Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Blog Day and One Web Day: Are You Participating?

August 31, 2007 is the third annual Blog Day.  BlogDay is focused on getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest.    On that day, you write a post recommending 5 blogs to read.  You are suppose to notify the bloggers, write a brief description of their blogs, and tag your post with BlogDay2007.  It's simple to do and a great way to connect with other bloggers and pass along some link love.

On that day, I'll be in Cambodia at the first Cambodian Blogger Summit Conference.  Since the event is dedicated to BlogDay,  I'm sure that my BlogDay post will point to five (or more) Cambodian BlogHers.  I plan on participating in a small group session called "Gender and Blogging" facilitated by Sopheap Chak.  (I enjoyed Sopheap's recent post about public education about not littering in Cambodia)

After I get back in September, OneWebDay is next community web event on my calendar scheduled for September 22, 2007.  OneWebDay is a celebration of the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities.  Check out this mini-documentary at dotsub for more about the event.

Susan Crawford is the founder of OneWebDay.   She’s a law professor in New York City, a member of the ICANN board, and a fellow of the Center for Democracy & Technology, and the Yale Information Society Project.  She teaches communications law and cyberlaw, and writes frequently about these subjects on her blog and in published articles.  In researching the origins of OneWebDay, I learned that BlogHer Mary Hodder was involved in some of the initial evangelism for the day.

In a recent interview about OneWebDay on Juxtaviews, Susan described some of the barriers to making a better Web:

In thinking about how to use OWD for your own purposes, it seems to me (personally) that you should keep in mind that these obstructions are different in different parts of the world. For some people, just getting access is an obstacle. For others, it’s highspeed access. For others, it’s symmetric access (uploading and downloading). Censorship/gatekeepers of all kinds are concerns, particularly at the infrastructure layer, all over the world.

Nonprofits can help make the web “just a little better than it was before”  simply by taking part: it’s up to you to decide how.   The event is on the NpTech Group Upcoming Calendar (the tag for the nonprofit technology field), so I suspect there will be some creative ideas that nonprofit techies will contribute to the event.

Building Online Communities with Drupal and Dave Briggs has a new blog!

 

David Briggs has a new job and as a result as a new blog called FEconnect.

FEconnect is a blog about using social media and web 2.0 technology in building communities in the further education sector. It’s also a platform for building online social tools to provide practical benefit as well as demonstrating the power of the web as a platform for community engagement.

His post, "Building Online Communities With Drupal" is an excellent primer for non-geeks.

Update 8/24 - Here's Some Reverse Linktribution:  TechSoup Blog points to Building Online Communities With Drupal

KM4DEV Journal: Stewarding technologies for collaboration, community building and knowledge sharing in development

The KM4D Journal is produced by the KM4Dev-community and I was honored to participate on the editorial team for the the recently published issued on "Stewarding technologies for collaboration, community building and knowledge sharing in development."  Nancy White and Lucie Lamoureux lead a team editors which include myself,  Partha Sarker, Oreoluwa Somolu, Beverly Trayner, and Brenda Zulu.   The issues contains articles, case studies, interviews, and community notes. 

While the focus is on organizations and contexts in development work, anyone who works for a nonprofit, and needs to learn about how to integrate web2.0 in terms of adoption issues, knowlege management, and online community building should read this.   The articles are all good, so I can't pick out a favorite.

I enjoyed, along with Nancy White, interviewing  ethnographer and blogger Dina Mehta, about the role of technology steward in the context of voluntary online disaster relief work.  We covered the choice and deployment of software, volunteer organization, mutual support and distributed leadership.

From Austraila to Dubai ...

My colleague Mike Seyfang thought there might be someone in my network interested in this opportunity.

I would appreciate it if you could bring the blog post below to the attention of anyone who might be interested:
http://silkcharm.blogspot.com/2007/07/job-community-manager-dubai.html

Global Jam on Online Communities for Social Innovation

Roshani Kothari of OneWorld pinged about this Global JAM on Online Communities for Social Innovation event next week and meant to post it.  I was reminded after reading.  Britt Bravo's NetSquared blog, here's some info about the Global JAM on Online Communities for Social Innovation from Nancy's White Full Circle Interaction Blog: 

If you are interested in social change and innovation, I encourage you to participate in this (FREE) event coming up next week. The "price of admission" is filling out a survey by the 15th, so jump on this now! Here are all the details...

July 18-19 Global JAM on Online Communities for Social Innovation

You are invited to the first Global JAM on Online Communities for Social Innovation, July 18-19 .  A JAM is an online discussion that is time limited, asynchronous, moderated, and subsequently analyzed.

The goal of this event is to collectively identify technology requirements for effective online communities to better support those working in social change and innovation. The intention is to share what we learn quickly and broadly.

YackPack

 

A couple of days ago some of my twitter friends who are videobloggers started talking about Yak Pack.  The metaphor is a web walkie talkie.  It is a little widget that allows live chat on any web site.   The videobloggers were using it on their wiki.  When I arrived to check it out, I heard Michael Verdi talking to a few others about the video blogging documentary.  It was a little strange, reminded me of citizen band or "CB" radios we used to use as teens in the late 1970's.

I'm connecting it to the questions that came up on yesterday's Community Squared telephone conference to discuss tagging communities and got onto the topic of how online communities are changing given Web2.0.  I was reflecting about snippets of conversation that happen around tagged items in the NpTech tagging community -- although not all have been deeply reflective conversations.  I used the metaphor of a school of fish swimming together in a tag stream.  Etienne, or someone asked "Does swimming together in a tag stream make us a community?"

So, here's a tool that may (or may not) facilitate those conversations around "stuff" or tagged items.   And, there's been some emerging use in this way, of course, from the online learning/educator community.

Via Stephen Downes I discovered some reflections from Always Learning about how they used Yak Pack to record audio conversation and then easily published the conversation.

Online Facilitation in a Web2.0 World - Workshop from Nancy White

I'm an alumnus mentor of Nancy White's Online Facilitation Workshop..  I was a student in the workshop almost two years ago and have subsequently served as mentor.  I have never learned so much in my whole life and had fun doing it!  Both as a student and as a mentor.  Even better, the other people I met through the workshop -- other professionals who do online facilitation,  support communities of practice, and work with web2.0 tools -- I have learned from and continued a peer relationship.   And, of course, the content is excellent as is the instructor, the fabulous Nancy White.

I'd highly recommend it ... better hurry .. because it starts on May 7th and there are a few spots left.

Penguin Day Reflections: OS as FairTrade, OS Feminism, and OS - the Next Generation

Open Source Feminism - Click to Play

Penguin Day is a day-long workshop for nonprofit organizations to explore the range of issues and options inovlved in using Free and Open Source Software.  Penguin Days happen in different locations several times a year and for the past three years, these meetings have taken place after the annual NTC: Nonprofit Technology Conference.  Last Saturday, I attended my first one.  Although I was pretty exhausted by Saturday,  I learned a great deal.

I was curious to observe the gender balance at Penguin Day and while I'm not as meticulous as Christine in counting and calculating the number of women and men in the room, I took a quick video to get a reading. Very roughly, the percentages for Penguin Day look better than industry standards for both OS and commercial software.  The video incorporates some slides from Angela Byron's excellent presentation, "Women in Floss" which also speaks to the dark side of gender issues in FOSS communities.  The presentation offers some good pointers to women in how to get involved in FOSS communities.

Click To Play

The morning started off with a Spectrogram Session.  A line was drawn with duct tape from one side of the room to the other.  Aspiration's Executive Director, Allen Gunn, read a series of opinion statements and asked if we disagreed or agreed or were neutral.   Everyone in the room found a place on the line relative to their opinion.  A group dialogue followed allowing people to articulate why they felt one way or other.

I'm sort of foggy on all the questions - due to my tired state, but the first set of opinion statements was "Nonprofits should adopt open source software for practical reasons" and "Nonprofits should adopt open source software for philosophical reasons."    The discussion reminded of the one I heard in the UK and read later on the Circuit Riders list "Is Open Source Fair Trade for Nonprofits?" (Interesting that KhmerOS had a table at the Cambodia Fair Trade Expo)

The video captures those on the philsophical side.  I was standing on the "adopt for practical reasons" side of the line.  I was somewhat persuaded to come closer to the middle in listening to David's and Jamie's arguments.   I think that of advocates need to have open source technology stewards behind them to be successful -- there is a need for stewards to guide the choices, training, translators -- to help nonprofits adopt open source software.

Might I dare suggest that future spectrograms include a question about gender balance in OS? Or, has this issue already been discussed in this context?

I attended a session about OS Online Communities facilitated by the Joomla! guy (whose name I can't remember due to my exhausted state and I apologize for that). UPDATE:  His name is Johan Janssens.  He told the story about the growth and challenges facing the Joomla! community.  (These stories need to be written down and it sparked a memory of a conversation I had with Zittrain at iLaw in 2005 who pointed me to a researcher at HBS who was looking at Open Source Software Communities.)

The questions that emerged from this group were not different from those that are asked when we talk about online facilitation and online communities.   These folks would be perfect participants for Nancy White's Online Facilitation Workhop. 

• How to bring new people up to speed.  How to get the good pieces to rise to the top.
• What are the tactics for supporting online open source communities?
• What makes online forums work or not work?  What are the best practices?
• How to get into the forums without being labeled as a stupid newbie
• How to engage people in valuable conversation?
• How to prepare the next generation of moderators in OS communities?
• What is the best tool for very large communities?
• How well does the tool support the organic growth of the community?
• What are the techniques for conversational weaving?
• What is the gensis of an open source community? 
• Since OS communities generally begin with a small group of developers or a scratch your own itch approach and some developers tend to be egomanics - how do you build community within this culture?

I participated in the speed geek session where about ten people get to pitch a project or idea to a rotating group of four or five people.  I pitched my Open Content game for Nonprofits.  In retrospect, I designed the game more for a range people who work in a nonprofits - technical and mangerial - and this audience a mix of more technical and technology providers.    Still, I got a lot of great feedback for the next remix of this game.  (Sorry Janet, no videos too tired to multi-task.)

After a lunch of pizza (which accelerated my tiredness), I lead a very small group informal discussion on Open Content.  We didn't play the game, but we had a great discussion about the creative commons licensing and the issues the notion of open content surfaces.

While she was busy facilitating a linux session, Michele Murrain had managed to blog a very thoughtful post shining a light on the Open Content issues (pay for it or set it free).  I agree with Michele's viewpoint, although I understand why Michael Gilbert and Laura Quinn respectfully disagree:

But ultimately, yes, I do think that all content that we provide to the nonprofit sector should be freely available, and under Creative Commons (or similar) licensing. That's the only way to provide important information to nonprofits that need it - some have a hard time affording even nominal fees for that sort of thing.

Click to Play - Adam Thompson Interview

At the end of the day, I met Adam Thompson who teaches at UofC Santa Cruz and I discovered that he distributes some of my blog content to his 25-40 students each semester.   He notes that the field is changing fast and that the blogosphere moves faster than textbooks and the "by" license makes this sharing easier. 

So, if my content was locked up and available on a fee basis, I might make some money but then again I might have less exposure.  I guess the key whether your main source of income is from the sales of your actual content or whether your content is line extension and you make your income via consulting or teaching.  Lots to think about here.

Click to Play - Are Mediated Experiences Bad?

I went out for a group dinner after Penguin Day.   I got a ride from Simon Rowland who was using his blackberry and GPS to help navigate to the restaurant to meet up with the rest of the group. In the front seat, Simon was talking about mediated experience with Zac Mutrux and how our engagement with gagets gets in the way of us being in the moment and interacting with people face-to-face.   This reminded of a post I wrote called "Shall we put away the cameras and have a conversation?"

This calls to mind a debate in the educator community about some years ago about computer-mediated experiences - and how it is a (mostly) bad thing.  Has this view changed by the pervasive Internet access? What struck me is that Simon is probably a Gen Y and Zac a Gen X and I'm a babyboomer.  My perception was that younger people do not feel mediated experience is a bad thing.  I was wrong -- this attitude isn't necessarily generational.

Click to Play - OS Next Generation
Music - Voyage Black

And, since I mentioned generations, my kids are "We Gen" and I wonder if they think mediated experience is a bad thing?   I must also mention that the blow up penguins were huge hit in our house - they are still being flung down the stairs.   Even more importantly, it gave me a chance to introduce the kids to the concept of Open Source software -- Harry's observations about penguins were interesting.

Screencast: Using Widgets to Build Community on Blogs Featured on NTEN Blog

 

Original photo remixed from flickr photo by Stinky Peter
Screencast in conjunction with NTEN
View the screencast as higher quality flash file -takes longer to download here

I'm so excited!  My screencast on widgets is featured in this month's NTEN newsletter in a section pointing to "How To Build Online Community."  The link will take you directly to the screencast, but I also went to the trouble of putting together some extensive program notes that will help you explore widgets in more depth and provides credits to all the wonderful cc licensed material I used in the screencast.  I didn't want those to get lost.  They follow below.

Screencast Program Notes

These program notes will help you implement some of the ideas presented in the screencast. If you have questions about widgets or want to share your organization’s experience (good and bad), the NTEN Affinity Groups, particularly Emerging Technology, Nonprofit Bloggers, or Nonprofit Webmasters, are good lists to connect with your peers on these topics.

Act 1:  What

What we're talking about are web widgets and the definition is:

A Web Widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate html-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake. Web Widgets often but not always use Adobe Flash or JavaScript programming languages.

Robin Good recently interviewed Marshall Kirkpatrick about Mash-ups and he asked Marshall to define widgets in the context of the conversation.  Here's his definition:

A Widget is a piece of code that enables a non-technical website publisher to pull in data and a display for that data from another website, so they can have, say, news ticker headlines or a personal horoscope, or local weather or an RSS feed.

Act 2:  Why

A few important questions to ask before your consider adding a widget to your blog or web site.

You need to think about these questions first, widgets second

• Does your web site or blog publish excellent content on a regular basis?
• Do you ask good questions that lead to conversations online?
• Do you have strategies for encouraging those conversations and linking them to your content?
• Do you write blog posts that inspire lots of comments?
• Do you employ a social networking or online outreach strategy that engages your regular readers and enables new readers to discover you?

Since widgets were fairly new, I installed a mail widget on my blog and asked nonprofit techies what they thought. 

Here's a summary:   

Using widgets is not yet a common practice on nonprofit blogs and folks are still experimenting and learning.    Still, there are benefits:

• Easy to use, don't need technical skills
• Can help you extend or enhance the conversation on your blog
• Can help you "listen" by gathering feedback and other information from your blog readers
• Can help you easily link to other sites, content, or individuals
• Can help make your blog more "findable"
• They are lots of fun

You can read a more detailed report of what folks thought here.

Before you go hog wild on widgetbox and install every widget known to mankind, consider the following:

• If most of your readers are following you via blog readers, they may not "pop" out of their reader to visit your browser.
• On the other hand, many blogs end up being positioned higher in search engine searches, so there must be some blogs that are being discovered via the browser and not a reader.  So, perhaps widgets should be designed to reach first-timers or new readers.  Consider them as a strategy for point of entry. You need to know from where your audience is coming to your blog.
• Consider your audience when you select a particular widget.  If you're a podcaster and your audience is likely to a microphone installed on their computer, than those message widgets might make sense.
• The use of widget must be linked to the topic, content, or purpose of your blog.  For example, linking a poll to a post on the topic.

Act 3:  A Few Good Examples

Group 1:  Interactivity

Polls

One of the most used widgets by nonprofits are the audience poll widgets.  Katya Andresen explains why.  Polls are a great way to get reader feedback too.  I used the Vidzu poll to get feedback on a blog post here.  In the screencast, I demonstrated how easy it is to add a poll to your site using the widget, PollDaddy. 

• You can do a general reader survey like, the nonprofit tech blog
• You can connect it to content in a post like the Bamboo  Project
• Or you can connect to the key goals of your blog like Save Guimaris

Chat and  Messages

The example I showed in the screencast was on Dave Wallace's blog, Life Kludger.

Message/IM Widgets: I installed the message widget from Odeo and the IM/Chat Widget from Meebo.   Using mail widgets and chat client wigets but depends on your audience.  Are they likely to use these features to engage with you?

The best comment line can be found at Emergency Trap Blog.  Its from MobaTalk and has a better interface and also automatically shares messages you've received.   

Be sure to test these widgets to make sure they are installed and work.

Group 2:   Content

This group of widgets allows you to take content from one site or location on the web and easily republish it elsewhere.

Here's a few examples:

Delicious Badge:  I use this widget to publish my social bookmarking bookmarks on my blog.

Flickr Widget/Badge:  If your organization is using flickr to say run a photo content or a community tagging project, it makes sense to add a flickr badge to your web site.  The Flickr widget lets you select all your photos, a particular tag or group.  It lets you customize the color, size, format, number of photos, etc.

Technorati Search Widget:  If anything else, I use the search widget on my blog to retrieve posts I wrote about a while ago, but can't quite remember when or what category I filed them in.  Visitors or readers might find the search useful as well. There are a lot of search widgets and thankfully Christine Herron did an exhaustive review of search widgets.   With that said, I get complaints from some  of my blog readers about the Technorati Search Widget, so I'm looking for suggestions.

Group 3: Fundraising Widgets

When I produced this screencast, widgets for fundraising or charity badges were just being announced.  The market is changing rapidly and there have been a lot more personal campaigns and activity.

Fundraising is the life blood of nonprofits and is another area of active experimentation using strategies called “personal fundraising”  Think citizen donor, citizen philthanthropist.    Widgets, charity badges, blog fundraising plugins allows your supporters become messengers for your cause. the shift is now from the organization raising money to the supporters taking on that role/responsibilities. The Widget just helps people track their commitment and shows progress being made.

Katya Andresen of The Nonprofit Marketing Blog has written extensively on the topic of personal fundraising.  You'll find these posts here and I'd drop everything and read them now!

I wrote a case study about my experience launching a personal fundraising campaign here.

First of Its Kind lists the top ten personal fundraising campaigns and has lots of excellent how-to guides.

Britt Bravo recently put together a terrrific list of personal fundraising causes.

I've aggregated a lot of these and other resources on the topic on my wiki portfolio.

Act 4: Where to find widgets

There are three general types of sources to find widgets to install on your organization's blog or web site:

1.   The particular Web2.0 Social Networking Tool or Service

Many widgets I came across are designed to work with various Web 2.0 social networking tools like del.icio.us, flickr, blip.tv, Technorati, etc.   So, if you are already using one of those services and want to integrate content onto your blog, check on their web site first.  Now, they may not be calling it a widget, some refer to as "badges."  Simply look in the "help" section of your favorite Web2.0 social networking site.

2.   A Widget Gallery or Directory for your Blogging Platform

I'm not a techy, so I use typepad.   Typepad has integrated widgets into the blogging platform, so adding a widget is even easier than cut and paste!  It's one click!   There is a widget gallery where you can go shopping for widgets.

There are also other platform-specific widget directories:  wordpress (here and here) and blogger  If you're on another platform, try the Squidoo Widget Finder Lens.

I went through the typepad collection and installed (unstalled) a lot of them because, to be honest, some did not hold promise for a nonprofit org blog.  With that said, the collection is growing and I did find the ultimately easy to install and just what I wanted delicious linkroll widget here, The Vidzu Audience Poll Widget (here) as well as a few other good possibilities for the nonprofit blogs here, here, here, and here.
Since widgets installation is integrated with my blogging platform it was one less click to install or unstall -- and not time consuming. 

I played around with the widget that allows we to easily stream my delicious links on my sidebar. (If you're not using typepad, don't despair, you can grab the code for a number of delicious widgets here, here, and here)  I am a big tagger so this was a must-have widget for me.  However, I don't want stream my entire collection of links though.  So, set it to stream based on the tag "linkblog" and that way I can relate the links to current posts or whatever theme I'm researching.

3.  Third-Party Widget Directory and Aggregator Sites

There are widget directory sites like snipperoo which organize various widgets for end-users to pluck and install and for widget developers to upload and share.  However, what the newest thing is something called a "Widget Aggregator."   As described at the recent Widget Live Conference "New widget aggregators are forming to organize and classify the world of widgets into simple and easy to deploy collections. These aggregators offer one widget box to rule them all, creating a single point of integration for new widget users."

Widgetbox For bloggers like me, Widgetbox offers a Widget panel. Once this panel is placed into a sidebar of a blog, any widget can be added simply via drag and drop.  It supports a range of blogging platforms.

Although the interface was a little geeky - after clicking around - it was very easy to install (and unstall) and update the widgets and panels I installed.

Act 5: Summary:

-Widgets have the potential of extending the distribution and connection of a nonprofit's content and can also can be useful in amplifying the community s associated with an organization's web site or blog.
-Widgets are easy to use and install and do not require special technical skills - they're fun too!

How to get started ...

-Successfully using widget to realize outcomes is going to be a matter of experimentation and learning.  Above all, the widget needs to be connected with your blog's content, readers' interests, and amplify conversation.

-Pick a few widgets, install them, and track them over a period of a month or so.  Figure out if your strategy is bringing in new traffic, generating more comments/activity on your blog, etc.  If not, do be aware to ditch it.

I wrote, shot, edited, and produced this screencast a few months ago and I'm already seeing how a lot of changed in the widget landscape.  So, if you'd like to add your thoughts, please drop a comment in the post.

Credits
Opening Sequence
Music

nervoso con las guitarras by: norelpref

Photos
Robots
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stinkypeter/91821888/in/photostream/

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stinkypeter/91821889/in/photostream/

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stinkypeter/91821886/in/photostream/

People at desk
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyfoo/

Dictionary
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jvk/

 

Nobs
http://www.flickr.com/photos/driggs/

 

Ze Frank's Word Game
http://www.zefrank.com/wp1/magnets/index.html

Conversation
http://flickr.com/photos/chrisheuer/

 

 

 

Outreach Strategy
http://flickr.com/photos/pdr/

Geek Skills:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/acaben/62925785/ 

 

Geek:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sd/7746599/

Grow A Geek:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyroq/110996294/

Money:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noahwesley/120499365/

Get Your Damn Tags Right! A Tagging Community

 

Via a post from the Tags/Networks/Narrative called Vocabulary Soup, I discovered another tagging community called, Get Your Damn Tags Right.

Occasionally, communities may well form around tagging. For example, the social music site Last FM has a group called "Get Your Damn Tags Right" which pretty much does what it says on the tin. I suspect that a quick search through various web2.0 sites will find groups interested in tagging.

The issue is whether this activity needs a new term to describe it. Emergent communicative practices from communities are not exactly unknown - the whole practice of the ethnography of communication lies in understanding the relationship between culture and communicative practice - and tagging is, in my view, a communications device. Part of this project revolves around exactly this issue.

That said, I love the term "feral hypertext". Jill Walker coined the term in 2005 in a great and provocative article. Feral hypertexts and tag clouds as narratives are one the trajectories of this project. I'm not sure where it will go, that's why it's an "Adventure in Tagging."

I looked at the Get Your Damn Tags Right community statement of purpose:

So, are you one of those people who absolutely hate having your music files mistagged? The artist has to be correct, the title the proper title, the track listed for the correct album, and all have to be spelled exactly right and with proper capitalization? This is the place for you.

And, as we may never have song moderation, this may be an eternal problem, unfortunately.

If you ever happen to see a group member with mistagged music, feel free to publicly give them crap about it here in the forums. Just do it in a friendly manner (as in pointing and laughing, not pointing and insulting). And mention the proper information for the tag, so that it's also constructive.

Be aware that this group focuses on badly tagged music files, not the tags applied to artists and songs by users of this site.

On the public forum, the discussion threads range from making fun of sloppy taggers "What's the worse tag you've ever seen?"  (Answer: Pink Floyd as Punk)  to threads asking for advice about what tag to use when tagging, Opera, for example.

Now, back to this other idea about Feral Hypertext

Definition of Feral:
Feral (a): Of an animal: Wild, untamed. Of a plant, also (rarely), of ground: Uncultivated. Now often applied to animals or plants that have lapsed into a wild from a domesticated condition.

Definition of Feral Hypertext:
The most interesting—and the most feral—aspect of Flickr is the tagging. Instead of providing a set list of possible keywords, Flickr allows users to type in any tag they like. Each photo can have as many tags as desired.