Sorry for not having post anything recently, but I have had the opportunity to participate in the Socialcamp and KM4DEV conference, which I will shortly blog about.

Thanks for the interesting comments on my blog post on local knowledge. Meryn Stol wrote a nice comment: “Every person can be a problem solver.” The challenge, however, is to succeed in complex projects. Unfortunately, many development projects are still rather planned than developed within the context. Or as William Easterly puts it, “The development field is still dominated by planers.” Although the best way to solve this problem is to be a “Seeker” rather than a “Planner” and look for small, sustainable programs. To set up projects in a relevant context is a key and means to include as much expertise (actors?) as possible. But here comes quickly the dilemma of how to find consensus and include all the different aspects and get lost in complexity.

I wonder if the social web can offer ways to potentially bring more transparency, collect more, particularly local, wisdom and gain better ways to cope with complexity and lastly achieve better results. Maybe social media, especially in the local context, open new ways for problem solutions in a collaborative manner such as wikipedia. Peter Ballantyne wrote it nicely in a comment:

“I think the newer social media have a huge potential to strengthen the local basis and focus of much development work, by creating and sustaining demands, maybe even small ones, for information expertise and knowledge that is local, for local purposes, by local people.”

However, there is still a lack of knowledge — the importance of local knowledge for problem solving. Alberto Masetti-Zannini approaches this very appealing on his paper “Web 2.0 and International Development NGOs”, in which he argues that “most NGOs still suffer from a deep-seated inability to develop two-way communication systems with those whom they seek to represent, and are still favouring top-down, centralised knowledge-management practices.”

He argues that participation mechanisms are key: “NGOs have struggled for a long time to build effective participation mechanisms in the developing world. Relevant and correct information from the bottom of the development pyramid is necessary to make knowledgeable decisions about their work.”

And is optimistic: “Indeed, Web 2.0 tools are beginning to change this situation, by generating and disseminating local content and knowledge in an open, shared structure. But are NGOs adopting these new technologies in their knowledge management practices?”

I am also sharing this optimism, but I am also fearing for the wide gap to participate in the social web. Thenmozhi Soundararajan had an interesting example back on a re-publica conference presentation, which underlines my concern: In the USA 25 % out of twelve graders graduate without necessary skills in writing – so 75% have not the capabilities to profoundly write and therefore engage in social media.

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Getting social media or web2.0 into an organization is still not an easy task. The skepticism is often as high as the enthusiasm. If you can prove the benefit of social media in an organization, then you have better cards to go forward. I have been experimenting for a while with blogs and wikis in an organizational context, therefore I thought of possible metrics.

Thanks to Rachel Happe, I have now a little, albeit comprehensive, list of metrics to measure the impact of social media. The following list is an excellent start for the evaluation of the impact or return of investment of social media:

Activity Metrics

• Page-views
• Unique visitors
• Members
• Posts (ideas/threads)
• Number of groups (networks/forums)
• Comments & Track-backs
• Tags/Ratings/Rankings
• Time spent on site
• Contributors
• Active contributors
• Word count
• Referrals
• Completed profiles
• Connections (between members)
• Ratios: Member to contributor; Posts to comments; Completed profiles to posts
• Periods: By day, week, month, year
• Frequency: of visits, posts, comments

Survey Metrics

• Satisfaction
• Affinity
• Quality and speed of issue resolution
• Referral likelihood
• Relevance of content, connections

I imagine that with all or some of this statistics, it is (1) much clearer to see whether users engage thoroughly in social media, (2) get a picture of the specific culture of communication and sharing, (3) whether this interaction has a benefit and is an alternative to conventional communication, and (4) it brings something new in the sense of synergies and innovation. Thus a next step would be to compare old ways of communication with the gains of new ones.

If you analyze this activities within the organizational contexts, you can easily extend them to the rest of the web. Pete Shelton makes some helpful suggestions of how to Measure the impact on the web or here is one for blogging.

• Page views/visitors
• Downloads
• Citations
• Mentions in the media/blogs
• RSS feeds
• Search engine rankings

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