Dissident

A guide to social media for organisations

 

A number of other bloggers have already picked up on this, including David Wilcox, but worth another mention here. Colin McKay, who works for the Canadian government has produced a handy little guide offering some tips on how to get social media accepted by large (e.g. Government) organisations.

Colin writes on the SoSaidThe.Organisation site:

"I think the advice in this 23 page guide to secretly implementing social media in organizations could be equally useful for any government employee looking to try out new technologies - I’m pretty certain on that point, since I’m a government employee in real life. You can find the guide at this link, and please feel free to share it with your friends, colleagues and bosses".

Here’s an excerpt, from the introduction:

How do you do it? How do you bring a spirit of innovation and experimentation to the communications shop of a large organization?

I’ve worked in a large organization – the government – for the last ten years. You can find bright, creative and resourceful people around every corner, in every department.

During the course of their careers, many of these people have thought of a move that could improve their work or their environment.

From experience, we all know that small changes in process or presentation are easily won. After all, it’s just another line on an approval sheet, or a tweak on the website.

Large organizations can also be convinced to launch a large-scale overhaul of their systems – whether it’s a supply chain, assembly process or online order system.

But it’s a real pain to get them to rethink their relationship with humans outside the security fence. After all, our customer service reps seem to be doing a good job, right? That sales force really does have a handle on the needs of the community, doesn’t it?

In speaking to hundreds of workers and managers for large organizations (government and private sector), I’ve been asked the same questions, over and over:

• How do you convince your boss to even experiment with social media?
• Doesn’t it mean a lot of extra work?
• Isn’t this sort of stuff blocked by our organizational policies?
  

This Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organizations is meant to help you answer some of those questions.

I liked the simple structure and practical tips that Colin provides in the guide. A 'must read' for anyone who feels constrained by organisational bureaucracy and office politics.

 

Social Networking in Plain English

Another great video from Common Craft. This one is about Social Networking. Enjoy!

RSS in Plain English

This is a neat little video explaining RSS is plain English. Note - it requires Flash Player 8.

Knowledge Management (KM) and Social Computing – are they the same?

‘Knowledge Management’ (KM) is a term that’s been bandied around since the mid 1990’s, with much debate as to what it actually means. The wikipedia definition is a reasonable starting point, but you still get the vociferous few who will take the literal meaning and argue that you can’t manage (tacit) knowledge, plus a confetti (I quite like that description) of academic papers that provide a forensic analysis of the ‘KM’ term. Fortunately, there are always two sides to every argument, and at least for me, the Dave Snowdon blog ‘Whence goeth KM’ provides a more balanced and reasoned discussion on the topic.

Anyway, one point which I trust won’t be in dispute is the fact that KM has spawned an entire industry – from academic dissertations on human cognition (how the brain thinks), to software vendors offering hierarchical and work flow-driven architectures as a panacea for everyone’s knowledge and information needs.

If things weren’t complicated enough, we now have a relatively new term to confuse all but the army of consultants who thrive on giving complicated labels to simple behaviours – ‘Social Computing’.

Now, in my mind, I can’t make a clear distinction between KM and Social Computing, except that KM is part of a broader framework that can exist independent of technology, and Social Computing is the application of KM through software tools and technology. But on reflection - I guess that is a clear distinction!

It seems that Social Computing has moved beyond the early hierarchical and work flow-driven systems and is providing a much flatter architecture with far more emphasis on peer-to-peer connectivity and disinter mediation of the web publishing process – i.e. everyone can be a publisher. Information and KM professionals are starting to become knowledge facilitators, and there is a surely an opportunity here for the re-invention of the traditional Librarian role - if only they would grasp it.

Social Commuting is going to have (already is having?) a disruptive effect on organisations that are slow to adapt to new technologies, where staff are getting more confident about using software services and applications that sit outside the corporate firewall. ICT departments are going to find this trend difficult to ignore, though I've already witnessed the Luddite trend in some organisations who’s initial reaction is just to lock down the firewall and prevent access to the facilities. Perversely, this is creating a growing community of hobbyists who are creating their own Social Computing environments (see Lgknowledge as a good example for the public sector) in their own time and space – away from the restrictions of the work environment.   

So, is Social Computing the next best thing since sliced bread? I believe it is. Social Computing can transform KM, shifting the emphasis from repositories and taxonomies, which are hard to build and maintain, to more intuitive, tacit knowledge sharing. Social Computing is becoming the 21st Century KM, moving it from an often too academic exercise, or imited by corporate (command and control driven) thinking,  into the real world of people sharing knowledge and expertise with each other naturally, without even thinking about it.  Pity we have to give it a label really!

The Lurker to Contributor ratio

I picked this up courtesy of Beth Kanter's blog, regarding a recent survey conducted in the education sector on use of Web 2.0 tools. The survey summary analysis is available under a Creative Commons license from David White, JISC funded ‘SPIRE’ project 2007 Survey. I was particularly interested in the data on the ratio between contributors to lurkers for on-line communities, an area I've previously commented on (Re the "1% Rule"). The survey reveals a much higher proportion (20%) who regularly contribute to social networking sites (e.g. Flickr, YouTube etc.), which I suspect might be skewed due to the demographic (education sector plus majority of respondents under 21?). It certainly doesn't reflect my own experience in setting up communities of practice in the public sector (local government) where it's closer to the 1% rule.

It's difficult to avoid making generalisations on a survey of this type, but it was also apparent that even within this survey demographic, there was a remarkable lack of knowledge about Web 2.0 social book-marking tools, looking at the high proportion of respondents who said they had never heard of del.icio.us or stumbleupon, and a strange inconsistency between the high proportion of respondents who had never heard of a wiki, and the relatively small proportion who had never heard of wikipedia. I would have thought they could have deduced some connection from the wikipedia name. Ho hum!

Download online_tool_use_surveysummary.pdf    

Weltanschauung for social computing

Dave Snowden’s post caught my eye today. (I’m interpreting Weltanschauung as meaning ‘world view’, or ‘accepted opinion’ here).

Sensible (and deep) perspective on the social computing ‘revolution’ (my word not Dave’s), as you’d probably expect from this renowned thinker. Difficult to do justice to Dave’s posting in a few words here, though a couple of points I’d like to note:

I too dislike the term ‘Enterprise 2.0’ (much in the same way as I dislike Web 2.0 – and I’m still not entirely sure if they’re the same!); social computing is far more descriptive and takes us away from the concept of giving release numbers to what is in effect a gradual (evolutionary) change, predicated on human behaviour. And yes, I have noted this contradicts the reference to ‘revolution’ in my first sentence, but I do get the impression from various vendors’ marketing releases that they believe it is a revolution.

The other point is (again) in support of the Dave Snowden’s statement that
“….you have to get people enthused, get the early adopters to use the tools. It’s a lot harder letting things evolve, than designing something based on an ideal approach….”

It is indeed difficult letting things evolve, because this takes time and despite the well-worn KM cliché of learning before, during and after, managers want instant (and perfect) solutions. The ideal solution doesn’t become apparent until users have worked out where the shortcuts are and how to avoid the pitfalls and problems. Anyone who thinks they can design an ideal system from a purely theoretical paradigm must be….well, Einstein. Maybe it happens, but not very often.

I’ve always been an advocate of starting off with something quick and dirty – and yes, probably imperfect, but by observing how it’s being used and listening to user’s feedback you can develop something approaching an ideal system. Of course you’ll never quite reach the utopian position of having a ‘perfect’ system, because that’s what evolution is all about. Change is good, provided we’re learning from it.

So, my own crusade is to find the (social computing) early adopters in the local government sector. Quite difficult when you have a fairly institutionalised mentality, where freedom of thought and action has been actively discouraged over many (many) years. The good news is, there are some out there, and the fact that in less than 6 months we’ve managed to encourage over 900 users to join one or more of the 24 or so on-line communities of practice on the IDeA collaborative workspace does give me some encouragement. In fact, I’m enthused about it!