone, meetings, emails, etc.?
• So far, how have interactive web based applications worked? What went well and what wrong?

This list could be easily extended, please write me if you have some other points.

To find the right tools for the existing work scenarios

The challenge is that there are not only many different tools for online communication, but also they can be used so differently. The trick is to identify a deficit in a typical scenario of work context and find the right tool for it. Particularly, in the beginning, it is very helpful
to target a need and gain a quick win.

For instance, a wiki can be used for very different purposes and are best adapted to the organizational need.

• Use it to write the protocol each week and to have a central place to follow up tasks. It can be written during the meeting and everybody can add it instantly or edit it later on.
  Advantage: It is a small start, implemented in a existing process and you can learn on the fly.
  Disadvantage: Only a small area of work or project management.
• A glossary for a department to collect precise information for standard processes.
  Advantage: The benefit of sharing can be shown quickly when a critical mass of employees contribute. Writing together what already exists.
  Disadvantage: Needs support from the whole department. cannot easily be established if staff does not want to share and it needs trainingfor each one who is involved.
• To organize the next company party or trip and use it for logistics.
  Advantage: For a temporary time and involves a small team. Shows transparency of the planning process to other colleagues.
  Disadvantage: Needs dedicated people and proper gardening of the wiki structure. Wikis can become easily confusing in larger projects (logistics).

These are, of course, only a few examples, but they shall show the variety of different implementation options. To analyze first what are normal work scenarios and then adapt a tool to it, it is therefore a key success factor.

This is a blog post series about my experiences on web2.0 in an organization, consisting of at least 26 different blog posts highlighting potentials and challenges and focusing on success factors. Please feel free to comment, contact me for further information and/or let me know which other topics within this context you would be interested on.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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As I have previously argued in a recent post, many NGOs have quite conventional organizing forms, facing the challenge of openness and often not founding a way to deal with open networks and a two way conversation. A key step to openness and different understanding of roles such as an organization, its members and stakeholders comes from a cultural shift towards learning.

NGO as learning organizations

Mariëtte Heres wrote an interesting article called “Aid is a knowledge industry.” She emphasizes on the importance of knowledge sharing and learning within and between NGOs and states that, “although NGOs are taking more interest in knowledge management, they have so far failed to recognize that they are part of a knowledge industry, of which the delivery of goods and services is only a part.”

If an NGO wants to become a learning organization, it is important that – in addition to acquiring substantive knowledge – it learns more about learning. ‘You need a learning attitude in this sector. And if you want to learn, you have to experiment. Even if the experiment is a failure, you still learn from it. Knowledge is the result of reflection’.

The ICCO alliance is in this regard quite progressive. It established publicly available “Learning and Sharing Spaces.” This ambitious attempt for a learning organization results in better understanding and innovation through transparency.

Open source everything

Mark Surman marks in his post, “Open, philanthropy and a theory of change,” a step further and argues for radical transparency, which “means opening up not only your yearly books, but also openly sharing your planning, learning and relationships as you go along.” In an inspiring visualization he describes his vision for an open knowledge society filled with possibilities. All organizational boundaries diminish — a key is to listen, learn and evolve with the community. The result is open philanthropy with a constant flow of ideas.

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In older days, new software and applications came to an organization via the IT department. Nowadays, it is easier for social software to reach organizations in different ways because no firewall can stop it. To keep social software and its potential for knowledge sharing behind the firewall it is a contradiction.

Social software arrives in an organization in many different ways. Traditionally, it used to be installed software, where the desktop was — or still is — protected to prevent any misuse. As the web becomes a platform, applications are more and more web based. For example, a whole office suite can be accessed online. Calendars, project management and to-do lists are also offered for free. And of course blogs, wikis and social networks are just one click away. Clearly this changes the role of the IT department.

Dennis D. McDonald elaborates the different adoption models social media. He sees four different models in which social media and social networking are taken up by organizations:

• Top down
  In the “top down” model organization’s leaders implement and lead the adoption of tools and techniques such as blogs, wikis, social networking systems, shared bookmarks, and podcasting.
• Bottom up
  In the “bottom up” model the workers start blogging, using wikis and social networking systems to advance their jobs.
• Inside out
  This is a variation of “bottom up,” only this time the tools are adopted internally by the organization and their usage spills over into external markets, members, or customers of the organization.
• Outside in
  In this model the adoption of social media and social networking by the marketplace progresses to a point where the organization can no longer ignore it, especially if usage by competitors starts to become public.

But why is it interesting to know how it happens?

1. It says a lot about the organizational culture.
2. It lets you connect it better to existing web solutions.
3. Too many different social software not connected nor taken with enough care will lead to another information overload and frustration.
4. Social media needs its audience and that can flourish itself in an organizational environment as long as people are aware of it.

Top down

It has its advantages because tools are available right in the organization and resources are given to promote them. However, there are not necessarily adopted as easily because it does not prove an added value per se. Especially, focusing purely on a tool can become easily a dead end. More important to motivate engagement in the dialogue in order to experiment is a key, and that is much easier with the support of the management. However, the top down approach can only be a trigger or role model, but success evolves through a horizontal community.

Bottom up

It is the most obvious way and what is happening in many cases. Facebook is, for example, a mixture of private and professional contacts. But can a social network be build informally through a web in an organization? Employees can easily experiment with blogs out in a secure place for free. The time until a specific software is on every desktop can take ages. In contrast, web tools are a click away and they are getting better everyday. This “guerilla method” has also its disadvantages that the more people there are, the more different tools are used. Organizational knowledge is not linked and dispersed over the net. It is also questionable whether it reaches a lot of colleagues.

Inside out
This is, however, an great attempt for an open network, where the organization can benefit best from internal and external knowledge. Few companies or organizations are doing this as far as I know. But until today the potential is not used if you look at social network, which marginal or not, are all grasped by an Intranet. I can think of Sun Microsystems. This approach blurs the boundaries, but leads to improved learning and innovation. That is what the book “Wikinomics” is all about. The resistance, especially from the management to it, is surely the strongest for many different reasons. This approach leads, however, to interesting debates about whether information has to be confidential and what should be open for sharing.

Outside in
This is happening still very rarely. Surely blogs and wikis are tested in many organizations. However the outside pressure on organizations is in my opinion still low, because not enough organizations have proven the success of advantage of social software. However Larry Huston gave an interesting interview Innovation Networks: Looking for Ideas Outside the Company.

I don’t believe we’re at a tipping point yet, but I think, in the future, the companies that identify those assets outside and begin to build relationships with them have a real shot at building a competitive advantage and preferential relationships.

Often, employees have to find their own way to get all sort of information out from the web. A comprehensive feed subscription would be needed to deliver employees with good and relevant information available.

How does web2.0 arrive in your organization? What are the obstacles before it flourishes? Can you see the different ways it happens? Which key success factors are embraced by an organization and its members?

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[Published in the Internationale Politik magazine in December 2007.]

How the participative Web 2.0 challenges development cooperation – and why this is a chance for development organizations 

Adyaka, a village in the heart of Uganda, needs a new trade school. None of the 4,000 inhabitants have the necessary skills to develop a business plan an the government has not been of any help at all. So the citizens of Adyaka have had to come up with a plan. With the help of the Internet they petitioned, literally, the whole world and asked for support for their village. Via the global neighbor network nabuur.com, volunteers worked in conjunction with the villagers to set up a business plan. Adyaka is not alone it its quest for support. 10.000 volunteers, who provide their skills and expertise, are available to help up to 150 communities. This web-based global neighbor network allows people from all over the world to discuss basic approaches, develop concepts and receive immediate feedback regarding the difficulties and the success during the implementation process.

Nabuur is just one of many platforms with innovative players which have emerged in recent years. The plurality of their approaches has one thing in common: each and every one is using the internet to promote and advance new development ideas. The traditional development cooperation is being confronted with a new, and so far, unfamiliar dynamic. The concept of ‘help to self-help’ defines the roles of the participants in an entirely innovative way: The borrowers pick the lenders.

The internet, since its breakthrough ten years ago, has been the subject of constant change. More than a Billion users have transformed it into a complex and multi-layered social network. The catchword “Web 2.0” allows internet users to create new individual realms within networks, users swap their knowledge and work together to create concepts and develop solutions. How can biomass be used to generate energy? The answer is provided by Howtopedia, a platform for applied knowledge, which supplies simple sets of technical instructions. The technology is secondary — the main motors of this spontaneous Internet movement are openness, transparency, networking and a focus on innovation. Cross-national project ideas are developed uniting a wide range of experts, interested parties and above all people in need of support. Cooperation develops via the peer-to-peer principle, directly, world-wide and very casual. In the past past, users exchanged songs in decentralized networks, now they are exchanging concepts for African villages. Organizations are working together with civil societies, individuals and groups form ad-hoc alliances across borders. Charles Leadbetter, author of the book “We Think“, sees an unlimited creative potential in these flat self-organized networks that are no longer in need of a classical organization. A new generation of social entrepreneurs, activists and volunteers are on their way to establish their own definition of international understanding.

This also opens the door for new and innovative approaches of the entire foreign aid field. Globalgiving.org is a platform that guarantees investors that 85-90% of the investment will be used locally and that the project will get off the ground in less than 60 days. The implementation, the successes and failures can be tracked through the entire cycle of the project — available to the public via the internet. A network of ideas, a global exchange for social and innovative projects, has been created. Benefactors are often rich philanthropists who have access to large sums of money, however, small donations still play a role. The main players of these networks are small teams that rely on individual, direct help and the ability of people to volunteer their time. At Kiva.org, anybody willing to do so can participate in financing a fish booth for a woman in Ecuador directly from their home computer. Micro-lending between the lenders and the borrowers is a direct result of the popular micro-financing in the worldwide fight against poverty. Kiva.org has disbursed 13 Million Dollars with an over 99% rate of repayment. The cooperation within local organizations aided in the development of an effective and transparent approach which questions the status quo of traditional foreign aid organizations. The lender will personally get his update from the woman owning the fish booth regarding the progress of the project. The consequences of these networks are highly underestimated, even though the approach has its own dynamic and will change development cooperation.

These platforms have been developed mainly in the North. In the South however, innovative social networks, which are directly connected with the local needs, have emerged. In Egypt, for example, the opposition movement has successfully established a network via the Internet. Human right activists use weblogs to discuss the current political situation, and also a homegrown Arab public forum has been developed alongside the state-controlled press. Activists use the newest innovative instruments for their campaigns such as posting photographs taken by mobile phones in order to document the manipulation of Egyptian elections. Even the Diaspora is using the internet quite extensively in order to develop and propagate ideas regarding business and common public interest. Mukuru.com, for example, is a platform where one can buy products for relatives living in Zimbabwe. As the internet in Africa has been getting connected with mobile phones, articles, such as presents, can be bought by SMS. The migrants do not only support their own country with money transfers, but they also use the internet strategically to turn acquired knowledge into support for development projects. This sort of ‘brain gain’ results not only in innovative business practices, but also in political change. And so is the case of Mzalendo.com, who has “An eye on the Kenya Parliament”. The process of change does not only depend on financial support, but also on the commitment and dedication and the successful networking capabilities of all people involved.

Internet, in developing countries, promote the discussion of political, economical and social change. Often bloggers act as citizen journalists. They shed light on poverty and criticize policies of governments, even the role of donors. Citizen journalism develops in a multitude of ways and in its own pace, but it is, overall, becoming more and more professional. The Nata Village Blog is painting a vivid picture of the daily fight against AIDS in a Botswana village. Due to its local importance, a blogosphere has developed entirely in Swahili. And then there is the worldwide blogger portal Global Voices which is being translated by volunteers in numerous different languages. The press agency Reuters supports the freedom of the press of Global Voices and posts its content on their own website. The rule among activists is that transformation has to come from the inside out, and one’s own initiative is the main force in the process of change.

The formation of these new social networks for change represents a great opportunity for development organizations: participation in these networks opens up opportunities for a common dialog on development political issues. The World Bank just launched its third blog titled “How to end Poverty in South East Asia”. The United Nations, together with the leaders of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other organizations, have opened up a dialog with development experts and the public. Pierre Jacquet, Chief Economist of “Agence Francaise de Developpement” (French Development Bank, FDB), spoke out on the press conference for the launch of the blog: “The heads of development organizations are sometimes portrayed as inaccessible bureaucrats, who decide among themselves on the faith of the world’s poorest nations. Through this blog the members will openly share their ideas, their doubts and even their frustrations manifesting their interest for dialog with other development professionals, students and the broader public.” These networks open up a previously unused potential in terms of voluntary commitment and expertise. Development organizations such as the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) can increase the efficiency of their work through targeted participation in these networks. The authors of the book “Wikinomics”, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, believe that only those organizations, which follow the path of networking, change the culture of their communication and benefit from this productivity potential, will survive.

Whoever is willing to contemplate the genuine complexities of project work cannot fail to see the need for a broad range of expertise and an interdisciplinary approach. The public, cooperative development of project initiatives via Wiki websites, whose text can be edited by every user, is technically simple. However, it calls for a new culture of knowledge exchange. The recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demands cooperative work due to the complexity of the problems, as well as the potential benefits to be gained from an opening up of organizations and companies. Many enthusiasts of the new web believe that the approach of free and open source software of freeware opens up a new way of problem solving. This goes hand in hand with efforts of the ‘open access’ initiative to supply valuable sources of information, like the Conservation Commons Initiative of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and its database about biodiversity with the help of numerous organizations. The question is how development organizations will benefit and take advantage of those new resources and how much they will contribute in order to achieve their goals more efficiently.

The cycles of change on the internet are fast; the opposition, in light of this dynamic, significant. The additional benefit must constantly be under investigation since there is the possible danger of a cacophony of discourses. No one today can say whether the theory of the Long Tail, which sees the niche as a driving force of the Internet, can be successfully applied to cooperative development work. Another question is if the transparency of the internet is adequate protection from financial fraud.

An obvious challenge is the lack of participation. The cost alone for access to the internet in many African countries is higher than the costs in Europe. The lack of technology is just one of many problems; the qualifications of the users another. The mobile telephone plays an important role, providing a bridge to the Internet with Africa and displaying the highest growth rate of any continent. But still only a small number of the citizens in developing countries have access to the internet. However, it is the social entrepreneurs and non-governmental organizations in Africa which have been quick to make use of the new opportunities, developing a range of initiatives and ideas. Development organizations are slowly joining them and they can learn a lot from the horizontal dialog. As Pierre Jacquet remarked at the opening of “Ideas4Development”: “This blog is in your hand let’s begin the debate.”

Download article: network-of-ideas.pdf

This article does not fall under the creative commons license. All rights reserved.

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Frequent readers know I am quite enthusiastic about the social web, its potentials and cultural impact. Especially when it comes to knowledge sharing and information and communication technologies for development. However, I also have concerns and see obstacles about the participative web — its development and its divide. So as a start of 2008, I will try not to add predictions, instead some challenges.

1. Exclusion
Connectivity is not only about access but also being able to use the web with all its potentials. To express oneself with social media and to engage in social networks. The social web has a philosophy of openness and sharing, but social networks often have typical exclusive patterns. Getting the right information through feeds does not make you more inclusive. The nowadays web is more participative than ever before, but still strives along lines of exclusion. Exclusion is around having instant access, and being from the western hemisphere, having a better education and getting more attention. The front-runners are far ahead of normal internet users. My concern is that “those already rich in knowledge, information and connections may just get richer” (Charles Leadbeater).

2. Complexity
The social web opens the door for participation, but simultaneously it widens the gap between insiders and outsiders. Although the web is getting easier — just 3 clicks to a blog — the barrier for entry is still high. Not everybody is as well connected, experienced and qualified to deal with all these tools and opportunities. To understand blogs, wikis, feeds and social bookmarking takes time. I taught a relative of mine the other day the first steps on how to use the Internet and realized once again how complex the web has got. There are so many tools but so little explanation. The plain in English videos are a rarity.

3. Orientation
As great as folksonomies are and as smart as the wisdom of crowd is, it still does not give us sufficient orientation in the world wide web. The delicious startpage will make you think the web is about programmers, but what does it tell an internet newbie? To find relevant information can still be a difficult task or even within the social web takes time and resources. Social bookmarking and blogs are amazing sources of information, however, you have to find them or have the know-how to grasp their potential. Web2.0 got much more user-friendly, but a lot more has to be done to explain the opportunity for everybody. For some people, web2.0 made the web even more complex because the voices of many do not necessarily give orientation.

4. Many voices
The number of blogs is growing every day and social networks attract many new members, but there is hardly any two-way-conversation on most blogs. Millions of blogs do not have comments, thousands of facebook groups have soon after they started lost their life. The many voices often do not get as many responses. Especially when the web is used to promote social change, it is questionable to which extent this can be done over the web. Often, great stories in blogs are not read because nobody links to them. The social web has its own competition over attention and this easily will forget Kenya, Let’s Talk Scoble-gate!

5. Speed
The speed of development is breathtaking and hardly to follow. Only a minority keep up the pace. A bit more than ten years ago the only digital presence I had was on an answering machine. Nowadays new gadgets, tools and opportunities fly up daily and there is hardly any time to try the older ones, because they are bypassed by “better” solutions. That is the case of most blog posts which receive no attention after a few days. It is hardly possible to follow the speed of innovation and question whether this is necessary. Alone wikis and blogs bear a great potential and have started to be used in different contexts.

6. Information overload
From my work, I look on web2.0 from a knowledge management perspective. Blogs and wikis are surely no miracle because they simply cannot supply a real good face to face meeting and a creative brainstorming in a group. As a recent study tells that 2008 is the year of the information overload. Emails are seen as a key obstacle, but implementing blogs and wikis can also lead to the similar result. First comes the need and then maybe a web solution, but only one really fits best what is already there. Web2.0 tools can become a time waster and too little is asked about the benefit of them. Or as Bev Trayner wrote in her post, maybe less is better when it comes to online tools.

7. Filter
I am amazed about the information power gain through feeds and getting more and more decent quality information out of the web. But it is still not easy to filter, or it takes a lot of time to get qualitative information. It is still difficult to find relevance in the social web, so I can click through a world of wisdom. Language is a key challenge and also the dominance of the masses like in the old media.

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From a knowledge management perspective Intranets are vital but so far inefficient. On one side, it is the only place where organizational information can be decentralized access 24/7. On the other side, the web behind the firewall is mostly top-down driven and hierarchical structured. The results are that only a tiny little fraction of social networking potential is possible and that most Intranets literally hinder possibilities to share knowledge.

Failure of Intranet
Well designed and managed Intranets cover most topics from an organization or company. However, if you look at the potential of social networking, knowledge sharing and learning, the internal web is in most cases failing terribly. Intranets represent top-down communication and no personal knowledge is offered, except for some neat yellow pages. Some companies already replaced their content management system with a wiki, where employees change things as they know better. Instead, the norm is content management system and useless work flows. So, person A writes a text, person B approves it, and person C publishes it. There is a higher chance to call some colleagues to get better information than finding it in the internal web. Thus, only a tiny fraction of what is really happening in an organization is offered. One consequence is that learning in an organization happens only outside the web.

The clash of cultures
There is a clash of culture between the Intranet sympathizers and those for open horizontal knowledge sharing. At the one end, there is the belief that information needs to be authoritatively managed and has to be standardized. Intranets often represent the wish of all relevant knowledge could be codified. At the other end, there is the belief that IT knowledge management solutions have to change, and emphasis should be on social networking. The read-write or collaborative web finally offers to the employees to use what fits best their needs. This, of course, changes the picture of what is happening in an organization. Intranets are planed mostly by small teams and too little focused is on the real needs of employees. Why do not let employees create their internal web then?

It will come anyway
I think the classical Intranet — a neat little homepage with different topics, a representation of each department, some yellow pages and maybe a document management system — is history in a few years. Having the three click blog installation, easy collaboration through wikis and web based office products, and be able to connect in own networks will completely burr the lines between the Intranet and Internet. For so many work related tasks, tools are already freely available in the internet and employees will sooner or later take use of that on a massive scale. It will come anyway and it surely might be a bit chaotic to some extent. But, which meeting is consistent, purely orientated on knowledge sharing and learning in your organization? Furthermore, it is a big chance in an organizational setting because it can deepen already existing work relations in an even more trusted environment.

Downsides

• Obviously, one danger is that all information, conversation and ideas are spread over the internet. How can you find out about what your colleague is doing? The internal search engines does not grasp it and again the possible transparency and exchange is lost because of too many tools in too many places.
• In the beginning it does need a learning phase of how to use each tool best. The key is to bring the right mixture of tools together, which fits best to the organizational culture.
• A holistic approach is important, otherwise social software leads to an information overload. Therefore filters, feeds and consistency are decisive.
• Social software depends heavily on its employee’s engagement, contrary to conventional Intranets. If there is no motivation, then better stick to the old Intranet.
• Web knowledge sharing can be very efficient, but it does not replace direct face to face communication.

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The social web is quite separated in different language domains. English is a key language to bridge different cultures, but it can also be a dead end. Worldwide collaboration can only work in a multilingual network.

English is one of the major languages on the net, whether it is on blogs, social networks or the chitchat on twitter. But languages are still breeding fast though the social web; the Japanese blogosphere is one of the biggest ones, for example, Google’s social network, Orkut, is the biggest in Brazil and India. Tanzania is also one example for a vibrant Swahili blogosphere. Chinese mandarin will be the most spoken language on the web. Global Voices is one of the few websites trying to connect cultures. Volunteer translators give insights to countries and cultures where usual media outlets do not report from.

But let’s have a look at the issue of language. Dave Gray has a nice visualization for different dimension of language here. He drew the four steps of language:

1. Communication
2. Conversation
3. Collaboration
4. Co-creation

On this United Nation website for cultural diversity it says, “Language not only communicates, it defines culture, nature, history, humanity and ancestry.” There are between 6.000 and 7.000 spoken languages on this world and unfortunately half of them are in threat of extinction. Language is fundamental for the collaborative web. It can enrich a discourse through blogs.

Translating machines have improved significantly. One example is the google translation for Arabic. But when it comes to collaboration, it is up to users to find a way to interact. How can we achieve this multilingual web? It needs a high language skill to collaborate effectively and creatively. A long tail of language has emerged. The future focus should be on networks with cross language interaction. Each language has a unique set of concepts, beliefs and expressions, which risk to be lost if all relies only on English.

So it is a dilemma. On one way English allows us to communicate worldwide, but at the same time it narrows down the potential for collaboration by simply contradicting cultural diversity. It greatly connects worldwide people, however, it is limited to small proportions of web users capable to read and write in English. I am personally in the same dilemma. I would love to blog in German — as being it my native language, my writing is much better — but I decided to blog in English to be able to network in this vast social network. Mixing languages can be possible as we have done it through the web2fordev conference blog, but even for that blog it was quite difficult to get French speaking authors involved.

Here it is an interesting statistic for the main languages in the Internet. There is a tendency towards a few strong languages. There are four languages not based on Latin characters. By the way, it took more than ten years after the Internet’s major breakthrough for ICANN to announced on the Internet Governance Forum to offer internationalized country code for top-level domains — and this just happened recently. This would mean that Chinese or Arabic letters become possible in domains. Ethan Zuckerman wrote more on that, and here, the UNESCO.

At last, languages are also important to protect our environment and can be decisive to preserve our biodiversity.

The links between language, culture and the environment suggest that biological, cultural and linguistic diversity should be studied together, as distinct but closely and necessarily related manifestations of the diversity of life on Earth. Researchers have referred to this new field of study as “biocultural diversity”.

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I have already written about 10 challenges for web2.0 in an organization, but this time I would like to highlight two decisive factors: Culture and a new paradigm of knowledge sharing. Furthermore, this post elaborates the differences between web2.0 in private life vs. in an organizational setting.

1. Culture is a key factor. Blogs and wikis change communication drastically to a horizontal level and make it transparent. Workflows are given up. Openness is a key to accept ideas and ongoing changes. If employees do not dare to share, the greatest tools will end up on failure. In a way, hierarchy and power driven communication are poison for such a participative approach.
2. Embrace the new paradigm for knowledge sharing. The collaborative web stands in contrast to many efforts trying to codify and categorize information. Making web2.0 work in an organization requires to accept knowledge in its different dimensions. Information cannot be own by only one party. Information can be sorted, interpreted and exchanged in multiple ways. Knowledge and learning evolves in a network.

To clarify the second point, I referred to David Snowden, who has mentioned this nice quote in a recent podcast. Elsua has some nice posts about the podcast.

Web2.0 is too unstructured to fit into an organizational setting, which heavily relies on codified and categorized knowledge. When you move to on a free flow of ideas what web2.0 about – then this kind of contradicts to processes and hierarchies of an organization.

All of this is much more difficult than expected in a conventionally run company or organization. In private life, this is so much easier to accept the collaborative web and to play around with. No surprise web2.0 is driven mainly by individuals, and organizations are slow followers.

A nice comparison between enterprise2.0 and web2.0, on the ‘Dif-fer-en-ti-ate blog,’ highlights the differences and the likely challenges:

web2.0 vs. enterprise2.0

• Organisational structure: Flat vs Hierarchical–flat organisational structures encourage collaboration while hierarchical ones hinder.
• Attitude: Sharing vs Hoarding–in your private life you share information freely without expectation of recompense, while at work, all people ask is, ‘what is in it for me?’.
• Visibility: Anonymity vs Recognition–in Web2.0 you are one of the herd; the majority of users can assume that there is anonymity in a crowd. At work people seek recognition for their contribution as career progression can depend on it.
• Society: Public vs Private–in Web2.0 you are able to control the information you share as well as free to create alternative persona’s, masks, behind which you can hide. In Enterprise2.0 there is no anonymity, everything you say and do online can be traced back to you.

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Leila Summa has given a great presentation called “Wanted: Employee2.0 – when technologies wait for their users.” She presented it in German but here I have translate some parts. (Complete presentation). It underlines again how fast this new forms of communication and opportunities evolve, how much faster organizations need to react, and how profound the culture impact will be sooner or later.

I found especially these two slides intriguing because they describe the future development in work life, the visions of many enthusiastic people about cultural changes of the new web, and the personal effect on the employee. The first slide accurately describes the old way of work life for employee1.0. Translation starting from the top center then clockwise:

(1) material values, (2) life-time position, (3) security, (4) stability & continuity, (5) personal contacts with a friend, (6) employee as a cost factor, (7) top-down – one way communication, (8) internal communications, (9) belief in hierarchy, (10) days/hours, (11) values of liability and acceptance.

The second slide describes wonderfully how the present work life 2.0 hits the employee. Translation clockwise: (1) immaterial values, (2) manager for time/freelancing, insecurity, (3) flexibility & change, social contacts with many friends, (4) employee as a knowledge source, (5) bottom down – two way communication, (6) internal relations, (7) social network, (8) minutes/seconds, (9) values of self fulfillment.

These slides show the changes of work life and to which large extent this will be shaped by the web. It certainly shows some downsides as instant communications. Not without surprise I see more in newspapers articles with titles such as “in the future anonymity is a luxury” or “the happiness of being unattainable.” What I miss on the slides is the culture of openness, sharing and the free flow of ideas in the participatory web.

(via PR Blogger)

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Complexity
Another key lesson was the big question of ‘how to best combine all these web2.0 tools to obtain better results.’ Everybody is still experimenting –this might be what web2.0 is all about. Nevertheless, I understood the importance of taking a holistic approach and use a combination of blogs according to the objective. So, experimenting still needs a strategic approach; in that way users do not fear an information overload. Blogs, for example, can be used for knowledge sharing, but then they may need to be very different when used for a campaign. And how are wikis and blogs linked to preserve transparency? I did not hear about strategies for best combining all the tools using available data and rss feeds. How do I offer all these channels for collaboration and still filter what is important to me? This has to be overcome to prove the benefit and not just use the technology for the sake of it.

I had the feeling everybody shared an enthusiasm for the potential that development can have, but I also only saw a few clear structured projects. A complete contrast to that was Damir Simunic, who talked about Collaboration on the Edge of Network. He basically argued that web2.0 is still too far away from broad usage by presenting a tool relying solely on emails, which has enough capabilities. Even though I find email is often an information overload application, Damir gave an interesting example: at the WHO, a 20.000 people network manages over easy mailing lists and easy features, proving traditional ways can be successful, especially in developing countries.

Networks
Dan McQuillan wrote a powerful wake up post and summarized very good the strategic questions about ‘dealing now with the available possibilities through web2.0.’ To me, it seems the power of web2.0 has been shared by most participants, but what could be done with it now and how to engage it was still unclear. In my panel, I asked therefore, whether organizations are open to sharing, willing to network and engage in such a participative manner. The conference showed how web2.0 brings an unusual mixture of individuals (e.g. activists), organizations, media and companies together. It needs a change in culture towards more openness and trust, which is not always easy –after all, who wants to or can accept that his or her wiki text has suddenly changed?
Collaboration through web2.0 is happening between a diversified landscape of these actors, and I wonder what will be the outcome of that. I liked the way Dan quotes Charles Leadbeater on ‘low-cost, self-organising networks will innovate all kinds of needed solutions.’ I hope that this innovation will be open source driven.

Content
Interestingly, there were few discussions about content. What is the type of content that will be delivered, shared and remixed through web2.0? What kind of content is there and how can it be virtually exchanged in a rather oral culture? Moses Kisembo and Jon Corbett summarized it nicely in a discussion we had. What helps all these new forms of information and technology when one does not know how to use them, and then it does not have any benefit, e.g. for a farmer? The question of relevance of all this user generated content was rarely discussed. Ethan Zuckermann emphasized in his presentation how important filters in this regard are. How to filter the information or voices to a meaningful size to find all that that is important to me. Aggregators can help, and so do social bookmarking sites, which show evaluated ranked webistes. More important are however, people, who sort, comment and translate content and make sense and relevance in the growing sea of information.

However, I imagine too that feeds and tagging can help. And as fast as the web developed, more things are coming up such as rss manipulation. That means, you drag data from different sources and with the sum of it, you make something better. And that is also what Michael Saunby’s presentation showed. With a mix of rss and data, manipulation fascinating new geographical information can be generated. These mashups can be mixed with all kind of freely available information sources, and as with Michael Saunby‘s case, allow individual climate change analysis.

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There are many different types of blogging. Rohit Bhargava shows us 25 different ones in his presentation, starting from insight over piggyback to bridge blogging. What fascinates me the most, it is the reasons why people blog. Throughout the last months bloggers tagged each other: Why Do You Blog? These are some examples showing how different but also how similar the reason’s for blogging are:

• How Blogs Have Increased Human Intelligence by a Factor of 5
• 5 Reasons Why I Blog
• Five Reasons Why I Blog
• Five Reasons Why I Blog
• Why I blog

Way more down-to-earth is a Pew Internet study which summarizes the following top reasons of why people blog:

1. to express yourself creatively
2. to document your personal experiences or share them with others
3. to stay in touch with friends and family
4. to share practical knowledge or skills with others
5. to motivate other people to action
6. to entertain people
7. to store resources or information important to you
8. to influence the way other people think
9. to network or to meet new people
10. to make money

Personally, I find much more inspiring what Esra from Bahrain writes about:

In this new age of information technology, not only are blogs used to inform, but to help us network with other like-minded individuals from across the globe. In the Arab world, political activism through blogging is becoming more common, and is actually influencing a lot of the mainstream media outlets, pressuring them to cover human rights violations.

Blogging can be used for cross-cultural understanding and dialogue, and there are more and more pan-Arab group blogs emerging. Personally, I share a group blog with other young writers from Mauritania, Tunisia, and Morocco; something which helps me understand their cultures better. Had it not been for blogging, I would be embarrassingly ignorant about them and their societies, even though these are fellow Arabs I am talking about.

The web and particularly personal stories from people in blogs make us aware of how it is to live in different places. Blogging bridges cultures, opens unlimited network potential, and helps us to overcome strangeness. But I see one problem, to bridge countries, cultures and communication, we need a common language such as English. However, when we are writing in one only common foreign language, we will eventually limit ourselves to not be able to express fully our thoughts. To be continued …

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Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) is still a fairly new theme in the development arena. Throughout the years ICT4D has diversified in many different sub-themes such as e-governance, e-agriculture, e-health, education, etc. Although there have been successful stories, the high hopes had often not been realized in many projects. Many initiatives did not work out and so many projects failed to establish a solid and sustainable approach for ICT4D. The reasons are multifold and some learnt lessons are the following:

1. ICT4D has been and still is narrowly focused on infrastructure.
2. Underestimation for the importance of training, qualification, and the different dimensions of connectivity.
3. ICT4D can only successful if it is a mean and not the end itself.
4. Many projects were not orientated on the needs. The benefit of ICT output remained often unclear.
5. ICT4D projects were often not seen from a holistic perspective. Many projects lacked a sustainable concept.
6. Just to offer information (e.g. websites or databases) leads to nothing when people do not see a benefit in it.
7. ICT4D has social, cultural, political and economical dimensions. In that regard technology is only one part.
8. Many experiments could have been avoided if previous experiences were considered (e.g. rural radios).
9. ICT4D works most successfully when its users take over it, creating and changing technology to their needs.
10. Lastly the ICT4D has only a fragmenting approach of sharing knowledge and learning experiences. Ironically, most ICT4D initiatives are not linked together – the potential of the web has not been bailed.

A major challenge, however, is the lack of proven impact for ICT in development. That’s why the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development devoted, lately, an own website to this challenge. The business sector has achieved significantly more, as the success of mobile phones shows. The grameen phone campaign has proven its impact to tackle poverty; which computers, networks and the Internet did not achieve in a decade. A tragic example are telecentres or Internet cafes, which in Africa now often go bankrupt because people rather spend money on their mobile phones.

The market-driven mobile phone phenomenon stood out amidst many donor-driven ‘pilot’ projects that had either collapsed or never delivered the promise, says Nalaka Gunawardene therefore in a critical summary of the first years of ICT4D.

But is it that critical when the web shows every day what is possible, and how sheer connectedness has its impact on development? Many countries have achieved important steps such as India’s approach to e-governance or Venezuela’s results of switching to free and open source software. However, very decisive, from my point of view, will be web2.0, the social web, or the collaborative web. Why is that; I will answer on my next post.

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I have already written before about the concept of open source, but this time I want to highlight the potential of free and open source software (FOSS). I attended a while ago an interesting presentation on free and open source software by Andrea Götzke and Balthas Seibold. What I found most interesting about the presentation were the manifold effects of FOSS:

• Economy
  Cost savings from purchasing software. The market barrier is low for new businesses, but the overall added value is higher because the software can be developed locally. With services for hardware and the web, FOSS offers local employment and development of software and generates though more income locally.
• Education
  FOSS offers universal access. The freedom to study the code of software. In Venezuela, for example, FOSS gave access to education because the whole infrastructure is much cheaper there and own training capacity was built. FOSS can act as a free knowledge transfer and create human capital e.g. through software development. It, therefore, can lead to a “brain gain”. FOSS allows and needs a complete different approach of collaborative work project with high value on common learning.
• Culture
  The development and usage of FOSS can contribute to the country cultural heritage. Own developed software products can be better adapted to local needs and offered in many languages. Own software solutions open new venues of knowledge sharing and learning.
• Law
  Open source software is freely available and guarantees legal security. FOSS offers a sustainable technological independence.

Free Open Source Software represents certain values – sharing, collaborating, community and social development. These values have deep roots in human nature and could be found in all societies at all times. They believe this model – developing software by a community of peer reviewed activists, participants, employees and gifting the results back into the community to be further developed by others thus extending the cycle – could be extended to economic and social development in Africa. It is in this context that the FOSS model emerges as a powerful model for African development. From Brenda Zulu

Challenges

• For a high reliability on FOSS, a critical community is needed, which constantly tests and changes the source code. It needs open culture, which is not always prevailing.
• Proprietary software is also available illegally and cheap, so it offers no incentive to switch to FOSS.
• In many countries the FOSS community is very small and the interaction in a network needs the web and therefore connectivity, which is often not available.
• Much has been done in translating software, therefore many web software is available in different languages. But that is not the case with document material.
• In many countries a whole training infrastructure has to be build to switch to open source software. For example, the Venezuelan Government decided to adopt open source some years ago, and build with it many resources, own training and development infrastructure.

I often got the feedback from practitioners that it also depends on the needs of each particular case. Proprietary software can be a better solution or is anyway the only one available. I am sure I missed many points and factors, but I will continue later on with that topic.

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