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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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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Is it enough to present to an audience the many opportunities of the web and the “amazing” variety of web tools existing nowadays? From my previous presentation experiences throughout this year, I can say I doubt it. Surely you can catch the attention or curiosity of some of your audience, but they do not necessarily find it relevant to their work and context. Therefore, I have come to at least try to bring my presentations  to another level, in order to address the whole audience, from the sceptics to the absolute beginners. It is an often neglected fact that the majority of employees in organizations have not yet used the social web particularly for their work.

Tools to present take too long
A presentation leaves you definitely not enough time to explain a tool sufficiently enough. Alone del.icio.us, a social bookmarking tool,  can take up to an hour to train and discuss its different angles. I have had fascinating discussions just about tagging that could have continued for hours.

So is the case of the example of the invention of the desktop and folder system – the PC desktop was developed in the seventies portraying a normal desk with papers and folders on it. The problem about it is that in the digital space, as tagging proves,  relevance and links are in a three dimensional space and go potentially in every direction. So we still use our computer in a very primitive way one could say. I blogged about the connection to hierarchy here.

Constraints you encounter
In most cases there is little time to show the audience the potential for the social web for knowledge sharing – 20 minutes if you are lucky. Not only time is a challenge, but also the difference resistance you might face – listeners are overwhelmed by information, the amount of tools, or simply bored of listing to words such as “social media”, web 2.0, Blog, Podcast, Twitter and so on. Instead, it is important to address the audience demand or talk about their biggest problems and catch them by the strength of examples. Sometimes I like to ask if somebody wants to play the devil advocate, which often triggers interesting discussions and shows how little we focus on how we work and so much on what we work.

How to approach your audience?
From the knowledge management perspective not much has changed and the deficits are the same: Finding the right information and the person behind it when needed; how to tackle the information overload; create spaces of creative exchange.
During a presentation I try focusing on these basic questions and showing the audience examples and approaches to use different tools to tackle some challenges. My key lesson learnt throughout the year is to focus on scenarios and leave out tools and all the fancy new words. In addition, I like to leave it up to the audience how and what they actually like to pick up. In most cases, I assume, anyway, the wrong tool as the one to get the most attention. The context and the different ways of personal work styles vary just too much.

Examples of approaches

I gave a presentation at the European Commission last Monday and did not know exactly what kind of an audience to expect. So I started with the usual challenges of  a knowledge worker such as information overload, difficult to find first hand experiences, exhausting complex team collaborations and problems about how often we reinvent the wheel. In the next slide I presented different approaches of companies and organizations tackling these problems with social web applications.

I talked about how Hewlett Packard wants to untap the experiences “lost” in email boxes and encourage employees to post their answers in forums. By the way Luis Suarez has a great experience going on working with as little email as possible.  Explaining email as a challenge for knowledge management triggers quite interesting dicussions. Then I explained the example of Sun Microsystem and the one I did internally myself with GTZ. I ended with an older study around the use of Wikis in Dresdner Bank, where they have reduced emails considerably (unfortunately the study is not anymore available on the social-text website). Having alone documents at a central place open to everyone is quite convincing. For the rest of the presentation I went on quite different topics such as networks for development cooperations, which triggered different attention. When I was talking about wiki, I simply recited the example of Wikipedia, which in most cases works perfectly.

For another presentation I tried encountering it from the well known knowledge management circle.  It goes as follows (1) start and orientation, (2) research, (3) strengthen competencies, (4) apply learning, (5) store knowledge, (6) exchange knowledge and (7) evaluate knowledge. The circle can vary in many ways, but it helps to present the concept of knowledge management relatively easy and then attach to each point some potential scenarios, where you can use social software. (1) RSS/Feeds – subscribe the web, (2) social bookmarking, (3) blogging, (4) outside the web, (5) tagging, (6) social networks and (7) easy engagement through rating and commenting. This circle can be applied of course to all kinds of purposes but can be focused on the personal knowledge management of each person. I was inspired by a presentation by Dirk Röhrborn (German).

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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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In my last post I described the potential for social networks by tweets and statuses, but now I would like to add to it some links of interesting blog posts about Twitter and its potential. There is, for example, Nancy White, collecting collaboration stories over Twitter. Another interesting post from Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Why Twitter pays my rent,” describes how you can follow on Twitter in real time what is happening in the world wide web. Lastly, Caroline Middlebrook wrote a nice Twitter guide.

However, in this post I also intend to highlight some possible pitfalls for micro-blogging, how Facebook statuses and Twitter messages are also called. Developments are so fast that reflection of these tools is important, and even though  I risk some culture pessimism, I pointed some out:

• Quality
  Some things can be expressed through statuses, but is the outcome really needed information? Is it worth the effort to read all these messages?
• Micro-content
  In 140 characters a lot can be said, but surely nothing thoroughly elaborated and roughly in depth. Can this micro-content help in terms of knowledge sharing or learning? Micro-content is rather vague, or not always precise or self explanatory.
• Attention
  Clearly, this kind of information needs another attention and might even pressure for more multitasking and loss of concentration. It is another step to blur the border between being online and offline.
• Time consuming
  The question here is whether it is more efficient to email or add another piece to the information overload. Or is it really an own channel for communication?
• Privacy
  There is without a doubt a privacy issue of how much you want to let others know about yourself. Being virtually connected does not mean you want to share so much of your privacy.  How can one compromise with the dilemma of being public and private at the same time?
• Time span
  Mostly, there is only a certain window of reception for a message before it is gone. It is a bit like blog posts which get attention the first few days and then they are often forgotten.
• Engagement
  It needs a certain size of network and engagement from it to really get feedbacks. Does micro-blogging really lead to exchange or are there just many voices and no responses?
• The zero sum game of communication
  The time used on these tools is spent less on others. On Skype chats or Twitter, communication is divided into small bits, what makes it even more difficult to get the whole picture.

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For the past weeks I have been experimenting with Twitter and Facebook. I have checked out the value of statuses (Facebook) and tweets (Twitter) over these two social network tools. For those of you who do not know, Facebook is a social network platform which lets one not only to add friends and content, but also add an actual status. Equal to Twitter, it allows only a limited number of characters and it is often used to express emotions, things you do, or raise questions. I wrote some while ago a post questioning whether Twitter makes sense or not? I have to say I have changed my opinion at a certain extent and now I believe Twitter and statuses can really enhance your social network experience.

Facebook and Twitter both have some great incentives but also some downfalls. Where does the network value lies? For Twitter, in the beginning I wondered why exchanging short 140 character messages is of any good. So I started using the two tools during the last weeks and concentrated on information exchange and sharing. I also subscribed via RSS to the statuses of my friends in Facebook, and was quite surprised about their activities. This leads to 10 reasons why statuses and tweets are a key for social networks:

1. Satisfaction
   It fits perfect to most people’s desire to express their thoughts and to get a response. For example, it is interesting how many people sooner or later start updating their statuses in Facebook. To write short messages is inviting.
2. Closeness
   Statuses let you follow what your network feels, thinks, works or simply wants to know. Different to blogs or entries in forums, it is rather informal and shows moods or curiosity and some times even anger. It is an important channel for people working intensively on the web, and more and more people will eventually do so.
3. Collaboration
   It opens new venues for small collaboration and can still support existing collaboration because it is an asynchronous and synchronous form of communication.
4. Openness
   In Twitterer people invite each other rather easy. Everybody can be addressed; a short conversations can develop and an answer might be there in minutes.
5. Sharing
   You can quickly share links, information or quotes in a quick way. A request is send out by on one click to a whole network and opens a channel for other types of communication to conventional ones such as email etc.
6. Change
   Alexandra Samuel has a nice post about how twitter and statuses can promote collective action for change.
7. Connectedness
   Through statuses you find out a lot about your peers and find overlapping interests. Tweets can connect people and topics which otherwise would not be possible that easily. Distanced friends or colleagues in the next room read your thoughts or know what your work on.
8. Network effect
   Its network effect comes from the overlapping of the connected people. In Twitter a message can be transmitted that way from one network of people to another and can reach their audience quickly and directly.
9. Mobile
   This micro-blogging can be followed from everywhere on the go. It connects you with your social network or group wherever you are.
10. Pull not push
    Other than email, it is up to you, the participant, to read it or leave it. As long as some peers are following and reading, there is always a potential answer or reaction.

To conclude, statuses and instant communication through twitter build a closer social network. It enables real synchronous peer to peer exchange and has decisive network value if it is used for real sharing. It clearly shows how slowly email is being replaced by instant communication (e.g. Skype, Twitter etc.). Together with the mobile phone I think it will be another step to make the web independent from the PC. In my opinion, it can be perfectly used to sustain and stimulate a social network because it is a pull-method. Every user decide when to engage and when not to, but when the network is big enough somebody will respond and the network effects will raise in real time. It is basically another evolution of communication, whether we like it or not. Next post I will highlight the downsides.

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Here in Germany, Web2.0 is in everybody’s mouth. Newspapers have been reporting about it lately, and some things are around the buzz word–blogs, wikis, social networks, wikipedia, facebook or youtube, get more and more attention. Whereas in the first wave most people wondered where and when will the next cool start-up spring up. The debate went on whether blogs are a threat to media or not. The wikipedia phenomenon brought finally the knowledge and collaboration dimension of web2.0 to the spotlight.

Ironically, in my opinion, the IT departments–responsible still–have often not taken the participative web as a top priority. And I wonder whether this is different elsewhere. By the way, a similar phenomenon is seen in the knowledge management arena. In relevant magazines, web2.0 and its potential for knowledge sharing and learning has hit the headlines this Summer. However, not many blogs are even around (Please notify me if you know some). One exception is Martin Röll, who wrote very early, albeit he stopped his blog, about knowledge sharing through blogs. Three other nice blogs are zungu.net, frogpond.de and Wissensmanagement2.0.

Going back to the topic, I wonder why many IT-specialists do not show a wider interest in web2.0 and share some enthusiasm. Here are some assumptions:

• IT-experts know by own experience that web2.0 is just another approach, and doubt the hype around it.
• IT-experts are bored of the triviality of this kind of software such as blogs and wikis.
• IT-departments completely underestimate the effects for web2.0 software.
• Web2.0 is seen secondary as technological and it is much more about culture, communication and commitment (3C)

“Like it or not, Web 2.0 is coming,” says Lisa Hoover in the context of enterprise2.0, and this different tools will be used in organizations. Euan agrees by stating: The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0? DO NOTHING. It strikes me to see how many people individually already use web2.0 tools such as blogs or wikis, or they arrange meetings with doodle, use their own desktop sharing and collaborate over google docs. And this all goes easily around the firewall because it is all browser-based. Nevertheless, some obstacles remain as Bev Trayner describes in her blog post Web2.0 is a long way from people at work.

I think it is important to grasp the potential of collaboration and to prove it can be a reduction of information overload and leverage new forms of collaboration. However, from a knowledge management perspective, it is also critical because of how can we share information, when it is distributed over the web. How can it be linked and searched from the intranet? Nevertheless, I am still puzzled about the reluctance towards web2.0 even though it can become a decisive and comparative advantage, being it internally for communication or externally to flourish cooperation.

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Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to blog during the web2fordev conference. Organization work was more than what I expected, and of course there were so many interesting people to talk to around, I just couldn’t let go. Favourably, we got about 50 blog posts mainly from our journalists, who came from different African countries, and who of course did a great job reporting. Now some sessions can be watched completely over video (unfortunately only Internet explorer though). The week started with an interesting web taster day, and went through many more topics ending the week, yesterday, with a farmer led documentation workshop from Dorine Rüter. Interesting cases were presented, of how farmers in Africa use digital cameras to document and create awareness of their problems in order to help each other. Let me now summarize impressions from theses days at the FAO in Rome.

Inclusion
Seen by many people just as a technology, the web2fordev conference proved to me -once again- that people are more minded and complying when gathered together for so-called web2.0. The conference–even with the official and formal character it has within the FAO headquarter–got a neat unconference character; as the the director of FAO communication said at the end, “This halls have not seen this kind of event before.” It was a good mixture of people from many different backgrounds. There could have been more activists and pioneers in my opinion, but the conference fortunately attracted many people from all around the world.

Patience
Through the days, I felt again that we are still at the bottom or ground work of the using web2.0 for development. Many participants had just started experimenting with blogs, etc. by themselves, and had an understandable difficulty to grasp web2.0 in all its dimensions. Therefore, some discussions went not as deep as I wished, but the different perspectives were valuable. There was often a mixture of scepticism and enthusiasm. Will wikis make sense one day? How much trust do we need to place on wikis , and can we even establish that only virtually? Where is the audience for blogs and how can I filter all that information? That way, on one side, participants helped each other to make sense of all these tools, and on the other, sophisticated database RSS models were presented by Thierry Helmer or Thomas Metz. I wonder how can we cope with the challenge of having so many tools developed in such a short time? Many people are certainly not disposed or cannot follow.

Web2.0 in the field
The conference showed me clearly that a lot has been done in and between organizations. That is where the potential and the easiest implementation lies. There are a few projects in developing countries that have not yet implemented web2.0, but unless obvious challenges are not bridged, it will be difficult to implement more. It was, therefore, helpful and quite realistic to hear from Moses Kisembo and Kado Muir that blogs and wikis are not seldom light-years away from what is needed in Uganda or Nigeria. Nevertheless, bloggers such as Prince Deh from Ginks show how important this pioneer work can be. One high hope at the conference, which was often mentioned, was the mobile phone. Some presentations had in my opinion more of traditional web approach, but there were also many exceptional interesting cases such as Brosdi .org, which is supported by Bellanet. Market information systems and knowledge sharing via questions and answers (e.g. audioblogging from India) were the strongest examples in terms of rural development. One major success factor was that it has a benefit for the community, and in that way they are willing to contribute.

Please check the web2fordev blog for more information. There have been 50 posts written around the conference. Nynke Kruiderink and I give a little interview on tagging.

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I have been dealing with different kinds of content management systems for some years now. What I find fascinating lately it is how applications became powerful and how easy they are to handle by non-experts. Through these applications, creating social media and networking is possible for everybody. Wikis and blogs can be set up in minutes through different web services. But also social network software such as Drupal, advanced content management systems such as Joomla, and of course, blog software such as WordPress, can be easily installed with little effort. For less then 10 bucks and with little web knowledge, powerful applications are around the corner.

1. Pick a hosting package which offers these free and open source software and includes one click installation for applications.
2. Most of these providers offer you a web based administration interface, where you can choose from many different software. With a few clicks a software is installed.
3. The application can be controlled through another web based interface and can be manually configured to different needs. For example, WordPress can be combined with blog posts and static pages to have a blog and a normal homepage.
4. Hundreds of free websites’ templates are offered for all sorts of different taste. In Joomla, it can be easily uploaded on the website itself and you can jump between different designs.
5. Hundreds of different modules or plug-ins allow you to extend your website in all directions. These modules are mostly for free and only need to be uploaded via ftp and activated in the web based configuration.

Of course these steps are a bit simplified, and to have a successful website running, still expertise is needed. However, with already included multiple language packages, these free and open source applications set the path for great networks to social change everywhere. Rightly done, these websites surely can compete with big portals in terms of their features and social networking features. Some applications offer even other distinct services such as BuzzMonitor and Pligg:

BuzzMonitor is “an open source application that “listens” to what people are saying about the World Bank across blogs and other sites in order to help the organization understand and engage in social media.” It is developed by Development Seed, who are also making a presentation at the web2fordev conference and Pierre Wielezynski from the World Bank. It is a monitoring that includes all kinds of feeds and allows them to be rated by the members. This is excellent for a community or organisation to get a picture of certain topics. It can be tested here: buzzm.worldbank.org/tour

A truly amazing application is Pligg, which is a Digg like software. It is a good approach for bringing people together to share and rate news from the web. It is, for example, used for social development here: ngopost.org. With this tool a community share and discuss what is happening in the info-sphere of the web. I would really like to use that application, however, I imagine it is not easy to involve others to join, when everybody is already involved in so many on-line networks. Does somebody have an idea?

In conclusion, I think the development of free and open source social software is decisive to engage for social change and development through web2.0. It will allow to spread the social media thrive in all areas. It is the openness of this application that let us communicate, sharing and creating social media in new ways.

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To begin with, I have to say, I am not a Twitter user. I have signed up for an account but have not used it at all. I, personally, prefer tools such as Skype. But still, I am willing to be convinced that it does bring an advantage for personal use. I imagine it can be very useful, though, so far, it seems to me another ‘great time consuming application.’ I wonder whether it is really an advantage to be hyperconnected. “Like any good pusher, services like Twitter don’t answer existing needs; they create new ones and then fill them. (Times)” I sense it speeds up the anyway fast communication and information sharing through the web. However, I also imagine it can be an application for new senseful forms of communication, activism and networking, especially with its connection to the mobile phone.
Given that assumption, I collected the following links about twitter:

• Mexico City’s Earthquake, reported on Twitter first
• The Potential of Twitter in Africa and map of Twitter in Africa
  
• “So the launching of Twitter provides a good alternative considering that the use of mobile phones is much higher than that of computers. In Malawi for example, there are about 50,000 Internet users against about 700,000 mobile phone users out of a population of about 12 million.
• Africa moves on: Twitter is just the beginning
• Twitter in an organization or company: Internal Twittering
• Emergency 2.0: Twitter helps public services speed up ahead the government in crisis situations
  “Twitter might play a substantive role in emergency response because of its ability to share location-based, real-time information among social networks.”
• Activism: Urgent Action IM Bots and Twitter for Darfur
  “But to me the critical thing about Twitter is the way it can be updated (and read) via mobile, and how that can reach in to urgent areas or situations in a way the internet can’t (yet).”
• Human rights: Global Voices is now on Twitter
• How human rights activists use Twitter
  “My favorite example of repurposing recently is my friend Alaa’s use of Twitter to coordinate activities of activists in Egypt.”

These articles show how Twitter can be used in all sorts of ways, such as to allow fast messaging and alert a network. It seems good to give notice and to feel connected. It can be an important tool for activism because it pings every member of a network and it is more personal and directed than blogs. I imagine also twittervision version for human rights worldwide or environmental violations in a region.

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To continue with my post “What is enterprise2.0,” I wrote a case study for organizational blogging. Inspired by the posts from EnterpriseRSS, Paul Dunay, I want to focus this time on RSS and feeds. In my opinion feeds can make a decisive difference in getting the right information at the right time in the right place, and can also reduce the email overload. As we still have to wait for the semantic web, RSS offers great potential for organizations in the following four dimensions:

1. Transmitter: Don’t email it. RSS it. Feeds deliver the latest information from themes and projects: Discussions in group blogs, solutions for problems in personal blogs, the status of documentation in wiki, interesting website through subscribed links feed, etc. This information is transparently available, showing organization wide activities otherwise hidden in email boxes. It is possible to get information from all kinds of projects inside an organization, and knowledge creation can be seen through news tickers from everybody’s browser.
2. Filter: Contrary to email push technology, feeds are a pull technology. One can decide by himself what to follow and escape the email flood. Some feeds are binding, such is the case of the department protocol or the follow-up of a milestone for a project; but most feeds can be subscribed by interest. Project steps can be easily monitored, links in a specific community of practice exchanged, or discussions can be followed. With evaluation tools such as AideRSS, valuable and most discussed content can be filtered.
3. Overview: Imagine that an intranet homepage would be like a feed aggregator. A look on the page shows exactly what is happening right in that moment in the whole organization. A feed aggregator would present all kind of feeds sorted by topic, projects, departments, date etc. Each topic or bigger projects have their own aggregator and can be browsed through tagclouds in every direction to find quickly a topic. Knowledge creation and information exchange can be followed from anywhere in the organization. Information does not have to be pushed into singly categories and limited databases.
4. Mashup: Like Yahoo pipes presented a while ago, these feeds can be easily combinable. Project developments are connected to a map application so one can see geographically where about and who it’s own organization is dealing with or discuss about it. In a multilingual organization, feeds can be redirected through translation services. Every employee can build his own aggregator and can mix data for his individual purpose.

No doubt this approach cannot be implemented easily. The problem is not technological, but it does need an open organizational culture. It does shift vertical to horizontal communication. Clearly, there can be numerous obstacles listed. The transparency must not always be in the interest of the management. It demands from the staff a great capacity to absorb all this feeds, sort, process, and digest them. Or how David Weiberger says it: “The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple. It is to swim in the complex.” Another obstacle are feed-readers, which are until now very basic and have to be further developed to easy sorting, archiving (tagging) and so forth.

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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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Yesterday, I read a blog post about “How do you convince people to share failures?” and I also heard about an interesting lessons learnt website project which was implemented some years ago.

In that project station masters were asked to give regular information about their stations such as statistics. Secondly to list problems and challenges throughout the last years. They were asked to describe how they tackled the problems. What were the failures and the success? This information combined with some criteria were filled to a database. With that every station master could find colleagues with similar problems and could contact them.

To me, it seems like a simply mechanism with a great result. A knowledge sharing tool which concentrates on learning experiences and connects people and knowledge.
But how would you do this nowadays in the realm of web2.0? Two questions came up to my mind:

• Does web2.0 really help us exchange lessons learnt in such an effective manner?
• Can tagging be the right way to find each others lesson learnt easier?

Web2.0 and lesson learnt
I have my doubts whether web2.0 goes this far yet to connect the right people with same problems in such an effective way. Social network tools give you features such as recommendations, feedbacks and a whole range of perspectives. But is that all you are looking for in that moment? In the best case, you can have a community of practice where you can address your questions. Valuable experiences are still hidden behind numerous links, which I can identify easier with social bookmarking, but still have to hope that Google will deliver me good results.

Tagging
In my opinion tagging is very powerful, but often underestimated, because it gives us relevance. Look at a tag-cloud and imagine you can click through endless relevant sub-tag-clouds. You can navigate through an ocean of wisdom, connecting knowledge and the people behind it. Imagine tagging is used wider than to just give broader information (e.g. general topic) but includes many much more information such as the “character” of a lesson learnt (success, failure, slow, expensive, high impact etc.). Many people already do that in social bookmarking, though it is very individual.

• Would that mean I can connect experiences the way it was down with a sophisticated application for the station masters? I wonder whether tags for evaluation can work as good as the topic-wise ones.
• How could the word “slow” be separated in a tag cloud from the word “software” so they do not stand next to each other?
• Do I really need this, or do topic clouds bring me anyway quicker to the field of my interest, and comments deliver the evaluation to me?

My aim is to use the power of a network itself to connect to experiences directly. I think that in most cases an application such as the station master is too much of an effort. It needs criteria and complicated programming. Can’t this be done easier with web2.0 technology and the wisdom of crowd?

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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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For the “I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate“  blog, I wrote a post about internal organizational blogging, as an example of how web2.0 can be used to change communications and enhance knowledge sharing. Behind “e-collaborate”, there is a great community of pratice to exchange experiences for online knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Blogging changes communication. This post is an attempt to summarize my group blogging experiences since the last two years. In the post, I describe the implementation, crititcal factors and results. What really strikes me is that internal blogging can change communication, lead to a better knowledge sharing, and from my experience, it can also become sustainable. The blog has become a community of its own which is driven by the users, who are equally readers and authors.

Check out the post: Roadblogs: GTZ Egypt’s experiences of introducing blogs for internal exchange

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While reading “everything is miscelleanous“, I found a quote by Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Assiciation, in Library Journal back in 2005:

“Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.”

Of course it contradicts from my own experience and organizational blogging. In my opinion, the communicative and networking aspects of blogging are often underestimated in how it contributes to personal learning by writing thoughts or “just” linking and commenting on other sources. Stephen Downes describes how blogs and other web tools enhance personal and networked learning in a video. Even more intriguing to me is Weinberger’s argument: “Knowledge – its content and its organization – is becoming a social act.” With the example of wikipedia, he argues that the web enables us to interpretate, define, express and link knowledge in a new way. Simple said knowledge is not given in a top-down approach like the Encyclopedia Britannica, “knowledge exists in the connections and in the gaps; it requires active engagement.”

Knowledge sharing and learning through the web is horizontal and with a steady flow. So an article has not date when it is finished and corrected. It is constantly edited, because of new facts or other perspectives from people. A blog post is a node in a network, which has comments or counter arguments in other posts. And wikipedia proves that knowledge, created by many people, is possible. Check out the book “The Age of Conversation” made by 100 authors. Imagine this in an organization. The intranet top-down communication would make no sense because the employees make their own web (e.g. wiki). One consequence would be that people, who know best, write the document and not necessarily the person in charge of it. In his book, Weinerger quotes Jimmy Wales talking about the neutrality of an article: “An article is neutral when people have stopped chaning it.” I wonder whether Michael Gorman would think the same today. Just last week a German journalist called Hans-Ulrich Jörges, from Stern social media, (e.g. content from blogs) “loser generated content“.

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Lost in the old web
Throughout the last years I have had mixed emotions about the Internet. On one hand, I was amazed about people, news, themes etc., but on the other hand, I was not satisfied with the overwhelming load of information and the difficulty of obtaining it when needed.

Running around to collect information
I used Google to research all my information and often repeated the same steps to find the same websites. I looked endlessly through websites to find eventually some information. I relied on all sorts of websites in hope that they would post something appealing for me. Basically, I ran though the web to find relevant information without mayor results. I always knew there was more than that and I could not catch up with the latest information.

Watch out! A new web has arrived!
One day a friend of mine pointed me to delicious – a social bookmarking tool where people from all over the world share links. I imported my favourite links onto the server and saw that many other people had already bookmarked the same links as well, and even had many other interesting ones. I was convinced that people knew much better than search engines. I also discovered that there are many people out there in the web who write riveting thoughts in their blogs. And that these blogs and social bookmark sites are basically networks made out of links, information and people.

Kick the overload of information!
I knew of RSS, a universal content format, designed to make the content of a website everywhere available. But after a while I understood that I could grasp all kind of information through feeds. So I threw away my fishing rod and got a fishing net instead to bring all relevant information out there on the web to my laptop. Now I can see when friends upload new photos, see changes in our jointly used Google calendar and have all the information compiled to my needs.

Becoming part of a community
So far I was pretty passive and contributed only with bookmarks. But because I appreciated all the valuable information, I decided to get active and start a blog to reflect on it what I read and learn from the web (networked learning). Suddenly I became a node in a far reaching network and started to interact with many people who had an interest on the same topics. I left all portals behind me and began valuing the contribution to the web of so many people out there like wisdom of crowd.

Sharing is the key!
All the richness of information comes from the participation of many people. Therefore sharing is the overall premise. I finally understood much better the power of hyperlinks and discovered how even complex themes can be greatly connected through the web and used for learning. You can virtually see how information finds its way through the web. Lastly, I discovered that tagging is a great way of making sense for all this information, and it is okay if everything becomes miscellaneous.

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I remember when I came across those weird looking different size word aggregations on websites and wondered what were they? When I read about tagging and tag clouds I was first skeptical about it and asked myself what is the benefit of them?

Nowadays I am fascinated, how tags can solve or at least improve how we sort information and make relevance between different tags. Through the wisdom of crowd one can extract very precisely the connections of themes and show the pattern of a community. To me classical hierarchical folder structure is only two dimensional, whereas tags are three dimensional, as long as the semantic web has not been implemented.

With social bookmarking through de.icio.us a single tag can be used to share links collaboratively. Peter Ballantyne had the idea of using collaborative tagging for the knowledge management for development network back in 2005. Next week another KM4DEV workshop will take place in Holland where I will prepare some visualization of the efforts throughout the last two years for the nonprofit knowledge management for development (NPK4DEV) tag.

NPK4DEV Tag Cloud (popular tags)

Joitske, a contributor of NPK4DEV wonders whether this tag experiment can form a community?

Tagging seems so superficial in terms of knowledge creation, it is more a flow of information. Can we say there is learning going on or is it just sharing information more rapidly? If people start tagging can we all that a community of practice?

In my opinion this tag cloud shows quite impressively what people associate with knowledge management for development in methods, countries, organizations and themes. It is a great way to share certain kind of information. In this regard it might be a passive community of practice keeping each other updated about new and interesting documents or new approaches such as vlogging. Furthermore it connects you to the people behind it.

However to deepen the effect of sharing and to have a broader learning effect, further steps would be necessary. For example Beth Kanter summarizes in her posts all links for the nptech tag, which is very useful. The communication between each other over delicious is close to zero, and one does not know whether the information behind the link is useful or valuable to his or her background. Commenting is rarely used and rating is not possible, and only bloggers involved reflect transparently the shared information.

Lastly, it is interesting to see how you can analyze tags, in this timeline. In the picture you can see the recent tags. Thanks to the blogger from www.unthinkingly.com, who did this timeline very nice with the nptech tag.

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Imagine you can share your bookmarks with your colleagues, find your documents and emails quickly through tagging, write about your work experiences on your personal homepage (blog), and document all project team work in a wiki. The result is a revolutionary different way to share knowledge online within an organization.

How does it work and what is the trick? It simply needs to combine the already existing and freely available tools or open source applications in web.2.0.

The marker: Tagging
Tagging simply means to add key words to every link you save or blog entry you write. Basically you don’t sort anymore all your different files in hierarchical folders, you know anyhow that this is never perfectly possible. Because knowledge has always many domains e.g. a single article contains all sorts of information, each reader has a different perspectives on it. Through tags you can see where topics are overlapping and find information from different angles.

• Tagging in Wikipedia
• What is tagging?
• A social analysis of tagging with a nice visualization

The network: Social Bookmarking
Imagine your bookmarks are visible to your colleagues. You would be able to share links on similar working areas and browse via tags all imaginable topics of your organization. These links have a great value, because they are verified or even commented by your colleagues. So you find easily like minded people and identify quickly who works on a certain theme.

• Check out my bookmark tag cloud on the right column or go to my delicious network.
• Social bookmarking in Wikipedia
• Intranet Social Bookmarking: Tagging Behind the Firewall

The storyteller: Blogging
How often have you answered to the same question over again? Why don’t you make a blog post about it, so all your colleagues with the same problem could find answers in your blog. How can you exchange information without having to send a mass email? Post it on a project blog which documents the learning process of how a project has developed over time. Blogs can also become information boards, picturing the life of organizations.

• My blog post about Sun blogging
• Bookmarking, tagging, and social software comes to the Enterprise (nice podcast)

The white board: Wiki
Remember how you used to send word files around while working collaboratively on a text? Now you can have a wiki to include your project documentation in, and everyone on your team can access it form anywhere. On the Wiki, you can see how a text develops over time and browse through the organizational knowledge via tags. With a Wiki, while your team works on a memo during a meeting, you can also link topics to other relevant sources. Thus you keep track of the team work.

• Wiki in plain English
• Web 2.0 for the enterprise: Wisdom of the employees

The connector: Feed/RSS
RSS is a universal format for files which gives you, on the contrary to email, the power to filter information. A colleague always writes interesting blog posts which are relevant to your work. You want to share links in a comunity of practice, or you need to follow up certain projects. Via feeds you can subscribe to the information relevant to you. Feeds keep you posted with all sort of information, such as links, documents, audio, video, wiki changes, etc.

• RSS in plain English
• Changing the Way We Communicate Internally

Why all of this? What is the advantage?

• Simply because it connects in manifold ways all available resources and people behind it.
• It makes everybody’s work transparent and offers new potential for sharing and cooperation.
• It is very easy to use. Just look how many blogs are out there and see how successful flickr, youtube and delicious are.
• It turns communication and knowledge sharing upside down and emphasizes on expertises.

Is this realistic? Does it make an intranet obsolete? What do you think? There are of course many challenges, but I will write about it in another post.

Check out also out this nice presentation on enterprise2.0.

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