For years, I have heard that the web is becoming a platform, where one can easily use a website as a tool box.  Community sites installed just with a few clicks and knowledge sharing communities are on their way. But as in most cases, there is always a hard point, and in this case is to get people involved. Although technology plays a less important role, it is still a critical factor whether people like to join and engage. Many ready-made-website fail to deliver the most important thing: To help people find stuff and help them exchange.

Technology constraints vs. user needs

Of course there are examples of simplified websites, which focus on user needs such as Gmail or Flickr. But knowledge sharing in a community is often way more complex if you have to combine different forms of media, a library of existing resources and so forth. I have tested numerous platforms and until today I have just been disappointed because each time I had certain needs and always had to put these under technology constraints. Although it should be the other way around and technology should help me make it better and easier.

Professional circles vs. passion driven communities

One big differentiation is important. I am talking here about professional communities, where people exchange about their work. These communities are much more difficult to establish. If people have a real desire to exchange ideas, for example, about their hobbies, a bizarre designed forum could work perfectly and would be more dynamic. There are many examples of dynamic communities that existed way before they were named Web2.0 or social media. To me, work related communities focus a lot on the knowledge management principle: Find the right information where and when it is needed.

Information seeking vs. engagement

I have less time. Nowadays, I can engage in so many communities, mostly when I am not even online. Why should I also join in your community? Perhaps because this community gives me the information I need: quick, easy and maybe even in high quality.  From this perspective, for example, a Ning website is a disaster. Flashy, blinky things focus on a personal presentation instead of orientation, coherence and relevance. Have you ever tried to find something on a Ning website?  How many communities are really active on Ning? Okay, to be fair, technology and a user centered website is one factor, but let me raise some more points:

• Most of these social network websites are features loaded and focus very little on plain people to people exchange.
• Although you have as a webmaster a set of options to change your network, it is not enough. You need to be able to tweak in detail to make a platform user-centered. Listen to your members and make changes according to them.
• Facebook, Linkedin, etc. are great tools to network and to mobilize, but offer almost no flexibility to build a community of practice. It is the Facebook way or no way. More important these big platforms have no interest in real exchange and learning. It is not their business concept.
• A questionable approach are widgets, where content is distributed all over the place. Photos here, documents there. A RSS feed is easily another information stream with little relevance.
• Each community has its own culture of exchange and different requirements. It is so difficult to find the right platform for that. Instead one needs to squeeze requirements to technology constraints.
• Confidentiality. Latest from Facebook, it is always a risk to give your data to such a platform. Also other platforms have a clear exit strategy for their users. You can leave easily and take your data with you.
• Community develop over time. It is impossible to foresee what is needed and what not for your platform in the future. Often a wonderful list of features is tempting, but so much is not really needed later on.
• If you want to make information finding for users the easiest possible way, the whole information structure behind a site becomes easily complex. The more is done through intelligently tagging in the background, the easier it becomes for users to find something.

Alternative?

Either you are lucky to find a service that offers you what you need or you opt for the usual stony way to build your own website. I know it is not a great alternative, but I believe we have to realize that so many web technologies are still in its infancy and we have just started to focus on the users as the center point of such technologies. I know it is not the best to shot at Ning as an example alone, but their latest turn in their payment policy shows a typical dilemma. Nobody knows where such providers are in a few years time.

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There are more than one billion people, who are members of some sort of social network website. But, will these websites be the future platforms, where we can engage to create social networks? I doubt it. The future will go back to your address book, where it has always been.

Photo by Zheem from Flickr (CC)

Address book

An address book can combine contact details and much more information people add to it. Now, imagine these contacts are updated constantly adding new information available depending on each person and the social network they belong to. The HTC android driven mobile phone has already got that function. It connects you to certain social network websites and matches them to your address book. So, it really does not matter what website is behind it, you simply get an overview or stream of information of your friends’s and colleagues’s activities at various websites under each (online active) contact in your address book:

Own control vs. Facebook control

Photo by laihiu from Flickr (CC)

Now, the best way to decide what is public or private and who shall see what, would be if you have complete control over your information. In the case of Facebook, they want to do that job for you and that is the problem. If one looks at the continuous privacy issues of Facebook, it is about time that information gets protected from companies, which change their terms of services every second day (e.g. Apple).

Steve Boyd writes: “One simple observation is that users will not be able to get the privacy they want (or think they already have, or at least had in the past) in today’s Facebook.” and he concludes that Facebook, therefore, is not the future.

However, the answer of many social network websites is to collect as much personal information to become your personal address book. The Facebook friend finder stores all the information forever and therefore comes up with intriguing friend suggestions.

Reality check

The problem is that there is not really a serious initiative to work on an alternative open system, where users could control their data and give social networks access to the information they want to share. Still, in a call for a Facebook alternative, people donated in short time a hundred thousand dollars.

Another, albeit failed and disappointing, attempt was Open Social, initiated by Google about two years ago. The good news, however, is that even Facebook will have difficulties to be the decisive player. That might (hopefully) be history soon.

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I wonder what are the factors and incentives that drive people to join an online community, and why not? My work normally involves different communities or evolves around these, but it is often difficult to anticipate how a community develops. Some things work, others not at all. To get a community started has a lot to do with experimenting. The other day I had an interesting chat with Nancy White and Joitske Hulsebosch about this specific topic, and decided to bring it up in public.

What did I miss?

Of course, mostly it depends on the context and on the person, as Nancy remarked. It is almost impossible to generalize here, but it seems that there are a multiple of factors that count. But the multitude of networks are all trying to gain one’s attention.

Lastly, this topic is also interesting as we often know so little about the majority of lurkers once they have joined and why they did? Ton Zijlstra and Lilia Efimova have some interesting thoughts about the value of lurkers:

“Lurking, although the word seems to imply a negative connotation, has usefull aspects nonetheless. It is a way of determining rules of behaviour for new comers to a group. (…) The most obvious characteristic of a lurker is that he is at the fringe of a group, listening and observing. Being at the fringe may seem like a bad place from the core, but in fact is a good position to build bridges to other groups, and be aware of other groups in the vicinity. “

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Cairo

Johannesburg

In this blog post, I will dive into the latest buzz: Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is a huge jump in location-based services as it happens all around the world at once. I have browsed through the map of Google Buzz’ mobile phone version, where statuses can be combined with your location – it is striking to see where all information pops up. Here are maps of three different cities – Johannesburg, Cairo and Mumbai – showing messages from the last 24 hours.

Mumbai

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

Photo by Scarygami @Flickr

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

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

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

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

Source Criteria:

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

Network factor:

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

Appearance:

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

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

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

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

Speed

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

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

Intensity

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

Crisscrossed

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

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There are over one billion Internet users worldwide according to a list from Wikipedia. Every day thousand of people joining social networks such as Facebook. How can these social networks be used to boost business? Are there differences between countries or regions how such social networks work? Mark Davies from Esoko, explains intriguing thoughts from his work in Ghana on market information systems through mobile phones.

The next billion

It is not easy to get figures, but the ones existing might come as a surprise to some. The largest social network in China, QQ has over 300 million active members. According to Appfrica, South Africa has 1.1 million Facebook members, Morocco 369,000, Tunisia 279,000, Nigeria 220,000, Kenya 150,000,and Mauritius 60,000.  Here are more details on social networks worldwide. The key role will be around mobile phones as the main way to access and interact in online social networks. According to research from Frost & Sullivan and Colibria, mobile social networks will grow ten fold to over 500 million users in Latin America and Africa in the next five years.

Culture and impact

But what happens in this social networks is what we know little about. What are the impact of such networks and their potentials beyond pure leisure exchange? This question has made me thought for a while and wonder what is the role of different cultures in such communities. For Anand Giridharadas, Facebook becomes an Indian village. Back at the ICT observatory I had an interesting discussion with Mark Davies around these questions, which I have recorded and transcribed below.

Christian: Hello Mark. We attended the last day of the ICT Observatory. We’ve had very interesting discussions the past days, and I would like to ask you, or discuss with you, the topic about social networks in Africa. Especially, you already mentioned that in your project, you really want to go in that direction using mobiles and the web for farmers, and to bring farmers and traders together. What do you think is the role of these networks and their potentials for the future?

Mark Davies: Well, I think it’s really interesting that we’ve been through a period of three or four years, where networks seem to be one of the most compelling and interesting uses of the web, or the web 2.0. We’ve experience FaceBook, Twitter, and these other, MySpace.

Sitting in Africa, where we’re working in Africa, and we’re working in commerce and trade, it’s all about social networks. You’re trading with individuals that you know, this is perhaps a friends, or an associate, or somebody within your village. There is some identity that you can associate with them, and there is an element of trust.

So it’s just intriguing to consider, if we took some of those principals of FaceBook, of Twitter, of MySpace, and we used it in a environment where, actually, social networks are even stringer. Does that mean that they are more or less appropriate? I think that’s what’s fascinating us.

Certainly in the case of European trade, or me as a businessman in America, I didn’t need to know the person that I was trading with. I working within legislative framework I was working where standards and grades existed, and we knew who and what we were trading.

In Africa, if you’re trading something, how do you insure that you get paid? How do you insure that the item that you’re trading is what you’ve agreed upon? How do you insure that these things are what they say they are? You use networks as a way to reinforce, in this informal sector, that kind of commence and trade.

I think that’s where we’re looking at using technology to reinforce those networks, and make it easier for you to extend your networks beyond, perhaps, the geography or immediate linkages that you currently experience.

Christian: So that would mean the physical presence, the face-to-face exchange, is very important. To which extent do you think it is possible to do something over the Internet, when it comes to something as serious as trader and business-to-business solutions through mobile phones?

Mark Davies: Well I don’t think you do trade over the web, I don’t think that’s what happens. But I think it’s about “how do you exploit some of your social capitol using the web?” I don’t think that means everything suddenly happens on the web, I don’t think that we’re going to see e-commerce anytime soon.

But how do I connect to somebody who might be in a different village, further away? If somebody has said that they have a product that I’m interested in, how can I use some networking tool to get closer to that person, to establish some identity or some reputation?

Perhaps I might find somebody that I already know in their community. And I can ask them “do you know so-and-so? Are they trustworthy? Can I send them the money before they send me the product?” I think that’s the way.

It’s a little more complex, it’s about minimizing risk. You’re using social networking, you’re using technology to minimize your risk. Not to replace complete transactional activities, which will still be, if not face-to-face, it will be mouth-to-mouth. You will be negotiating, you will be arguing, you will be qualifying the deal.

But you can certainly use technology to use society, and used linkages as ways of minimizing your risk. In the same way how Grameen, with finance and loans, has leveraged your community, your network to create social pressure on you to pay back during certain periods, or on certain dates. In the same way, we can use social networks to create peer pressure so that you’re not abusing a trade or commerce relationship, in a similar way, with a stranger.

Christian: Very interesting. You also told me that you, for implementation, that you think about reputation. The keyword is reputation. Can you imagine something like eBay for rating and reputation? To which extent could that work? Especially, also, what could be the role of mobile phones then?

Mark Davies: Well, I think that people trade in Africa based on reputation. They know that “I may not even get the best price from this person, but I know that I will get paid, and I know that I will paid quickly.” These are the sorts of reputations that are important when you are choosing “who might I trade with?”

So the fact is that I think people in Africa, more or less, are simply not digitized. They don’t exist in a database. They have have a SIM card. Do they have a phone number? Yes. Do they have a postal address, or in they in a electoral register? These thing are beginning, but in effect, they aren’t accessible. You can’t find a profile to find out whether this person has abused previous trading relationships or not.

So I think, that as we profile people and put them into these databases, and digitize communities, we can associate content, observations, and commentary about them that can help other people interact with them. And again, reduce their risk. Now whether, in the simplest form, that might mean “are you allowing that community to rank and rate an individual?” We don’t know.

It’s, I think, a very dangerous games to be in. Because people may have all kinds of reasons why they might want to rank you and rate you, that are not particularly objective. So I think we need to think very carefully about who can rank who, under what circumstances. How can we keep it objective? Do we have particular agents, or brokers, that have greater weighting, or ranking, to their own ranking of other individuals?

But very simply, you could see a system whereby I, on a mobile phone, could enter the could enter the mobile phone of the person I’m trading with, and just establish “does the person exist? Are they on a system somewhere? How long have they been on that system? If they’ve been on it for three weeks, can I trust them? And if they’ve been on for three years, maybe there’s some more credibility there. And can you tell me how many complaints have been approved by brokers within that platforms, so that I can see that there is quite some risk with doing a trade with this person?”

So very much like eBay. 73 percent score, because 300 people have ranked this person and had a positive experience. That introduction of reputation into markets in Africa, will have a profound impact on expanding circles of trade.

Christian: That means, of course, more sales for products, and more…

Mark Davies: Yes, I think it’s not only about trying to push product our of Africa, to the rest of the world. It’s within Africa, it’s within the sub-regions. It’s between Ghana and Burkina, that we find trade breaking down because there are barriers of language, barriers of trust, barriers of regulation.

A great deal of thinking is being emphasized on “how do we create inter-regional trade, so that the wealth can be rationed within these African communities? That we can increase production, that we can increase demand within national consumer populations?”

As such, I think these tools, and these technologies, can play a very important role in facilitating that, and allowing cross-border trade with people that you might not have traded with before. Even if it just means “how do I convert a price into my currency?” In northern regions of Ghana, where you’re trying to understand what the price is in Burkina, it’s in French and it’s in CFR, in their currency.

So it’s very difficult to kind of compare. “Should I go a few extra kilometer, and buy or sell that product.” Technology can be used, and it will be on the mobile, to breakdown those kinds of barriers or language and currency, so that you can judge for you self what is the opportunity that is presented.

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

Illustration by Hugh MacLeod

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

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

Challenge 2: Getting the information from networks

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

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

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

Where are the brilliant solutions to link better relevant information?

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

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Imagine if people were using social network sites such as Facebook not only for leisure, but to contribute to a good cause.  If engagement would go beyond Slacktivism to be part of a cause, and millions of people were contributing to a common for worldwide development work. Why doesn’t it happen like that with Wikipedia? Or am I wrong and perhaps we actually are coming close to mass collaboration?

If I look at the statistics and the incredible growth of social networks, I wonder how and when would these networks be used to join expertise, share ideas, do volunteer work, and mobilize people for social change?

Over at the web2fordev blog, I analyzed the potentials of social networks to address world challenges, which I extend in three posts. My assumption is that a lot has already happened, but most initiaves are still squattered around the web and the large group of “normal”, non social media enthusiasts, the majority of the web, is just tapping into online social networks.

The next Billion – the rise of social network sites in developing countries

Social network websites are becoming a global phenomenon. Millions now go online to engage in social networks. According to Wikipedia, there are some 1.5 billion members worldwide. Where is this growth taking place? What does this mean for web2fordev? And what role do mobile phones play. Almost a million people registered on Facebook in just three years for Egypt alone. According to Appfrica, South Africa has 1.1 million Facebook members, Morocco 369,000, Tunisia 279,000, Nigeria 220,000, Kenya 150,000,and Mauritius 60,000. The largest online social network is in China. QQ focuses on instant messaging and gaming with over 300 million active members. (Whole article)

The world becomes a village – implications of social networks

What happens when millions of people engage in social networks? Online communities are not a new phenomenon, but the creation of large online meeting spaces marks a new era and new dimensions.

What is happening in these social networks and what are the implications? A great analogy comes from Anand Giridharadas, who wrote an article by the title “Behind Facebook’s Success: It Takes a Village“. Anand argues that being in a social network is like living in a village, where you can share your thoughts, emotions, news, and more – something like entertaining neighbourhood relationships, with the difference that geographic location, physical distances and time do not matter anymore and interactions can occur on a global scale, 24 hours  a day and seven days a week. Once you establish your network with a multitude of members, “you are compelled, as in the village, to know their business. It’s strangely nice.”

From local to global – social networks address world challenges

Whether the environment, poverty or peace, almost all of today’s challenges are also dealt with in one or in another way  through the Internet. Online social networks play an increasingly important role in connecting people and offering spaces where groups of individuals can work on solutions and push for change. There are fascinating examples from local to global engagement.

What are the different forms of engagement and who takes part in them?

The ease of forming groups

There are two main pillars: Firstly, through the social web it has becomes increasingly easy to find and connect with people sharing common interests and worldviews. Secondly, it is getting easier by the day to set-up online groups online, attract followers and see them coalesce around a shared vision or common mission.

Clay Shirky highlights a social factor in his book “Here comes Everybody”:

“Ridiculously easy group-forming matters, because the desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always been constrained by transaction costs.” “Everywhere you look, groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action. For the first time in history, we have tools that truly allow for this.”

Different forms of engagement

Participating in social networks can be very different, for example, from passive sharing to active problem solving. Gaurav Mishra has elaborated the “4Cs Social Media Framework“, which helps look at the different forms of engagement. I adopted it slightly and describe each level through different examples.

Content Sharing

It all starts with sharing information between people, by publishing content, to let each other know about certain issues and create conversations. It can be by simply sharing a common tag such as web2fordev to collect bookmarks or to use the same hashtags such as #iranelection when spreading news about the recent election in Iran.

Forming Networks

This way, far-off individuals can find each other in a spontaneous and informal manner and form networks. It has never been that easy to locate people with similar interests. Lisa Campbell did an interesting study about mobile social networks in Costa Rica and describes how Twitter and Hi5 are gradual forming networks of like minded people. She emphasises how these connections are increasingly fostered by interactions via mobile phones. For example Hi5 has a mobile version in 26 languages. Online networks engaged in development cooperation can be found with the spectrum of DGroups.org.

Co-Creation

At the higher level of engagement, people actually start jointly creating things by using text, audio or video. Such efforts are well represented by Wikis, such as the Water Wiki, with the contribution of many other organizations or on dot.sub where volunteers translate the subtitles of videos in their preferred languages.

Collective Action

Collective action can materialise in many ways. For example, people can act collectively in the name of a cause or for expressing their grievances. This happened last year when 50,000 Estonians where mobilized over the web to clean up garbage throughout their country in one day; or in Egypt, where a Facebook group grew to 70.000 members supporting the strike of textile workers in a matter of days. The group triggered a lot of discussion on democracy in Egypt but it did not lead to street protests due the unwillingness of the government to allow demonstrations. Another example is a campaign to rally against the FARC in Colombia. The Facebook group, “A Million Voices Against FARC,” initiated rallies that took place in 165 cities across the globe.

Communities

On a higher level, this collective action can generate communities, which differently from an ad-hoc network, have a sustained collaboration and a shared goal. Such is Nabuur.com, existing since 2001, where over 17.000 volunteers try to help villages in developing countries. This online help network is used by participants from around the world to discuss approaches to development, generate ideas, and obtain feedback. For example the “Zero Waste Management project” in Bweyogerere in Uganda can improve its immediate local context through such web enabled support. The Public Participation GIS community is another example with its close to 2000 members active across the globe and collaborating on a number of initiatives at different levels all dealing with participatory spatial information management and communication.

Examples of collective actions towards the implementation of a joint project or more specifically towards the development of a shared product are the communities populating the galaxy of free/open source software (FOSS). Notable examples are the communities which work on the development Content Management Systems like Joomla, Drupal, or other applications like Openstreetmaps.

Real Life Impact

So, higher forms of collective action can have spill-over effects to the real world, for example, improve a situation and create communities to work on more solutions for pressuring problems. One last interesting example exemplifying the whole above described engagement, is the project around Ushahidi, where human rights activists offer a platform that crowdsources crisis information. Although the tool itself has generated a lot of enthusiasm, equally interesting is how it has developed so far. It started with befriended bloggers, who as I understood, got to know each other through their blogs and formed a network of similar interests. That led to a collaboration in the post-election crisis of Kenya, where some of them took action and established a crisis monitoring tool. The people involved had not known each other before and got connected over the web. The tool was used then in the field and triggered a country wide collective action to document human rights violations. The success triggered the coalescing of a community around the issue of crisis mapping with developers and activists developing the tools further and replicating them elsewhere. This is an example on how web-enabled collaboration had real impact in the field. One other outcome is a crisiscamp, which took place recently in Washington. Another one is planned in the UK.

All these different phases  do not need to happen in a prescribed order and it should illustrate how much work and effort is needed to build up a community. These illustrate how much potential lies in these new group formations. The majority of interaction is mainly for leisure but with little means an individual engagement can grow for example to a larger campaign. But Beth Kanter has also indicated the difficulty to lead Facebook members to higher levels of engagement. A petition is quickly signed, but to contribute and interact on a regular basis is not happening on a massive scale yet. A critical mass of individuals engaging proactively, trust, animation and experience are needed particularly in often anonymous online interaction, which usually takes up time.

The potentials of social networks are not necessarily for the good. Extremist groups, even hoaxers,  are very sophisticated to exploit social networks for their purposes, so that “social networks and video-sharing sites don’t always bring people closer together“. Social network providers are not rarely overburdened to deal with all these different forms of activism.

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If the social web and social media can make such a difference, then their impact should be measurable. Certainly, the question is: How much can or shall be measured? A gut feeling alone might not be enough, particularly when one needs to convince others to engage in social media. Nevertheless, I think there are some ways to get better metrics to at least measure interaction, which go beyond tools such as Google Analytics. So this is an attempt to measure interaction in social networks and the success or value of knowledge sharing?

Campaign: Storytelling and social media
Beth Kanter has an excellent presentation on storytelling & social media. First of all, she emphasizes that counting metrics alone makes little sense as they need to be part of a bigger framework. She takes the case of a campaign, which might have some good analogies to single social network platforms or communities of practice.

“Return on Investment is a much broader concept that doing math. If you lay it step-by-step, it includes these:

• Smart Objective
• Defined Audience
• Clearly articulated benefits statement that looks at tangible and intangible
• Use of metrics to measure your results
• Results translated into dollar value (donations or time saved)
• Financial calculations: net gain, opportunity cost, or comparison to other method
• Communicating the results”

Social network: Knowledge sharing and learning
If I translate that to my case, I have not got the smartest goal in terms of quantifiable results: A high value and share of knowledge. Lets say it is quite generic. But as Richard Dennison writes here, that is exactly a problem:

If you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. We are driving quality, innovation and creativity out of our businesses and institutions in favour of quantity. It has been shown again and again that our obsession with targets simply perverts activities to meet those targets at the expense of doing something useful or meaningful.

Nevertheless, I think there are at least some metrics that let you see how intensive or broad your interaction is. A while ago I collected already some metrics thanks to Rachel Happe.

I tried to approach this issue the following clusters and example metrics:

Representation
If you really want to achieve a high value you need a diverse representation.

• A good platform has a certain mix of representations: e.g. countries, organizations or departments, etc.
• The representation can be measured by visitors, members, contributions.
• You can set a criteria raster. For example, an own organization is less important and external stakeholders are more valuable.

Contributions
The percentage of contribution is a key indicator of the willingness to engage, and whether your website is attractive or not. For example, if more than 10% of your network is regularly participative (i.e. contributing), you have then achieved quite something.

• Frequency of new resources and the average percentage of member contributions.
• Mix of contributions, e.g. links are not as valuable as blog posts through a ranking.

Interaction

• Ratio of comments vs. resources: Average percentage of comments on each contribution such as blog posts, links, etc.
• The ratio of comments towards members.
• The amount of blog posts linking to other blog posts in the network.

Content (quality)

• The bounce rate of your website says how much people were interested to click further.
• Average time spent on pages.
• Page views. The more people browse pages – the more interest they have.
• The average amount of tags used by each contributor.

Outreach of website

• Growth of members or newsletter subscriber
• The amount of invitations sent from your platform.
• The amount of links to your platform.

Of course these metrics do not bring you much further in terms of quality, but I guess that could be solved by analysing the sample content or making a survey. But, who can say what content has higher quality for learning? It is not that easy. What do you think? Do you maybe have more metrics?

I checked in the past days external statistic systems such as Google Analytics and they only offer a few from the above metrics. So it is important to choose a platform which offers you more statistics. Measuring this by mailing is much simpler. In a next step I will try to get this information out of a Drupal platform and then contemplate more about Beth’s point to not only leave it on counting.

Two interesting attempts of calculators are here:

• The PBwiki ROI Calculator
• Calculator for social network campaigns

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The simplest and most powerful form of mobile activism in the future will probably still be ordinary communication. However, in all fields of activism such as advocacy, awareness, research and protest, the mobile phone can be a strategic tool for communication, collaboration, coordination and collective action. In this regard we have only started to tap upon the potential of this all-purpose tool, being it in ownership by a majority of Africans across the continent.
However if one wants to look at some likely future scenarios and potentials for advanced mobile usage, then 4 trends could be particularly promising for mobile activism.

The first trend is disruptive innovation around mobile phones especially in Africa. If it is hardware or software, the creativity and ingenuity is happening – through adapting or hacking, new means and uses are developed right where they are needed. Open operation systems allow to create various needed features for the local context in the respective language. Mobile software examples from Kenya show the potential that exists even in low-cost and older models.

The second trend is around the local context, where increasing mobile features such as videos, photos, sooner or later GPS or sensors allow to analyse and document the environment. The mobile becomes a research tool to give its user the capacity to collect and share information. Open information repositories can be created for advocacy work. One outcome is increasing transparency. Mobile phones can be key for collectivity contributing to new information systems and receiving all sorts of information. The example of Ushahidi shows strength in linking the collected information to geodata.

The third trend is the mobile as a publishing and broadcasting tool. Text, audio and video is already possible – its contributions can support own communication channels and coincide with existing forms of citizen journalism. Here we already witness overlapping with other information and communication technologies such as radio. Surely, some form of data exchange has to work for that, which still inhibits several challenges. But that form of information exchange will happen, whatever technology is behind it. Tools for information exchange solely relying on SMS prove this is possible for all phones.

The fourth trend is about the potential for peer-to-peer networking. Mxit in South Africa, a mobile social network application with more than 5 million members lets one engage in an own community independently from location and time. Engaging in a ubiquitous network is promising for activism: coordination, mobilization and collective action. “It is not about mobile any more. It is the convergence from the social web with the mobile. The mobile let you interact within a network in a highly contextual way.” (Teemu Arina) Or as anthropologist Jan Chipchase asks: “So what does it mean when people’s identity is mobile?”

Nevertheless, a lot of challenges still remain, such as high costs or illiteracy. The control of mobile phone networks can become a security risk, also there is the potential that activists have to compete with private sector and the government in these new channels, and it might become an echo chamber residing with the essential challenges of activism: the lack of participation.

What do you think? Do you agree with the four trends or do you think there are additional ones? I will investigate this topic further in the next weeks for an article in a book about mobile activism in Africa. Thanks in advance for any remarks, links and critic!

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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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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

Let’s face it, when you deal with knowledge sharing in an organization, it becomes quickly obvious that most knowledge is shared personally, face-to-face over the telephone or in the cafeteria. In a personal conversation people can describe issues in length, reply to questions and tell the “real” story. Formal meetings often do not give space for vibrant discussions and are often not the forum to describe the pros and cons. Although by listening to the experiences of others, best learning can be achieved.

An ordinary organization has usually a top-down controlled Intranet, where the different departments add their contributions. Sometimes there is even a forum, but in many cases hardly used at all — it is somewhere hidden or a hassle to access. The organizational life is happening somewhere else and employees on a business trip or in a different branch are cut off.

Social software offers at least three new ways for organization to benefit from:

1. To get a picture of what is really happening in an organization. What are the major topics? What is it what staff discusses and cares about? Not all is going to be public, but a lot more than a top-down Intranet or internal communication by the corporate communication department. Is your organization ready for that?
2. To bring people with same interests together without typing with your numb finger over the telephone. Personal employee’s pages, such as yellow pages, can be easily linked through common key words (tags) by interests, competencies, blog posts, projects on wiki pages etc. Check your del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site) or this video and browse through it and see yourself how quickly you find like-minded people. On delicious it is often anonymous, but in an organization it is all linked to employees and their expertise, their projects and questions. Check out 20 things to do on a social network in the office.
3. To increase productivity and emphasize innovation. To imagine employees to network on a peer-to-peer basis. A transparent open network will not only brings synergies and avoids to reinvention of the wheel, but also offers innovations. Like-minded people collaborate on their preferred topics. Staff with similar ideas find each other or new ideas arose out of discussions between people who have different departments.

Why should they do it? It certainly needs transparency and trust but the benefit and mutual gain can come quickly. But this is of course a nightmare scenario to all those employees, who treat knowledge as power. Because in this kind of open horizontal community you are what you share!

How to start?

Here are some rather bottom-up approaches:

• Start a collaborative tagging experiment over del.icio.us with colleagues to see how easy the sharing of valuable information can be, or open up a room on friendfeed to discuss right away resources.
• Use external tools for your team to make project management easier. One example could be a blog for your project’s history, milestones and other management tasks.
• Connect with colleagues through existing social networks such as Xing, Linkedin or Facebook and use it for exchange.
• Extend informal activities on the web and make other colleagues be aware of it: bulletin board, liftsharing etc.
• As Joitske commented on my first blog post, you can address a specific problem and use social media for an open transparent discussion.

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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Blogs have started a little revolution — nowadays everyone with Internet access can publish content on the web. Citizens can articulate their perspective and exchange it within a network of blogs. The mobile phone, with its improved access to the web, gives new means for citizen engagement because one can connect from everywhere and engage and broadcast from anywhere. These are the three most influential factors:

Always online

There is a slow shift when the web loses its physical limitation. Although the web is all around the world, in most of the cases you have to go somewhere to be connected. The mobile phone, because it is easier to connect to the web, changes that — you are always online. The web is a constant follower that might be frightening to some. But a “blackberry for activism” lets activists get involved instantly. On a peer to peer basis, people are connected = protected. A recent case underlines the potential: “Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice.” Jan Chipchase wrote in a recent New York Times article, “the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.”

Interacting from everywhere

Some years ago I read Howard Rheingold’s “Smart Mobs” and I could not really see these mobile peer-to-peer networks happening on a massive scale, but, nowadays, a connection to the web allows people to be part of social networks. There are many worldwide experiences for sms campaigns for political change. The New York Times recently wrote, “50 million people, or about 2.3 percent of all mobile users, already use the cellphone for social networking.” This is particularly important in developing countries, where mobile phones are the communication tool. The real benefit is not in the northern hemisphere, where through the recent years most mobile business models have been failing. It is in Africa or Asia where the mobile phone is the main communication technology. If this is connected through the web, it then allows interaction, coordination and organization on a peer to peer basis. The cvberactivism in the aftermath of political violence in Kenya is one example and another is the mobile social blogging network vipera.com.

Broadcast from everywhere

In re-publica.de I watched a fascinating session on video citizen journalism. Brian Conley presented a project in which people from Iraq broadcast from Baghdad over the web (Alive in Baghdad), and there is no media team around. This presentation reminded me of a recent new development: live video broadcasting. Two new services are very interesting: Qik and Mogulus. Yes, more new tools, but these ones represent a shift — with Qik you can broadcast alive from your mobile phone wherever you are. I first got introduced to it when David Wilcox interviewed me through his mobile phone at the Social Innovation Camp. And the other tool, Mogulus.com, can be set up easily in your own television station to be online, letting you broadcast on daily basis from it. Eduardo Avila writes a fascinating story from Ecuador:  My Mobile Voice and Citizen Journalism.

Citizen video broadcasting has two interesting facets: First, videos often have a stronger impact compared to texts. Second, citizen journalists, such as mobile reporters in Africa, go themselves to demonstrations and make interviews or film directly from areas where no media outlet goes.

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A bit late I write my feedback from the Social Innovation Camp (sicamp08), which luckily had the chance to join. I first heard about it from Dan McQuillan, who is one of the initiators and also has a great blog. It was a fascinating weekend with a real kind of Barcamp atmosphere, or as David Wilcox says, the sicamp08 “will make a big difference in the way we think about doing good stuff with new stuff.”

On Friday we went to a get-together and later to a pub. During this few hours, I got to know somebody from the open source movement in Brazil, a PHD student about social media, some great folks who try to change the British local government from inside out, and a lot of people with great ideas – many more than the six chosen for the Social Innovation Camp. But also, the Young foundation premises were a great location and the organization was excellent. Before I tell more about the different projects and the weekend, I would like to wrap up the highlights:

• It works! The concept of bringing people together to collaborate for social innovation through the web worked excellent. Almost a hundred people showed up, who were all eager to collaborate and offered their expertise.
• Inside out. It is amazing to see the spirit of the participative alive and be able to meet all these open people. In contrast to Barcamps, it goes a step further and people work on a project and by that, you share experiences and learn from each other. Both represent a great passion for exchange and a desire for creativity.
• Scale it up! I can so imagine how this approach could be scaled up. Bringing people with ideas together an d forming something together exhilarating and contagious. The web has become a playground to rethink or we-think (Charles Leadbeater) the potential of social change and overcome traditional barriers. Therefore I am eager to participate at the Social Camp in Berlin next June.
• Unlimited ideas. It was really amazing, in brainstorm sessions, to listen and discuss so many ideas that the attendees have. There are many impressive ways to empower citizens, to engage in social or injustice or help to change a community. To me, it is clear that we are just at the start of this development. Business start-ups were the beginning and social innovation start-ups are the future.
• Richness of data. During the last year, I was often overwhelmed, suspicious or frustrated about all this available information and data in the net. But now, there is a great potential to get much more out of all these data. Make it relevant, use it for transparency or advocacy. This kind of information power will change a lot: Being it “rate my prison” or the potential of aggregation.
• It is the mobile phone. Once again the mobile will make a big difference because of one simple reason. Whereas in the past I went to the computer to do something with the web, in the future my life and the web are closely connected. I can engage when I want or consult a friend or contribute to the wiki bar-code or I switch off.

There is a backnetwork page to see all people involved and all six chosen projects are described at the Social Innovation Camp website:

• Wibi.it
  Formerly bar-code Wikipedia. A site for storing user-generated information – such as carbon footprint, manufacturing conditions and reviews – against a product, identified by its barcode number. It enables buyers to check product information through their mobile phone right in the supermarket, for example, whether it really is fair trade.
• Enabled by Design
  A resource for anyone looking to make adjustments to their lives, be it as a result of disability, injury or impairment. Enabled by Design won £2,000 as our judges’ favourite idea at Show and Tell.
  
• On The Up
  Formerly Personal Development Reports. An online system that supports young people to identify their personal skills and qualities. That is the project I worked with. It is about personal development to help young people get a perspective, become peer learners and fulfil their dreams. In the first hour, I did not know whether it would work but suddenly a great visionary idea came together. I am curious to see how it will go on.
• Rate Your Prison
  Formerly Prison Visits. A tool to support the families of prisoners coping with the experience of being apart from a loved one. Rate Your Prison won £1,000 as the runner-up project at Show and Tell. There is little information about how prisoners feel in prison. A voice for the voiceless
• CVLifeLine
  Formerly Rate my CV. A site for helping jobseekers using Web 2.0 tools. Young people can help each other to improve their CVs.
• Stuffshare
  Freecycle meets Street Car: a stuff club.

Most projects even had prototype websites finished in those two days, which it was amazing to see they were done with the help of coders and designers. And the winners were “enabled by design” and “rate my prison!” For more information and all other blog posts check the list by Aleksi Aaltonen.

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In Phnom Penh, as everywhere else, the mobile phone is a must have accessory for the youth, and when they get together, they enjoy bluetoothing; or so Thomas Wanhoff told me during my stay in Cambodia. This basically means that they share ringtones, images, videos and games through their mobile phones. The other day I read that last year a quarter of Internet traffic was over the mobile phone. I myself use my mobile to access the web more and more, but I am still not completely satisfied since I do not get to interact easily enough through the social web. However, the iphone has really changed something in that regard.

And so, I wonder how the mobile web and, particularly the collaborative web, will develop? And will it work? By this I mean that I can interact with all sorts of tools via my mobile phone — edit a wiki, build a mashup, writing a blog post, and finally network more effectively. It is clear that the mobile will sooner or later bypass the personal computer by Internet usage. In developing countries the mobile phone is even more important because it will be the decisive tool to access the web as Joel Selanikio points out:

If I had told you ten years ago that by the end of 2007 there would be an international network of wirelessly-connected computers throughout the developing world, you might well have said it wasn’t possible. I am talking, of course, about the mobile phone network.

But, where are the applications and easy ways to do that on the mobile phone? One example are RSS feeds, which can be quickly delivered to mobile phones as Ndesanjo Macha described in a podcast how he accesses via his mobile phone blogs. Lighweight rss feeds are perfect for the slow GPRS connection. 

Most famous is of course Howard Rheingold’s book smartmobs.com. Already some years ago Rheingold described how deep the impact of the mobile web is for youngsters, who play role games in real time, and the game board is the streets of the city. One phenomena were the flashmobs, where a critical mass of people suddenly showed up somewhere to protest or party. Mobile citizen reporter is another interesting outcome but often it is limited to an uploaded photo.

In the field of mobile learning a lot has been discussed. As Teemu Arina points out nicely in a video interview about the future of learning.

Some years ago, Finland was very strong in the mobile side and people where laughing at the idea of mobile learning. But I think it’s coming. I think it’s integrating with the informal learning space, because being mobile means that the context is around you.  

There are still many limitation to the phone: the screen, keyboard, connection. However this is just a matter of time, and recent devices already make a difference. I wonder why  so little has been developed in order to interact and collaborate via the mobile phone in the social web.

Mobile social networks such as MXit in South Africa show the potential. I imagine some people will find it frightening to be always online, but it can also have a lot of advantages to have available Internet access everywhere. However, for developing countries it will make a huge difference to fully be able to participate in the social web because mobile phones are the future. I am sure I missed a lot of things happening. Please drop me a line if you know of interesting examples.

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

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

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

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

Downsides

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(via PR Blogger)

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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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