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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some questions for example:

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

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

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

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

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

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Writing blog posts, commenting on them and adding Wiki-pages does take time if you want to achieve good quality – meaning writing consistent, easy to understand articles about even complex topics, linking to other resources and sharing valuable experiences. But good quality takes time, where little time is available for the work overload and dedication rarely appreciated by management in many organizations.

Paradoxical resistance to social media
There is often a strong resistance against blogging or introducing a Wiki (e.g. for a glossary) because either people are afraid of facing even more work or management wonders the benefit of such efforts. But paradoxically, a lot of time is invested on exchanging information and experiences through email. But these emails are, in most cases, sunken in mailboxes and often just read by a few or even only one person. But these exchanges could be all openly available and part of an organizational archive of wisdom through social media tools.

The dilemma of time vs. quality
If, however, you want to make such content available to everybody, it needs sufficient information and a certain quality to be easily understood by colleagues. The better the quality, the wider the audience who can make sense of it. Particularly, if one thinks of a longer perspective, experiences must be provided in such way that colleagues can get the best out of it. But how much time is left in a daily hectic work to write a great wiki article? Often not much, and even worst, it has less priority than another urgent email.

But isn’t a certain quality needed because otherwise there is simply too much information? For instance, a post linking to other sources might be helpful and interesting, but such a post has a not very long time value. Imagine you want to find information later on. It is either over the search engine or through tags. It would be of little help if you find just posts with outdated links.

Nevertheless, the time spent on formulating emails outweighs often the simplicity of blogging. For an organization, it is time to get over their shared folder system and find other ways to preserve knowledge over time.

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For the past months I have been trying to make the most out of information, therefore I have been experimenting with feeds. No doubt the information power one gains through feeds is great, but the time needed to digest all that information is too long. Unfortunately, there are only a few well working filter mechanisms to get the right information. Clay Shirky talks about it, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.”

ICT4Dfeed experiment
I can best describe my experiences with my small feed experiment around ICT4D themes (ICT4Dfeed). I experimented with Yahoo pipes, Aiderss, Feedhub and many other tools, but I could not reduce the 30 daily resources to less top resources. The only way it worked out was through my own pre-selection which will be published in a twitter ICT4D account. By the way, this has triggered quite some more attention – 80 followers, – whereas the ICT4D feed has around 25 followers. In the case of twitter, there is also the social network factor. But, let me describe my lessons learnt…

Potentials
The ICT4D feed has 60 resources such as search engines, social bookmark sites, selected and influential blogs, community websites and organizations. In theory, the reader has to invest around 5 minutes to simply scan the feed or half an hour daily to read the most important articles. In the first case, one is up to date of what is happening, and in the second case, one can even get to know in detail about the latest developments. The 60 feeds fetch a majority of news happening in this particular sector. So, if you are willing to invest the time you can compete with every organization. The old times of information unbalance are over, where only paid service subscribers have an advantage. 

Challenges
As Chris Brogan would nicely put it in this post, all the interesting comments filters are still to weak. The only chance is to scan all these sources and find the golden nuggets in between them. Automatic filtering is not working efficiently yet. I have tried filtering by certain key words but have not been successful at getting better results, although pulling certain tags – for example, in del.ico.us – can be key for a good feed. I also tried services such as Aiderss, which ranks feeds by the amount of comments or links (technorati and delicious). But this works fine in any well connected social media network, for instance in the US, but not on niche topics with valuable content but few links.

Conclusion
There is a gain in subscribing to a lot of resources on the Internet and having a well researched and filtered selection of feeds. It surely takes time to find the best feeds, but the results can bring you a lot of value. I am building up such a feed for a magazine publisher at the moment and it is surprising to see how even the old media does not know about the potential of feeds and RSS technology. A draft selection showed me how easily one can monitor the web for interesting topics. But the potential to me really lies in collective filtering. Therefore, in my further experiment I decided to test buzzmonitor to collectively filter resources. Drop me a line if you would like to join me in in that experiment.

If people with the same interests come together, they could share the burden of filtering. Like the nptech tagging experiment of in delicious proves it – by reading the feed you already know about the latest non-profit technology developments. The problems remain, who summarizes this information? This is being done mainly through “Hub” bloggers digesting all the information. In this regard, friendfeed is not helping because it multiplies feeds and does nothing about filtering.

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No doubt in recent years web application has been improving significantly in terms of usability. Particularly, the beta mode approach often involves users to bring in their feedback. But still, unfortunately, I have not heard from any beta mode website in an corporate or organizational setting yet. In this blog post I want to argue that the engagement through social software often happens because of a lack of usability.

When do wikis become mature?
Let me start with the harshest examples: Wikis. To be provocative, I would say there is hardly any wiki solution in the web, which entails the basic rules of usability. Navigation is somewhere, extra features fly around and orientation within a wiki is often a catastrophe. Yes, sure, Wikipedia is successful and many people participate, but the software behind it, mediawiki, is rather confusing. But also hosting models such as pbwiki and wetpaint lack usability. I’ve myself trained people to use it and realised that many of them (of all ages) struggle.

Good Usability = Higher Motivation
If you want normal internet or intranet users to engage in social software, it has to be dead simple. If you do not give enough orientation it will be hard and you can only overcome that because your content is so thrilling. But in which cases is it a content so thrilling in an organizational setting? That is one reason why in private people engage much more in the social web – because it isabout topics that matter to them; to make it more interesting. So in an organizational context the barrier to engage is even higher.

The easiness of blogs
Contrary to that are blogs, where applications such as Moveabletype or WordPress can be downsized to the limit. Login, click for post, write a post and publish. That is easy. The difference is then also the wayit is published. Frontpage first post. I have done a blog post! In my experience blogs versus wikis have a much more intuitive approach. Contrary to this is for example Ning – a nice social network application.

Pick up the users
We have to understand that the majority of internet users focus in email and google search. All the fancy web2.0 tools are just at the beginning. Stories and experiences about the difficulty to implement content management systems say a lot about that. Most websites in my opinion are still overloaded for the average user and give too many offers and too little orientation. Not without a reason critics saythat these tools are a waste of time. In terms of efficiency, social software has to go a long way.

Small is beautiful
Social software in an organization can also simply mean that I can rate content or leave a comment on every intranet page. Not common in most organizational systems. A classical structured website with options to edit here and there might be easier to understand and to engage than a whole new wiki. Small gradual steps might be often abetter choice then to come with something completely new. This way one can experiment with options to interact and to offer what thecommunity really wants.

Do not underestimate complexity of social software
One last example is delicious, a social bookmarking platform, which I really like. I presented this form of knowledge sharing many times and gave trainings. I thought it is so clear and easy. But although the design is quite simple, I had to realize how long it took me to understand this application yet alone tagging and all the features. So in essence we seem to expect too much from users and easily overwhelm them with new tools and features. Although the motivation to participate is anyway low. If we want to achieve and end through social software we have to focus on its users first of all.

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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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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During last days I have been going trough different ICT4D papers, and then again I have been astonished to see that their focus was mainly limited to the issue of access although access to a computer or Internet is just a first step and does not mean you can fully engage in the web. Some time ago, while introducing a laptop to a relative, I observed how it is to move a mouse for the first time and how much more their is to learn and the complex steps that have to be taken before you master to browse the web and send your first email. There are many steps to be taken to use ICT as a mean for more.

The UNESCO has an interesting paper called Understanding information literacy: a primer, which highlights very accurate those different dimension for the higher goal of life long learning.

What is Information Literacy, where did it come from, how is it related to lifelong learning, and to other kinds of literacies, and why is it critically important to every nation, its institutions, and its citizens, in order for them to perform competitively and productively in a Digital World and a 21st Century Global Information Society, as well as to promote greater social inclusion, and freedom of expression and opinion

I summarized here the different steps of literacy necessary to fully leverage the potential of the Internet:

1. Basic or core literacies
   This term still applies to the core or foundation literacies of learning how to read, how to write and how to perform simple numeracy tasks necessary in everyday life.
2. Computer literacy
   Computer literacy means the efficient ability to know how to use and operate computers as information processing machine
   • a. Hardware Literacy
     Hardware literacy refers to the set of basic operations you need to know in order to use a computer such as a Personal Computer (PC) or Laptop, or perhaps a combination hand-held device such as BlackBerry efficiently.
   • b. Software Literacy.
     Software literacy refers to the “invisible” set of general-purpose procedures and instructions that the computer or telecommunications hardware requires in order to perform its functions properly.
3. Media Literacy
   Media literacy embraces everything from having the knowledge needed to use old and new media technology to having a critical relationship to media content in a time when the media constitute one of the most powerful forces in society.
4. Distance Education and E-Learning
5. Cultural Literacy
   Cultural literacy means a knowledge of, and understanding, of how a country’s, a religion’s, an ethnic group’s, or a tribe’s traditions, beliefs, symbols and icons, celebrations, and traditional means of communication (e.g. orally) impact the creation, storage, handling, communication, preservation and archiving of data, information and
   knowledge, using technologies.
6. Information Literacy
   … empower people in all walks of life to seek, evaluate, use and create information
   effectively to achieve their personal, social, occupational and educational goals.

Going through these steps one can imagine how long it can take and how much more there is to come once you have access. It is quite obvious that those steps or dimension for knowledge sharing and learning are an essential benefit getting through information and communication technology. But ICT’s are only means and access itself does not necessarily get you anywhere. This shows that the real challenge is to help people acquire these literacy skills. For example think back how long it took you to understand the basis and logic of an operation system, its folders, files etc.

Luckily, software is nowadays developed more intuitively as the “beta mode” websites show. Also, hardware is getting more user centered as the “iphone” shows. One imagine then the time it can take to engage through the web, to interact and collaborate. Social media opens new venues to engage in many of the above listed literacy. But all those nice fancy tools out there on the web have still to prove that they really improve literacy for all.

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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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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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