Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Tagging for Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing Webinar and Action Learning Exercise I'm

Next week I'm teaching a two-part online workshop that includes a Webinar, Action Learning Exercise, and A Reflection Discussiona for Extension professionals and how they can begin to use tagging for collaboration and knowledge shraing. 

I decided to use the Ethan Zuckerman advice of point don't write -- and pointed to some excellent screencasts and videos about social bookmarking.   I'm thinking about doing a remix though because there is redundancy and also because I just discovered a way to download youtube videos and convert them so I can remix.

The presentation wiki and resources can be found here.

The reflection exercise can be found here.

Shoulder-to-Shoulder Instructional Media: My Tagging Screencast at NTEN!

Photo from my flickr stream
View the Tagging Screencast
Presented by NTEN

I'm pleased to announce that my screencast about tagging has been released and showcased by NTEN!  I created this screencast back in September/October of last year, so this release has provided a great opportunity to meta reflect on the whole screencast creation process as well as consider how my views about the use of tagging have evolved.

I've thought long and hard about how video editing amplifies my compulsive nature and how I need to  reduce my ratio of video minutes viewed per hours of editing time!  I hope to share some simple and fun ways to create "shoulder-to-shoulder" instructional media for the panel on Screencasting at NTC I'm doing.

While I'm still very much passionate about screencasting, I've come to dislike the term.  I personally want to move away from the metaphor of making movies of the computer screen to more shoulder-to-shoulder instructional media and perhaps something that is more participatory or for lack of a better word, social.  Maybe it is more like moment capture.  How do you create good instructional media in a reasonable amount of time and do a good enough job that helps people learn something by viewing it?      

That's enough meta for now.

If you're still with me, let me share some tidbits about that photo.   I created it for the screencast to illustrate the definition of tagging.  What is really interesting to me is that the photo - which I composed and uploaded into flickr is my most commented, favorited, and viewed photo!  (It was even favorited by this guy I don't know named Joshua)  I've also had many requests from folks to use in their tagging presentations.  Again, shows me the power of open content and open source thinking.

Here's the script from the screencast written back in October.  Some of my thinking has definitely evolved ....

Introduction

These program notes will help you implement some of the ideas presented in the screencast. If you have questions about tagging or want to share your organization’s experience (good and bad) with social bookmarking,  the NTEN Affinity Group, NpTagvocates, is a great place for discussion with your peers on these topics.

Act 1:  The Problem

Many nonprofits professionals have to manage a lot of information on the web and share it with their co-workers or clients. In many smaller organizations, where there are not enough resources for a high-end knowledge management system, people end up using their browser favorites or forward links to one another via email. Unfortunately, these methods make sharing and managing information resources difficult. 

Here’s why:

(1)  The folder structure of your favorites list is not always flexible enough to allow for easy cross referencing
(2)  Bookmarks can’t be accessed from different locations or computers
(3)  Links can get lost in email
(4)  Knowledge management is a solitary endeavor, not a social one.

Act 2:   Definitions

Tagging and social bookmarking can be useful techniques for smaller nonprofits to easily share their information resources. But first, some definitions.
 
Tags

Users add tags to describe online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks or text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. For a more detailed definition of tags, see the Wikipedia entry here.

Here are the examples I showed you in the screencast, using the tag “sharpie.”

Photos
Web Pages
Event
Videos
People

For an excellent primer on tagging, see Andy Carvin’s PBS LearningNow essay.
 
Social Bookmarking
 
Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public web site and describing them with tags. You simply register with a social bookmarking site, typically a free service, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate your individual bookmarks as public or private. You can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that users have created and saved.
 
7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking published by Educause is an excellent introduction to social bookmarking for non-technical folks.

There are many social bookmarking services available on the web. The ones most often mentioned by members of the nonprofit technology community include this short list:

Del.icio.us

Ma.gnolia

Furl

Diigo

If you want a detailed comparison of these and other social bookmarking services, you can read one at Consultant Commons.  If you want to find out who else uses what social bookmarking service in the nonprofit tech sector, check out Social Source Commons.

As mentioned in the screencast, Del.icio.us, which was purchased by Yahoo, is a good place to start. It has a critical mass of users, is fairly easy to use, and it is free. You’ll want to read the Del.icio.us Getting Started Guide as a first step and review other help documents as needed.

Act 3:  The Benefits

  Findability
  People use words that they themselves like to use to categorize things.
  It is more straightforward than choosing a folder.
  The information is one place
 
  Social Aspect

The social aspect is a very important benefit. If you are skeptical, think about having 24/7 access to your co-workers, bosses or a subject matter expert’s bookmarks. Wouldn’t that be useful?

With many people tagging, the social aspect exposes us to the intelligence of the group, which may add other tags, making the resource even more findable. You can read more about how tagging makes knowledge management a more social experience in this paper by Rahmi Sinha, researcher. I like the article and diagram so much, I included it in the screencast.

Marnie Webb’s bookmarks are here. She has also written quite a bit about tagging over at her blog.
 
Easily Share What You Know With Others

Tagging and social bookmarking make it easy to share what you know with others or a community by simply exposing your delicious url. As a trainer, I let people know my del.icio.us url when they ask for additional resources. For example, I’ve tagged lots of nonprofit tagging examples with “nptag” and you can find them here: http://del.icio.us/kanter/nptag

Many organizations use social bookmarking services to share resources more informally with clients than through a web site. A few nonprofits are using socialbookmarking to track resources or follow particular topics for trend analysis for strategic planning. 

Sometimes you may not want to expose all of your bookmarks. Most services offer a “tag as private” feature. (Look in the “settings” to enable this feature in del.icio.us)

As I mentioned in the screencast, you can use RSS and javascript to publish your del.icio.us links on your blog. The Craft Emergency resource list that I showed you in the screencast is done just that way. There is a write-up of the project here.

This article will give you a more detailed description of the benefits:Tagging Gives Web Human Meaning
 
Act 4: Getting Started

I presented a very easy template for using tags and social bookmarking services to share internal information with a team, committee, or a few staff members. There are different ways you can design this project, but this is a very simple approach that you can build on later.
 
Step 1: Discuss Tagging Policy

Tagging can get sloppy – spelling errors, verbs v.s. nouns, etc. You probably noticed that about my tag stream. This can make trouble down the road if you want to publish your resources to a web site using an RSS. So, come up with a few standard tags. But don’t get bogged down – you’re not creating a formal taxonomy, rather it’s a folksonomy. Also, people can add whatever additional tags they want so they can remember the item as well as a description.

If you want to understand more about tag strengths and weaknesses, I recommend the following articles:   

  Tags Strengths, Weaknesses And How To Make Them Work by Robin Good

  Tips for Effective Tagging from TechSoup

  Tips for Tidying Tags by Alexandra Samuel

 
Step 2: Set up an organizational account and get everyone set up

If you are using tagging to manage internal information sharing, it is probably best to set up one account and let everyone have the userid/password. Set up everyone with a bookmarklet tool and show them how to use it.

You can find the FireFox bookmarklet here and the Explorer bookmarklet here.
 
Step 3: Teach people how to start bookmarking!

It is very easy to get started bookmarking as I showed you in the screencast. The most difficult part will be to switch from your habit of using the browser favorites list to the bookmarklet tool. 

 

Step 4: Share the bookmarks

The simplest way to share your bookmarks is to publish or share your del.icio.us url which your username. For example, my username is kanter and my url is:
http://del.icio.us/kanter

You can also share a particular tag such as “tagging” as follows:
http://del.icio.us/kanter/tagging

And, you can share any combination of tags as follows:
http://del.icio.us/kanter/tagging+nonprofit

If you want to share a resource with a single individual outside your organization and who also uses del.icio.us, you can use the “for:username” tag to direct the resource into that user’s in-box.)
 

Publishing an RSS Feed of Your Bookmarks onto Your Web Site

If you want to publish on your blog or web site, it is a two step process. First you have navigate to the RSS feed scrolling down the to bottom of the page and clicking on the orange RSS icon. For my account, my RSS feed is located at:
 
http://del.icio.us/rss/kanter

You can also navigate to a particular tag, and then find the RSS feed if you want to just publish resources that have been tagged with a particular tag. For example, if I wanted to publish the resources that I’ve tagged with tagging. The URL would look like this:

http://del.icio.us/kanter/tagging

Then you need to sign up a for an account with feedburner. Next cut and paste the URL into the Feedburner tool and follow the instructions. When you get to the options for refining your feed, select “Publicize and Monetize” and then “buzz boost” and follow the instructions. At the end, feedburner spits out some javascript code that you cut and paste into your web page or blog.

For additional project designs and ideas, see the following case studies:

  Craft Emergency Resources

  Nonprofits and Tagging: Two Case Studies

  Dutch Nonprofits Collaborate With Del.icio.us

  Sharing Interesting Web Sites: Development Nonprofits

  Tagging in Art Museums

  Tagging Nonprofit Missions

  Examining Tagging in the Nonprofit World

  If you want to see more, you can find them in my del.icio.us account:
  http://del.icio.us/kanter/nptag+casestudy
 

 

: The Tips

 

  It’s much better to watch these than for me to write about them, but for a quick reminder, here are they:

  1. Edit and clean up your bookmarks
  2. Review your collection by navigating by tag
  3. Browse the bookmarks of colleagues and subject matter experts
  4. If you don’t know their account URL, ask them
  5. Browse by tag and other users when beginning to research a topic
  6. Use in combination with search
  7. Browse the NpTech tag

  Here are some more advanced tips and tricks:
  Seven Habits of Wildly Successful Del.icio.us Users

  Consultant Commons: Blogging and Tagging How-Tos

  Absolutely Del.icio.us Tool Collection

  Complete List of Tools for Del.icio.us

Photo Credits:

Act 1:

Office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyfoo/103060741/
Dogs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/42857758@N00/74905059/in/set-684524
Solitary Office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/moriza/

Act 2:
DefinitionsComputer café users: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maebmij/123180774/

Act 3: Benefits

Chocolate Lab: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cbgb/42499133/
Dogs Sniffing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethan_wuds/
Poco: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jessiesan/51310260/

 

Act 4: Getting Started

Meeting: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakecaptive/85332783/

My YouTube Interview with Steve Cliff: Part 1 - Six Tips for Community Tagging Projects

I did a post about the Steve Cliff and the Voterss Project and it reminded be that for over a year I've been attempting to do multimedia conversation and I have only been able to talk to myself!

So, I posted the video below as a response to Steve's introductory video, asking him for some tips for success in a community tagging project:

Here's the response I got:

 

Here's a transcript of the answers:

Hey there Beth. I was excited to get your video question.  Almost as excited as I was when I got the call from YouTube founders about a $1million grant!

Interrupted by a call from his wife.  Steve’s buying an Ipod Shuffle!

Actually, we didn’t get a million dollar grant.  We’re out there in the wilderness doing our grassroots thing, using tools like Flickr, Del.icio.us, YouTube, etc.

I have six tips on how to start a community tagging project:

1 Pick a compelling theme

Don’t make it so narrow and obscure that only one or two people are interested in the topic. 

2. Connect with natural behavior

There are people who are already bookmarking particular resources.  Seek out those people first.   Don’t make tagging extra work or add on.  Find the people who are already tagging information in your topic area and work with them.

3. Pick your tags carefully

We had a problem with mno06 as tag, because it brought up all the YouTube users with mn in their name.   If you use a tag that has a date in it, like mno06 – it becomes dead.  We became more generic and used mnpolitics.

4. Display the results

Make sure people can see the results of what they are doing.   Our aggregation page allows people to see what we’ve collected.

5.Go beyond your known community

You are going to go to those already tagging or doing videos in your content as a first step..  Use the contact and social networking tools built into the tools to find them and connect with them.  Ask them to add your tag to the items they are already connecting.  That’s how we seeded our project.  For example, we found someone who was tagging photos of election themes.

There are people now beginning to contact us and are interested.  There are people creating new flickr accounts to join our efforts and we're teaching them how to tag.   Then shift to the new people who aren’t tagging or creating video.

6.  Tools, particularly video, need to be become easier

The biggest challenge is that I have to record in video and then upload.  YouTube needs a flashbased video recorder built into the interface.  It has to be one click and easy to do it.  Also, with flickr, people need to realize that they you need more than 5 photos to be live.  Also, YouTube has a delay.

I posted a video with a follow up question and Steve says he will answer it next week.  So, stay tuned!

Apple Picking with Tags

Cider apple
Originally uploaded by Mexicanwave.

I've always really enjoyed research, particularly hunting for information on the web.  But the fruits of my  labor has gotten so much richer with the integration of social networking tools, particularly social bookmarking services.   I used to just google it, but not any longer.  I've added wandering through delicious.

A waste of time you say? I say ha!

I've always found great stuff by following this little trick.  Look at the bookmarks of folks who first tagged an item that is popular.  I also look at the bookmarks of first taggers of resources that I find particularly useful. 

First taggers tend to be mavens.   Yes, skeptics - I do sometimes come across some folks who just happen to be in an earlier time zone - like GMT - and have crappy bookmark collections.   But not all the time.

Today's harvest yieled this gorgeous apple photo take by  Steve Bridger and his blog - NFP2 - How Not- for- Profits can Benefit from blogs and social media.

I found it by tagging something I thought was interesting to nonprofit technology and I was the second person to do so.  The first was Steve.

And, then I noticed his flickr photos --  and you should definitely view these wonderful compositions.

And to bring this full circle, we spent Sunday Apple picking with Mongkol, one of the Cambodian bloggers who is here in the US in a Fullbright Scholarship.  Check out our apple picking flickr photos.

Will Social Networking Change Nonprofit Membership?

So, I bolt awake up very early this morning worrying about my to-do list or rather my not done yet list.    So, of course I go to the computer because I can always count on my colleagues from Europe, Africa, Asia, or Southeast Asia to be up and around and distract me from my insomnia.

My colleague, David Wilcox,  let me know about a new event/community blog for a London meeting about social networking and nonprofits taking place tommorrow.   The goal is to demonstrate some of the social networking tools available through a Drupal-based multi-user blogging system.  (Here's a few other examples - here and here)  He asks me to post.  He alerts me to the event tag:
snnonprofit.

I decided to poke around the site and discovered a pointer to one of David's thoughtful posts on Social networking and nonprofits.

It used to be that you joined associations because it was a way of meeting like-minded people and getting help, facilities, information and other things difficult or costly to organise for yourself. These days it is much easier to find people and resources online, and to mix and match these assets into project teams, communities of practice, and informal networks.

That means social networking is going to impact on nonprofit membership.  More at Designing for Civil Society: Why bother with "membership" in future?

In the comments I found a link to this report.

Google Fight: The Remedy to Sloppy Tag Jobs?

Click through to the larger image to read

Not sure whether you should use nonprofit or non-profit in your tag?  Why not have a googlefight?

Newspaper Headline Generator

Newspaper Headline Generator
Originally uploaded by cambodia4kidsorg.

Celeste found the fake Newspaper Headline Generator and has thought up some ways that nonprofits can use it.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in tagging and nonprofits - come on over the N-TEN Affinity Groups and join the NP Tagvocates Group!

Show Me Experiments and Realistic Outcomes for Tagging/RSS

My colleague Joitske points out my spelling error in my Tagvocates post -- I spelled it "tagovate."  It also made me realize that it should be tag because of sloppiness.  That aside, Joistke goes on to reflect on the usefulness of tagging and rss feeds for her work with communities of practices (and by extension - nonprofit organizations.)

She describes the value in terms of avoiding information overload for busy professionals.

"Transferring more to RSS feeds (and this can be topical feeds from joint unique delicious tags tagged by colleagues too) will shift the feeling of having to read to reading when you are ready, interested and available. Much more interest driven, user-centric. Leaving professionals to do their work and not mix it with potentially distracting mails. This is a huge shift RSS/tagging can bring into the workspace."

While those who want to use tagging for social change may view that result as missing the point,  Joitske asks:

Going back to tagging for social change: that's a whole different topic: I haven't seen how tagging could really work for social change other than bringing the right information together in faster ways ...

which then helps the organizations do the work that creates the change ... which is exactly the point that several commenters to an earlier post made here and here.

Joitske's other observation about tagging is also important: "The other observation I can make so far on our tag experiments is that it doesn't foster any exchange/conversation, unless you combine it with reading your co-tagger blogs..."     And, I wonder what we are loosing bypassing the conversation and jumping into action - but hopefully the N-TEN Affinity Group which has an group email component may facilitate some conversation (as well as some old fashion phone calls) that might lead to a "Show Me" or Action Learning experiment as a first step.

Now, on the topic of experiments that teach - I have to applaud Cityzen Jane's concept of "Show Me" examples.  She says, "For my non-web, non-technical managers who needed to see something more
than my enthusiasm for technology. It's a given that the geek in the corner office, me - would get excited about web 2.0 for instance, but why should my managers? Concrete examples were needed."  Here's a great example of one of her prove its ..

Great Visual: Why Before What or How

It's here.  I'd love to make one like this for tagging.

Technorati Tags: nptag

Rob Johnston: NP Tagvocate for nonprofit employment resource information- 2nps

The NP Tagvocates N-TEN Affinity Group is trying to spread tagging in the nonprofit sector. (Click here and scroll down to NP Tagovates).   If anything else comes out of this experiment, it is a great way to find out about nonprofit bloggers and taggers. 

Today, Rob Johnston from the Wilson Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Pace University stepped up as a NP Tagvocate for the "2nps" tag that should be used to share any resource related to employment in the nonprofit sector, career transitions, baby boomers and public service, etc. 

Rob is working on a program to ease the transition of experienced business people to nonproit employment.   The site is 2Nonprofits.org.  There is also a blog comunity.

Tags: 2nps

Calling All Nonprofit Tagvocates!

One of the breakout sessions at The Netsquared Conference was on Tagging in the Nonprofit World at that session blogher Holly Ross of N-TEN asked a question ... "How can we use tagging to make social change, not just organize our own work."    

Holly Ross decided to organize one of the "Making It Happen" sessions on finding a way to address that goal.   We had a small group and an amazing discussion.  The folks around table included Nora Alogna, Erica Rios who writes a blog named "Thoughts of a Chicana Feminist",  Tim Bishop, Zac Montrux, Holly Ross and myself.   Other nonprofit taggers who have also contributed to tagging and nonprofits dialogue while at Netsquared (in person or virtually) include Alex Samuels, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Chris Heuer, Dorine Ruter, Deborah Finn, Emily from the nonprofit blog exchange, Allison  Hewlett, Joitske Hulsebosch, Celeste/ Studio 501c3 Blog,  Marnie Webb, Ruby Sinreich and others.

So, here's what we came up with call to all nonprofit Tagvocates:

We decided that we should come up with a few tags for the nonprofit sector and start getting them out there by recruiting "Tagvocates" who vow to:

1. Use the tags all over the place
2. Recruit other tagvocates for their tag(s)

The plan is to get a set of tags out there, the aggregate the content (maybe with Suprglu?), and then foster a discussion about how we can use the content that we're tagging for social change.  For example - can a legal services organization use a set of tags to help aggregate content about Seattle area housing for their clients and agreggate it on their site?  Can an enviro group use a tag to aggregate info about a
local developer to expose ant-environmental practices?

if you're interested in joining us, come on over to http://groups.nten.org and join the NP Tagvocates group!

Cognitive Seduction (a typology of user experience pleasures)

This post describes what good game designers do to "turn your brain on" or "cognitive arousal."  Passionate Users Blog has tweaked some gaming design rules to apply to NON-game experience.  Which experiental pleasures does tagging give its users? 

Typology of Cognitive Pleasures

(in no particular order)

1. Discovery
User experience as exploration of new territory

2. Challenge
User experience as obstacles to overcome, goals lying just beyond current skill and knowledge levels

3. Narrative
User experience as story arc (user on hero's journey) and character identification

4. Self-expression
User experience as self-discovery and creativity

5. Social framework
User experience as an opportunity for interaction/fellowship with others

6. Cognitive Arousal
User experience as brain teaser

7. Thrill
User experience as risk-taking with a safety net

8. Sensation
User experience as sensory stimulation

9. Triumph
User experience as opportunity to kick ass

10. Flow
User experience as opportunity for complete concentration, extreme focus, lack of self-awareness

11. Accomplishment
User experience as opportunity for productivity and success

12. Fantasy
User experience as alternate reality

13. Learning
User experience as opportunity for growth and improvement

Cleaning up the Tag Soup

from a post by Steve Eisner who writes a blog called A Social Life

Some points for me:

• Defines two different types of tag behavior: Consuming Taggers:  People who stalk other people's tags.  Prefer to use their own vocabularly.  Publishing Taggers:   Haven an incentive to match their audiences' vocabularies.

"At the same time, the network benefits of social bookmarking depend on enough publishers agreeing upon a common vocabulary. Although these forces are somewhat in opposition, things work out pretty well for most topics. Equilibrium is quickly reached as everyone agrees on a few common tags."

Tag mess happens when the topic is complex, new, or very specific.  Tag-based solutions break down and everyone starts speaking their own language.  Confusion results in a huge variations of tags.  (Example here)

How to clean up the mess::

• Gather usage data and calculate tag values
• Expose tag values to publishers
• Provide new ways to browse tags
• Indirectly associate user-specific tags to high-value public tags

Getting past the tag mess (and making tagging palatable to a more controlled enterprise environment) starts with the recognition that for any particular piece of content, not every tag has the same value.  If you want to encourage a certain subset of tags, expose tag values to publishers. Their natural desire to reach an audience means that they will gravitate towards the most valuable tags. But this doesn’t just mean showing a tagger the previous tags that people have used. Assuming “value” is based on whether this tag will help your audience find this content, then the tags that people are already searching for must be worth much more – even if fewer people are currently using those tags.

Other solution:

Tag Equivalence: What this means is that users can tag items with some original term, but if another term becomes more popular, the first term can somehow be declared equivalent to the new term, so searchers will find the intended content. Whether automatically applied or added manually, this equivalence can greatly increase the network benefit of a bookmarking application.

What are the personal benefits of tagging?

Photo Source:  Power Law of Participation from Ross Mayfield's Photostream
His article is here.

The visual was mentioned from article "What are the personal benefits of tagging?"

Talks about the benefits to consumers (people who tag for themselves) and publishers (people who tag to get noticed by others). 

Summarzing from the article:

Benefits to Consumers
Reason 1: Can categorize and organize collections of bookmarks. Anyone who’s saved more than a handful of links can see the benefit, and quickly picks up the metaphor: tagging is like putting a bunch of
items into a shared folder.

Reason 2:  Allow the user to express tags using personal vocabulary. It takes a lot of work to settle upon a public vocabulary for any particular topic. As evidenced by endlessly recurring “what tag should
we use for this?” conversations, the right terms might not even exist at the time of tagging! A purely selfish tagger has very little incentive to use common, group-accepted terms over words he uses every
day. So one thing to assume while developing an enterprise app is that users do not want to be taught how to tag, at least not before they’ve gotten enough personal benefit to start accepting tagging.

Benefits to Publishers

Reason: The ability to easily organize and publish collections of content.

It’s possible to use them to push content to interested people through integration and syndication.
While this may cause most readers to think of RSS feeds, that’s not the only way that data can be syndicated. In fact, it probably doesn’t even register in the enterprise yet - the most common form of syndication in today’s enterprise is sending documents and links in e-mail, a low-tech solution that works pretty well for sending single items.

Everything changes when you’re able to easily add tags to content at its original source. The use of tags introduces a separation between content’s repository and the collections it’s in.  Tags can be used to collect content from multiple repositories, just like a federated search engine indexes keywords across several
sources. New collections can be created with no more effort than thinking of a new tag term. After the collection has been created, bookmarking services allow you to send entire sets of links, usually
providing nice compact URLs to ease the process. Even when the feed is primarily designed for your own consumption, it can just as easily be shared with others should the need arise. Better yet, the collections
keep updating as you continue tagging.

The Del.icio.us Lesson

via Alex Barnett Blog

"From now on I’m going to call this idea the “Del.icio.us Lesson”. This is the lesson that personal value precedes network value: that selfish use comes before shared use. We’re
seeing it more and more everyday in services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and is an interesting aspect of networked applications. Even though we’re definitely benefitting from the value of networked software, we’re still not doing so unless the software is valuable to us on a
personal level first.

Or:

Personal value >> Network effects >> Personal value

Join us for a chat on tagging and nonprofits

Join us for a chat on tagging and nonprofits
Originally uploaded by cambodia4kidsorg.

Great Discussion about Nonprofits and Tagging: Come on over!

There is a panel on nonprofit and tagging taking place netsquared.  There is some interesting discussion threads taking place.  Even if you're not attending in person, you may have some questions or observations to add.  Some of the questions:

• Why some people love discovery aspect of tagging and others don't?
• How do we get past this debate to the point where we can set up some good learning experiments with the use of tagging for nonprofit organizations and reap some good lessons learned or practices?   
• If you've gotten past this debate in your organization and are using tagging, what have you learned? 
• What would advice would you give to other organizations just beginning to experiment?
• How do enthusiasts of tagging talk about tagging less transcendentally and more in terms of "you can use this technique to achieve X, Y, Z?
• But if we want to really catalyze the use of tags in the npo world, it sure wouldn't hurt to get some of those e.d.s on board, and we haven't found the argument for that yet.  What is it?
• How can you use tags to organize and find content?

Another nonprofit using tagging

via Emily of Emily's World comes another example of nonprofit tagging.   The organization is The Creative Coast Initiative and they appear to be using del.icio.us to organize resources to be published on their site.  They have several different feeds for each cateogries or tags:  including news/events, jobs, resumes, real estate, etc.

The organization is "a public/private partnership responsible for attracting and growing brain-based businesses in Savannah."   The partners include the City, County, Economic Development Authority, and "technology leaders."   Hmm .. tagging a redevelopment, revitalization strategy?

I'm going to do some further research and find out a little bit more.  Perhaps I can coax them to share  a little bit more of what they're doing over at the discussion about nonprofit tagging for netsquared

This is what I'm wondering:

• What was the planning process around tagging to produce the RSS feeds?
• Who in the organization is doing the tagging?
• What is the tag design?
• How are they using tagging?
• What was the ED's view about the use of tagging to publish to the web site?
• What value does the use of tagging bring to their organization?
• Anything to share about what they're learning about using tagging this way?
• What needs to be in place to make it successful?

Social Analysis of Tagging: How Tagging Transforms the Solitary Browsing Experience Into A Social One

This visual comes from Rashimi Sinha's essay on the question Why do people tag?

For many, tagging is for sharing their own information and watching others. Even if you tag mostly to remember your own stuff, it is difficult to remain untouched by the presence of others. This article will explore how tagging lets us connect with others.

Rashimi also wrote another interesting essay entitled "A Cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular."   The conclusion:

"The beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost. At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations. Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme. The challenge for tagging systems is to then do what the brain does - intelligent computation to make sense of these local observations, and an efficient, predictable way to ensure findability."

I refound this paper while browsing through the research papers presented at the Collaborative Tagging Workshop. 

The paper that caught my eye was about the use of tagging on a corporate intranet.  It describes the design and implementation of a pilot (not yet completed).   Some of the questions they hope to learn in the evaluation are:

Our main objective is to determine whether social bookmarking tools can be useful to our employees. We would like to understand in which ways the tool is being used, e.g., simply as a personal bookmarking tool, for information discovery, as a mechanism for sharing and disseminating information, as a repository for project-related resources, and/or for expert finding.We are also interested in the social influences and evolution. Will virtual communities develop? Are people more likely to copy or view the most popular bookmarks (hence making them more popular)? How will use and behaviors (both individual and community) change over time? Are people more likely to use tags others have already adopted? Will tags begin to converge ? Will new tags be introduced as “communicative tools”  and will they be adopted by others? What other innovative or unanticipated uses will emerge?

Tagging in an Art Museum Context

The Art Museum Social Tagging Project is a group of art museums is looking at integrating folksonomies into the museum Web by developing a working prototype for tagging and term collection, and outlining directions for future development and research that could benefit the entire museum community.   

The project uses a tool named STEVE, an open-source tool for enabling social tagging of museum object images to create folksonomies.   I first heard about this project last November and thought I might check in on it.

A new proof of concept paper was just presented. 

Some notes:

Why social tagging could be useful in a museum context:

Museums want audiences to engage with their collections and ideas, but recognize that traditional methods of unidirectional on-line and in-gallery communications have limited access and dialog. Supporting social tagging of museum collections, and providing access based on the resulting folksonomy, opens museum collections to new interpretations that reflect visitors’ perspectives rather than institutional ones. This co-operation between museums and visitors bridges the gap between the professional language of the curator and the popular language of the museum visitor, and helps individuals see their personal meanings and perspectives in public collections.

This is the part of the paper that I found most interesting:

Museums want their communities to connect with their collections. Projects that explore this challenge, encourage users to interpret works of art by placing them in their personal narrative. Built on constructivist educational theory, that emphasizes personal meaning-making and a user-centered focus in the development on-line and in-gallery experiences, these projects strive to provide a unique and compelling engagement with works of art. S

ocial tagging appeals to museums because it embodies these self-directed learning philosophies: tagging is a dialog between the viewer and the work, and the viewerand the museum. A tag is a user’s assertion that a work of art is about something. Tagging offers a way for people to connect directly with works of art, to own them by labeling or naming them – one of the aspects of sensemaking.

Tagging also lets users assert personal perspectives and associations between objects. Small individual efforts aggregate into unique pathways through a complex context. Embracing these alternative perspectives is a significant departure for museums, reflecting a growing understanding of museums’ places in a diverse community, and a desire to enable social engagement.

Tagging in a museum context may differ from social bookmarking because of pre-existing types of social relationships. Tagging projects could help foster and maintain links with specialized groups like volunteers and docents, or support the work of teachers and students. Rather than being motivated by personal gain, a socialaltruism kicks in.  This is reflected in the way the Cleveland Museum of Art links to its on-line tagging tool: “Help others find this object”. 

Tagging is a personal investment in the museum’s collection. The visitor adds value for the museum, for themselves, and for other visitors by revealing distinct perspectives and communities. Museums can use analysis of tags to learn more about their visitors and to support their use of collections. We readily imagine tag-powered visualizations that exploit relationships between tags and existing museum documentation, or more ‘fun’ tools (like flickr Tag Fight. Sharing common tags, or pushing a “feed” of works of art based on tag subscriptions, could also facilitate the personal exploration of collections and offer more active connections between museums and users.

Why do some people love the discovery aspect of tagging and others don't?

Okay, when we talk about the "why" of tagging - we use two words - findability and discovery.  I love the way Marnie Webb phrased it in this comment.   

"Discovery allows me to play.  Wonder through tag streams and find related items in a way that helps me get at various topics in a much different way than search."

On the other side, I have a colleagues who hate, no HATE, this part of the tagging experience and think it is a big fat waste of time.  One colleague who I respect said this to me: "Although following other people's tags is interesting, so is wandering around the library looking through books in certain sections, but it is a huge time vacumn, considering the actual usefullness and applicability of what I find is usually nil." 

This is what think - I think it has to do with learning styles and myer briggs personality types.  I haven't come across specific research, but Nancy White mentioned this in her presentation about the Seven Competencies of Online Interaction that "Interacting online involves thinking/moving laterally not
hierarchically. Global thinkers, those who absorb large amounts of information randomly and then see patterns, do better than sequential thinkers who tend to take linear steps that follow in a logical order."  So, how can we make tagging easier for sequential thinkers?

Tagging and Communities of Practice - Reflections from KM

I "met" Dorine Ruter when we both participated in the online Web 2.0 and Communities of Practice Online Conference.   The tagging discussion included an action learning exercise where we shared a lot of resources about tagging as well as explored the discovery aspect of delicious.

Dorine is currently involved a pilot project for KM4DEV where a community of practice is collaborating on sharing delicious feeds.   She recently posted about a demonstration she gave during a meeting with members of the "Dutch ‘e-collaboration’ group" about tagging and social-bookmarking.

In the comments, I prodded her to share some of her experience about using tagging as a tool to share resources in a community of practice context.  She gave me some very rich reflections as a reply in the comments

Her key points:

She spoke with two other colleagues Allison Hewlitt at Bellanet  and Peter Ballantyne of Eurforic who are also working with tagging in CoP/Organizational context and their comments resonated with her own observations:

The "how to" of CoP group tagging is an obstacle in getting to the "why" (exposing  the intelligence of the group, thus making resources more findable.)

• What central tag to use to get an item noticed?
• Can anyone use this tag or do we want to create a special feed/account to provide filtered information? (BK: I wonder how the "network" feature or "private groups" feature of delicious influences this?)
  
• What tags to use to describe items, who decides this?
• What items to tag in the first place, do we need rules for this?

One of her points resonated with some other reflections I'm seeing on this side of the pond from early adopters in the nonprofit space in using tagging for resource sharing.   Her point is this:  Getting people motivated to tag content (easy tool, easy approach) and at the same time create good content as output (quality selection of sources, good descriptions and tags) is just very difficult.

She identifies some of the tension-points.  I've translated these into some questions that nonprofits might discuss as part their experimentation with organizational tagging and perhaps leading to a tagging policy that works for the group:

• Who in our organization must be involved? Everyone or can it work within sub-group?
• How do we create an environment where people are eager to participate or do you focus on providing a high quality resource of information?
• What if people in our group are re-finding items tagged that others have tagged before?
• (Does that contribute to the willingness to participate or pollute the tag stream and create information overload?)
• What if items are tagged that are interesting, but not on the topic most of the group wants to focus on?

This correlates with some of Marc Sirkin's musings about his organization's experiment with tagging

Your tag or mine? Then there's the problem of naming your tags. Everyone has a slightly different way of thinking about things - I say Myeloma, you say Multiple Myeloma. Without a standard set of published, prompted tags, chaos could reign. Then again if you only allow pre-created tags, there's not flexibility for users to create their own world view within the tags. Trying to do both would result in "tag goo" (a term I literally just invented).  (BK: Would it?)

Link Fishing
So let's say I have all these great tags... maybe hundreds of them. At that point, even a nicely formatted "tag cloud" would only serve up quantity, not quality of links - and from there I'd have to sift through perhaps tens or thousands of links in a much less efficient way than by just using Google from the start.

In the comments of this post, there is an interesting discussion thread that also points out the question, "How do you deal with information overload?  Doesn't tagging create information overload?  Why not just use search?"

The term information overload made me think of Marshall's fabulous interview with Robin Good on netsquared:  "Mastering Information Overload."    Good is advocating for a new type of knowledge worker - he calls them Newsmasters.  These are human filters "who subscribe to the RSS feeds of a large number of sources, search queries, and other dynamic sources.   The person uses a combination of machine automation and topic-specific expert knowledge.  The most important information resulting from these filtered subscriptions is then delivered to end users, either by RSS, email, on a web site or by whatever delivery is appropriate.  Central to the concept is that one person is responsible for curating information for others in the group or community."  (The last part makes feel a little uncomfortable.)

So, how does the Newsmaster avoid information overload?  Are these the early adopters of the Internet and whose brains have evolved along with the growth of electronic information and have superhuman prcocessing skills?  (Not the early adopters suffering from Alzheimers) What's their secret?

Marshall notes in his article: "Newsmastering is all about acting as a curator of the huge new stream of information that is coming to us every day .... thus the decision often comes down to What can I afford not to read?"    Ah, what Will Richardson did on Earth Day.  Ah ha, the environmental metaphor calls to mind David Shenk's Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut" and my favorite line in the book, "Give a hoot, don't data pollute."   

Marshall also describes some simple technical approaches:

Newsmastering can be as simple as splicing multiple RSS feeds together into a mix with a tool like FeedDigest.com. The next step in sophistication is to filter your feeds and be specific in your sources. More complex topics require strategic choices in sources and filters.

Lest this appears as simple as just finding interesting things on the internet, Robin points out that not just anyone can be a good Newsmaster. The most important qualities to have are passion and competence in the particular field being covered. In order to select, edit and manage the real information gems in any sector, a Newsmaster must have a deep familiarity to recognize news and resources in their proper context.

 

So, no grand conclusions on any of this, but plenty of good questions for discussion and further experimentation and learning ....

Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging - article on TechSoup

This article, "Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging" was recently updated and published on TechSoup.  It morphs two different blog posts by nonprofit tagging thought leaders, Ruby Sinreich and Alexandra Samuel.

These are excellent practical tips for choosing tags - either if you're doing this for your own personal information management or to use as a guide to help your organization come up with a tagging policy or at least some standard tags.

UPDATE: I've published a resource on tagging and nonprofits.  If you're just discovering my blog or tagging for nonprofits via this post, check out my Nonprofit Tagging Wikispace.

More thoughts on nonprofit tagging

Quite an interesting thread on the riders tech list on using tagging for nonprofits.

Michael Gilbert's comments are right on:

The reason tagging worked for us (and the reason it works for social bookmarking sites) is exactly as Dan Cooney describes it. It made things findable to the person who did the tagging. It does that for several reasons: (1) People use words that they themselves like to use to categorize things. (2) It is more straightforward than choosing a folder. (autocomplete makes it even more so). (3) It exposes the document to the intelligence of the group, which may add other tags, making it even more findable.

Our users developed several other ways to work with tags (in addition to per-tag RSS - and yes, we were using Dave Winer's early drafts of the RSS format): (1) They hand compiled one-off collections of links for particular purposes (such as references for a report) and then applied tags after the fact to the whole batch. (2) They used saved searches, for which they also had RSS feeds. (3) As with Del.icio.us, they had access to "what's new" feeds for the system as a whole and for specific users.

Nonprofit Use of Tagging

Nonprofit Use of Tagging
Originally uploaded by cambodia4kidsorg.

Playing with visuals ... for the big picture look.  Have a story to illustrate an organizational example - a composite of tales.  My other brainstorming is here.  This visual is for the panel session at netsquared called "I tag the hand that feeds me: examining tagging in the nonprofit world."   If you have ideas, questions, or observations - leave a comment at the end of the session description.