Weblog
18 hours ago: links for 2008-07-24
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Part two.
2 days ago: links for 2008-07-23
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Not just a good sharepoint overview. Also, a terrific example of community — question to listserv, thorough answer and then open archiving to spread the answer.
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Think of this as a primer in creating a listening post.
5 days ago: links for 2008-07-20
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Intel’s World Mural Project sounds pretty interesting.
7 days ago: links for 2008-07-18
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Do you need people to come to you? Are you wiling to come to them?
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When SocialActions says they want your ideas, they really mean it. Contribute your dream app to their list.
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ONE/Northwest is a font of terrific resources and help. I’m looking forward to their blog.
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“No insider path to getting an agent or special formatting to get your screenplay read. Instead, it’s all built on one simple idea: ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’” “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
8 days ago: links for 2008-07-17
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OF course, if you read all of these, you won’t be that productive.
14 days ago: Pay close attention to NTEN's We are Media
NTEN‘s We are Media is a fabulous — fabulous! — community media project facilitated by the indefatigable Beth Kanter. It’s build, week by week, by, well, by you and anyone else who wants to participate. It can be as easy as collecting (just use the tag wearemedia) or as indepth as jumping into the wiki with both typing hands to help shape the information.
This is great, not just to see the end result, but see a community building a lasting resource.
(quick disclaimer: I’m in the Advisory Group)
37 days ago: What is the value we give our communities?
I spent yesterday (and am spending today and tomorrow) at Supernova 2008. You can find my unfiltered notes on the npbrain wiki (a little experiment in its own right).
Yesterday’s series of talks seemed to add up to how transactions are processed on the web. And I don’t mean processed in the credit card vendor sense but processed in the how to do we describe value and make sure that we (people connecting and moving around via the Internet and the grace of our mobile careers) give it and receive it and how to companies (the people who have set up shop on the internet) attach something financial to that value — whether through advertising, targeted pitches, friend recommendations, or by giving us something (a piece of hardware, say) that will meet the needs that they are confident we have.
There was some argument, mostly headed by Esther Dyson, that asked whether or not that transaction was really everything that happens on the web. Her central point: people are on the internet, using mobile phones for reasons that transcend a quid pro quo kind of transaction.
I don’t know what I think, honestly. I think mainly people engage in a behavior because it has a value for them. Because they think they are “buying” something with their time, attention, actions and dollars. But that doesn’t always means that the results of the transaction are immediate, like they are at the grocery store (I give you some money; you let me leave with food — very neat and clear). In fact, it seems to me figuring out what the transaction is, over time, is a huge part of the debate of the Internet and mobile services.
Clay Shirky set the stage well by talking about two things necessary for a community to take collective action:
- density: you need to have enough people to make the collective action work (two people can’t raise a barn, for example)
- continuity: you have to have faith that the same people will be there later when you need them
It’s all a good combination and, taken together, is one that’s important for social benefit organizations to have. How are we providing value to the people who support us? It can’t just be the thank you notes that we send for donations. How are we providing value for signing up for our newsletter, passing along an outreach message, providing volunteer support and giving donations? Thank you isn’t enough. Are we making our key supporters stars? Do we make sure to get people good timely information about our cause? Do we give people a venue to come together and meet others? And, in that value, are we creating a community that is dense enough and long-last enough to come together for collective actions that build rather than just protest?
42 days ago: How does blogging change you?
Via Learning 2.0: The Threat (and promise) of Social Interaction I found Minds on Fire by John Seely Brown. Joshua Porter says, of Brown’s piece:
So the shift to public display, a shift to expected social interaction, changed the way the students learned and the effort they put into their education. If that’s not an incentive to experiment with and use social software I don’t know what is. Social software isn’t just a new way to work, it changes the effort we put into that work.
This talks a lot about education (obviously) but I think the same thing applies to nonprofits. When we start to put our thinking and opportunities for engagement on display we change them — it’s like public speaking or any kind of performance. We can get to the good kind of nervous.
I’m not sure, though, that we really take advantage of this good kind of nerves. We’ve been missing a possibility here by making our public performance too internally focused. What do I mean by that? We need money and so we ask for money on our blogs, in our outreach, via our Facebook groups. If we don’t think of this as what we need, but others need from us, is there another way we engage people — still asking for money (because we do need it, after all) but maybe making something other than the exchange of dollars the value of the performance.
There is some evidence to suggest that people will give more if they are asked to engage in other things first. It may be that we’ve been treating this as a zero sum game but that, in fact, it is not. In fact, engaging people first can often result in bigger (financial and other) investments over time.
I know I started talking about public pressure and ended up talking about dollars. I guess, I’m saying that we need to lift our head up and realize that we are in public so that we can change more of our behavior. What do you think? Am I drawing connections that just don’t really exist?
(the research I’m referring to is something that Jennifer Aaker talked about at an event I attended a while back. But it looks like the research has not been published yet)
43 days ago: Creating imaginary topical friends on FriendFeed?
The value of FriendFeed, clearly, is the ability to have people you know, like and/or respect (sometimes all three!) point to things and the comment on them in one big friendly pile.
But Marshall Kirkpatrick’s thoughts on microsites have been stuck in my head. That’s a great use of the internet for nonprofits. As Jon Stahl said in the comment here, “building out a thoughful custom project by weaving together a “pipeline” of commoditized services from the interweb, rather than relying on a monolithic “do-everyting” application.” Still, though, I’ve been trying to suss through easy ways to do this.
Maybe a combination of imaginary friends and rooms on FriendFeed is a way to do this. So, the imaginary friends feature lets you pull together the RSS tracks of your friend’s internet trails — if your friends haven’t yet done this for themselves on FriendFeed. And rooms is a way to gather together and join in a conversation.
Let’s say you want to pull together a microsite based on marriage equality — a topic that doesn’t get a lot of result in the FriendFeed search box but does show up on sites like flickr, del.icio.us etc. Well, find those RSS feeds, pull them together as an imaginary friend and then start a room joining that friend to the conversation (can you do that? I haven’t tried yet).
Of course, since an imaginary friend has an RSS feed this might be a way to pipe the aggregated content onto another site. Much less elegant than Marshall’s plan* but it might be quicker and easier way to do it. And it has the bonus of making it easy for people to follow, share bits, and engage in conversation.
Have you seen examples of this? Is there value to doing it in this tool or should it just happen on a website or, say, in a blog?
44 days ago: What's your favorite imaginary mashup?
In the run up to this year’s NetSquared, we asked ourselves what would happen if we got some terrific ideas that can’t happen because the data isn’t open and accessible?
Good, we said, to each. Great. It could be a way to advocate for a different kind of openness.
It seems according to this post, Where Are the APIs for Government Data, some other folks agree. Authors from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy write:
Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonpror commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to nd and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.Which leads me to ask: what’s your favorite imaginary mashup? The data that you’d like see combined if only you get your mitts on the data?
