Search the web for global development topics

March 29, 2008

If you want to find decent information about development aid, Focuss.info is a good source to start from. Basically, it works with a customized Google search, which allows you to search only certain websites — in this case, within many websites relevant to development aid. Focuss.info, an initiative by the Overseas Development Institute ISS institute and in particular Richard Lalleman, goes one step further indexing websites from a community of social bookmarkers. So, through my del.icio.us account, I can contribute to the search easily with my bookmarks. Through a RSS feed, all of these bookmarks are added to the search engine.

The other day I got an email from Richard, telling me I was the social bookmarker of the month. Many thanks! To me, social bookmarking is one of the key tools of the participative web, which gives me valuable information. So, if you also share bookmarks and are interested in topics related to development, you should join this community. Send an email to: info(dot)focuss(at)gmail(dot)com.

And to conclude, for more information about the web2fordev conference, Arne Wunder and Paul Matthews gave a presentation about the evolutionary history of focuss.info.

The web comes closer - the magic of tag clouds

October 4, 2007

As you might have already noticed, I am a pretty big fan of tagging. I think tagging is often underestimated because it is trivial, but at the same time intuitive and meaningful.

A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags (keywords) used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag. (Wikipedia)

Last week, during the web2fordev conference, I presented some web2.0 tools on the webtaster day, and interestingly, tagging triggered greater discussions. Tag clouds show the power of tagging because they summarize the popular topics of a network, show the interest of a person or represent the demand of a community. They bring transparency, simplicity and relevance.

  • Transparency of what a community drives and the community’s topics. It turns classical taxonomy (e.g. a website menu) upside down, so we do not have to rely on “smart” hierarchical structure.
  • Simplicity in what the sea of information is about. It offers us meta-information about all kinds of content available, and it is easy to tag.
  • Relevance of what is the meaning of one keyword to another (e.g. social bookmarking). It involves people, who link and connect information, which other no sophisticated search robot can do so far.

Lastly, it offers us the possibility to map the web ourselves and rely a bit less on search engine robots. It is more realistic than all the semantic web buzz. The following tag clouds represent different communities and their interests. In this regard, this tag clouds are magic because they are a respective representation of networks in their topics.

Afrigator blog aggregator offers an overview of how tags have evolved over time.

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This tag cloud represents the last.fm website, with different tastes of music.

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43 things is a social network website.

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This tag cloud represents the popular tags of photos from a flickr user.

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Tag clouds are also possible with texts such as this John F. Kennedy speech.

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This tag cloud represents qype city guide highlighting the user’s interest.

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A tag cloud representing the major topics of millions of blogs from Technorati.

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Tagging, represented in tag clouds, can easily lead to generalization, but as delicious shows, it can also be represent in an individual perspective. In delicious you can browse through tags in all directions because hierarchical order is absent. But tag clouds can also be quite frightening since they can say a lot about person. Unfortunately, tagging has not evolved very much throughout the last years as Thomas Vanderwal point out in his blog post.

While there are examples that tagging services have moved forward, there is so much more room to advance and improve. As people’s own collection of tagged pages and objects have grown the tools are needed to better refind them.

David Weinberger has a nice description for tagging in his book “Everything is Miscellaneous”:

We are building this connected miscellany link by link and tag by tag. Its value is in the implicit relationship that turns it into an infrastructure of meaning.

10 arguments for web2.0 in an organization

September 3, 2007

It is not always easy to argue in favour of web2.0 tools when you are faced with these arguments:

  • More information? My mailbox already drives me nuts!
  • The content written by some people is often so irrelevant and just for entertainment.
  • I spent already so much time online and now I shall even invest more time on these social networks, wikis etc.
  • I can find my stuff in google. Why shall I tag, blog or share bookmarks?
  • Didn’t we try this online interaction before and it failed? Look at forums and why they never worked.
  • IT solutions often fail. Look at all these outdated databases where you cannot find what you need.

Lida Rose at flickrI already wrote some posts about communication and knowledge sharing through web2.0 in an organization. To me, it seems worthwhile to experiment with it, especially because it empowers each member of an organization. But being convinced and enthusiastic is not enough to help people overcome their skepticism about just another set of IT tools.
So I tried to summarize ten arguments, which help me often persuade colleagues and friends to give web2.0 a try.

  1. Overview: Look at folder structure on your computer. Did it work to store your documents in the right folder and to find them quickly later on? How are the search results of your intranet? Imagine you could criss-cross through tag clouds of topics from your organization, with a few clicks you would find your niche topic. It is not magic. Social bookmarking tools, such as delicious, show it works. It does not use folders. Instead it relies on tags.
  2. Transparency: In emails and classical Intranet, dominated environment information is in-transparent. It goes vertical or horizontal and hides all the valuable information–interesting for others–in mailboxes of individuals.
  3. Relevance: Emails reach you whether you want them or not, and a lot of their content has no relevance to your work. With RSS feeds, you subscribe to what is relevant to your work or what deals about your topic. With your blog, you gather your own community of interest around you and share practice.
  4. Connectedness: Imagine address books or yellow pages would not be the only source to find competence. You could surf different wikis, blogs and bookmark pages, and see behind every page your colleagues discussions or people with similar links. All these conversations make you aware of who are the colleagues sharing your interest or problem.
  5. Openness: Using the read/write web in organizations means that you can interact at any point –being it in a wiki project page or a colleague’s blog post– and help to link the right people and the right topics together. For example, a profile page with a tag cloud of posts and links shows each person’s interests in detail.
  6. Enrichment: Do you struggle over formal documents written in a boring way, leaving out the experiences and opinions. To codify tacit knowledge is a difficult task anyway. Blogs can become storytelling tools amplifying hundreds of learning experiences from daily practice of teams and colleagues.
  7. Easiness: The best part of most of the web2.0 tools is their easy handling. These tools are consequently made for people and have been many times tested to make them better. The beta mode of many applications shows their openness to approach improvement. In contrast, to complicated content management systems, wikis and blogs do not require training.
  8. Technology: A great thing about many web2.0 tools is their often easy technology. You do not have to ask for every second step to the IT department. It is not a sophisticated database with a complicated interface that fails in giving you the right information. Web2.0 means that staff can create and mix tools and media themselves. Blogs can be set up in minutes, interdependencies are created through links and not failing search robots.
  9. Network: Did you ever struggle while navigating through a website? No surprise because it shows only a one dimensional perspective on the organizational knowledge. When colleagues frequently bookmark what interest them in an organizational web and share this with others, then, they weave their own web. This, not only links the real knowledge domains important for an organization; it also creates a social network.
  10. Contribution: Such a web relies on the contribution of its members. It, therefore, highlights and re-numerates the most active contributors, who are willing to share knowledge and like to connect people to learn from each other.

And last but not least, web2.0 has of course obstacles because interaction often remains online. But how great can it work when you find an interesting blog post from a colleague and then ask him to have lunch next week.

A learning story: My way to web2.0

June 26, 2007

Lost in the old web
Drawing6 Throughout the last years I have had mixed emotions about the Internet. On one hand, I was amazed about people, news, themes etc., but on the other hand, I was not satisfied with the overwhelming load of information and the difficulty of obtaining it when needed.

Running around to collect information
Drawing3 I used Google to research all my information and often repeated the same steps to find the same websites. I looked endlessly through websites to find eventually some information. I relied on all sorts of websites in hope that they would post something appealing for me. Basically, I ran though the web to find relevant information without mayor results. I always knew there was more than that and I could not catch up with the latest information.

Watch out! A new web has arrived!
Drawing2 One day a friend of mine pointed me to delicious – a social bookmarking tool where people from all over the world share links. I imported my favourite links onto the server and saw that many other people had already bookmarked the same links as well, and even had many other interesting ones. I was convinced that people knew much better than search engines. I also discovered that there are many people out there in the web who write riveting thoughts in their blogs. And that these blogs and social bookmark sites are basically networks made out of links, information and people.

Kick the overload of information!
Drawing4 I knew of RSS, a universal content format, designed to make the content of a website everywhere available. But after a while I understood that I could grasp all kind of information through feeds. So I threw away my fishing rod and got a fishing net instead to bring all relevant information out there on the web to my laptop. Now I can see when friends upload new photos, see changes in our jointly used Google calendar and have all the information compiled to my needs.

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

Sharing is the key!
Drawing7 All the richness of information comes from the participation of many people. Therefore sharing is the overall premise. I finally understood much better the power of hyperlinks and discovered how even complex themes can be greatly connected through the web and used for learning. You can virtually see how information finds its way through the web. Lastly, I discovered that tagging is a great way of making sense for all this information, and it is okay if everything becomes miscellaneous.

KM4DEV workshop 2007 - peer learning as its best

June 21, 2007

I have just spent three days of intensive discussions with interesting people from around the world, who work in different areas of knowledge management for development (KM4DEV). Besides of some sessions, the three day event had an open sharing and learning approach by leaving it up to the participants to fill in the agenda. The concept seemed a bit confusing in the start, but turned out to be very creative and inspiring.

So here is some feedback of things I found especially interesting from the workshop:

  • Web2.0 and knowledge management
    The workshop itself was the best example of how important face to face contact is and how it opens many venues for learning. The collaborative web nevertheless, gains great importance all in the knowledge management field. Many people are involved in an online knowledge sharing or are planning on building a new generation of sharing and learning platforms. Interesting to me, however, is that wikis were seen quite skeptical and rather complicated. The linkages between tagging, RSS, Blog, wiki and social bookmarking were discussed, but only some organizations have started to integrate them.
  • Graphic facilitation
    Nancy White gave a great session about how graphical facilitation opens new avenues for expression, reduces complexity and helps to give a picture of a process or constellation. It really encourages me to do more in visualization even though I am not very talented in drawing. Micheline Chartrand also made a nice post on that session.
  • Styles of presentation
    There was not a single power point presentation during the workshop, nevertheless there were funny and inspiring presentations: A lot of of drawings, different kinds of performances such as singing and acting, and videos such as the one for social bookmarking. It is of course just a copy of the great RSS in plain English video.



Click To Play

NPK4DEV – a collaborative tagging experience

June 14, 2007

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

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

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

NPK4DEV Tag Cloud (popular tags)
Tag Cloud

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

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

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

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

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

tagliner

What is enterprise2.0? Five pillars for efficient knowledge sharing

June 10, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why all of this? What is the advantage?

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

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

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

What I learnt about social bookmarking

May 6, 2007

I started using the social bookmarking service del.icio.us a year ago, without actually knowing if it was worth the effort. Although it took me quite a while to get behind its potential and I am still learning about it, I can now say I love del.icio.us. For those of you who have not heard about it and who have also experimented with it, I recapitulate my learning curve with the social bookmarking in 10 steps:

  1. At first, I appreciated to access my bookmarks from everywhere but I never really used extensively my favorites in my browser.
  2. Now I have to think about the tags (key words) for every bookmark and was puzzled about the sense of it and whether it is worth the time. Luckily I installed the browser plugin and just had to deal with a little pop up window.
  3. I found the “saved by 1 other person” link and look through other link lists and can get lost in interesting and boring websites just like in Google search. Here and there I find very interesting documents but did not use it frequently because I searched mostly without a goal.
  4. By tagging and checking other people’s tags, I discovered new information and connection in knowledge domains. I started integrating these into my tags and when needed I also reformulated them.
  5. Thanks to Dorine Rüter, I joined another approach of an distant passive community of practice through a tag experiment called npk4dev (latest links are in the right sidebar), which is used by several people from different locations and organizations to share bookmarks on nonprofit knowledge for development issues. A bigger tag stream experiment is used through nptech (nonprofit technology).
  6. I started adding interesting people to my network, so I can see their bookmarks as well. After a while, I realized how valuable most of there new bookmarks were. You can see how information is delivered and spread through the web and can follow network connections. I decided to put my network in my feed-reader.
  7. I took a closer look at my tags and analyzed which ones are heavily used by other users and have interesting links (for example ICT4D) and add the RSS to my feed-reader. (Want to know what RSS are and why it is of advantage to use them? Check out this video!)
  8. I started posted links to some people from my network and try to integrate colleagues and friends into the same sharing. I noticed that people observe very closely the links from other people, and I asked myself whether a tag could or might give to much information about a person. (Luckily I found the “not shared” feature).
  9. I noticed that I referred more and more to delicious instead of Google to search for information, even though it is slower. With an easy keyword, the results are better and most important from other users evaluations.
  10. I wondered why del.icio.us does not offer new features such as improved search, ability to form groups and send messages, or to use it better for collaborative tagging experiences. I wondered how I can use it better for my personal knowledge management and start using for instance a tag for a to-do-list.

And now I even started a blog and integrated my bookmarks and use the same tags to structure my writings and to enhance my learning. To summarize it, I really needed some time to learn how to use social bookmarking creatively and efficiently. And I am still amazed how tiny little details give new opportunities in how to use this tool. A great screencast for the benefit of tagging and social bookmarking has been made by Beth Kanter. I hope this is interesting for beginners and practitioners, and I am curious to hear about your experiences.


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