Social networking

While I was attending and presenting at the UK nonprofits technology conference Pathways to success yesterday, the UK government announced the invitation to bid for a £1.2 million programme to help third sector organisations innovate by exchanging experience online and off. This further fuelled coffee-time conversations about what might be needed to support any technology-related change. General conclusion: culture shift before tech adoption ... so keep it simple, small steps, focussed on real needs.  read more »

The Guardian today carries an excellent article by Megan Griffith on the importance of social networking and social media to nonprofit organisations. It raises themes dealt with in a longer report, available here, that Megan has authored for Third Sector Foresight.  read more »

The RSA is following up discussions it hosted recently on open source politics with a more substantial free conference on The social impact of the web: society, government and the Internet on May 25. It fits with moves by the new chief executive, Matthew Taylor, to re-energise the 250-year-old institution with new forms of engagement inside and out. Earlier posts on that here and here.  read more »

There is now a wiki under development to provide resources for nonprofits on how to understand and use social media. The wiki project was prompted by development of the NCVO ICT Foresight report - basically the Foresight team funded me to develop a glossary of social media and I've kept adding to it. Now there is:

• A section on what is social media
• A glossary of social media - long version and a shorter one.
• A presentation on social media developed by Beth Kanter for the UK Circuit Riders conference
• A social media workshop game that I developed with Beth for the conference
• A page of links, under keywords
• A list of blogs and wikis about social media
• A guide to (non tech) networking

The wiki is being developed in association with the US-based Web 2.0 in Nonprofits created by Michele Martin. More here about how to join in. Any help most welcome.  read more »

The NCVO ICT Foresight report which prompted development of this site is due out at the end of March, as Megan Griffith reports here. Megan writes:  read more »

For many VCOs, online ‘social’ networks have the potential to be disruptive; that is, they have the power to change the model of organising upon which many VCOs, and particularly membership bodies, are based. The connections that ICT facilitates suggest that some organisations may increasingly be bypassed and that power may shift away from top-down hierarchical organisations and towards more fluid and participative networks where there is less need for a centralised ‘bricks and mortar’ coordinating organisation.

John Hagel in Social Networks and Urbanization offers a framework for understanding the benefits of social networking sites like MySpace, triggered by a Financial Times article on Danah Boyd, entitled “The high priestess of internet friendship”
Here’s an early typology of social network sites that I sketched out after reading the article. Rather than categorize sites themselves it may be more useful to think about three primary functions of these sites – connection, creation and collaboration.  Individual sites can then be analyzed in terms of their relative emphasis on these three functions. It turns out that sites differ significantly in terms of their relative emphasis.  read more »

If you wanted to explain tech-supported social networking to people in nonprofits (and elsewhere) what propositions and conversation starters would you come up with?  read more »

Robin Hamman - who work on local online communities with the BBC - offers 6 tips on blog watching for local journalists. They are useful for the rest of us too, and complement How to read blogs? over at I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate.  read more »

Over at Open Business: Designing Business for an Open Model

Howard Rheingold just released on the Cooperation Commons blog a  read more »

In Free wisdom Johnnie Moore highlights a couple of publications I also spotted in my blog browsing, but I'll just quote Johnnie ... partly because that's easy, and more importantly because I would urge you to look around and subscribe to Johnnie's blog too. He facilitates Open Space events - as I recorded here - and through his practice there and on his blog provides a constant inspiration of how to do things with light and playful touches that always get you somewhere interesting .... not necessarily where you expected.

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If you are looking for a round-up of all things social networky, Josef Kolbitsch and Hermann Maurer of Graz University of Technology, Austria, have produced an overview entitled The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume  read more »

I've blogged a piece at Designing for Civil Society about I why I think that participation is about culture not tools - but new Web 2.0 ones can help change culture.

 

This item from Tim Erickson at democracy.org - Elected Officials and Issues Forums - rather bears out the point in an earlier post that Lurking is OK. Using the example of an email and web forum in Brighton and Hove, it demonstrates that even if officials aren't participating they may be influenced by discussion in the community.  read more »

In her blog on nonprofit marketing Nancy E. Schwartz points to a report explaining what Web 2.0 is all about, and why it is important to nonprofits. She also promises to blog more about soocial networking places like MySpace, Facebook and Second Life.  read more »

Jack Vinson, who writes understandable stuff about knowledge management, examines whether there is a problem in the (generally accepted) fact that the overwhelming majority of people in online communities don't contribute. He entitles his post The evil that lurkers do ...  read more »

In Web Video for Social Benefit Sector: Some learnings ... Beth Kanter has some great links, advice and insights into nonprofits using video on the web. For example, she quotes from discussion on Nonprofits and Vlogging over at Social Edge.

The moderator, Patrick O'Heffernan, shared his thoughts based on his experience with The People Choose which is connected to Link TVand the first non-profit site to launch user-generated video as acommunity building process in a non profit environment. His list ofbenefits include:  read more »

Stowe Boyd on the difference:

Collaborative tools are geared toward the sharing of information by groups, while social tools aren't primarily: instead, social tools are oriented toward supporting the interactions of individuals in social networks, and the shaping of culture that arises from the impact of these tools on our social context.

More at Collaboration Loop - Social Versus Collaborative Tools. This seems to me to relate well to discussion on the difference between groups and networks.  read more »

Robin Hamman in place blog aggregation - how to make it interesting tips us off about about a new aggregation site that will pull together feeds from blogs that are place-specific ... thus answering a question I'm sometime asked: "where can I find interactive web sites about local communities". What's more interesting, he suggests, is aggregation of blogs within a locality .. which placeblogger may or may not do. Robin is working on a project with the BBC and local bloggers in Manchester.

Here's Robin's take:

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We had a terrific discussion yesterday at NCVO around nonprofits, social networking and much else as Molly Webb reports at Demos - a site which itself featured strong in our session as an example of how an organisation can use new tools and approaches effectively internally and externally. How far nonprofit organisations would be prepared to open themselves up in this way was one of the recurrent themes.
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