Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Smithsonian: Crowdsourcing An Institution's Vision on Youtube

Over the weekend, I took my kids to the movie, Night of Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.  They thoroughly enjoyed watching the exhibits come to life.  (My kids especially liked the Einstein bobbing heads).   Now the Smithsonian Institution, in a flash of cloud like behavior, is coming to life on the social web.

The Smithsonian Institution is in the midst of a huge strategic planning effort, with new media as one of the focal points for its future.  It looks like their strategic planning process is being extended by the social web, going beyond the traditional flip charts and chocolate chip cookies of all-day planning retreats.  While they may be also be doing focus groups and surveys, it looks like they've added a research channel: YouTube. 

Welcome to Smithsonian 2.0!

They're doing some crowdsourcing via their YouTube Channel.  The Smithsonian has opened the conversation up to the world and is inviting people to submit a one-minute video sharing their vision for the Institution's future.   The question they're asking:

Given the news ways of acquiring and sharing knowledge through technology: the internet, social networking, video sharing, and cell phones—where do you see the Smithsonian's museums and websites going in the future? How can we make education more relevant to you in a digital age?

There's a handful of videos already submitted and just gotta love this one with the baby.

The text of the invitation on YouTube is as follows:

We're looking for a few friends and fans from around the world to help us form the future Smithsonian experience. A revolutionary Web and New Media Strategy project is underway, and we invite you to collaborate with us as we envision a rich new media future for the Institution.

They're asking folks to join this YouTube group and submit a one-minute video by June 30th.  I wonder who they are reaching out to, why they selected YouTube (are there other places where people who are interested in the future of the Smithsonian gather?), are they reaching out to new media professionals as well as others?

It will be interesting to see how they summarizing the feedback and illustrate how they plan to incorporate it into their strategic planning. 

Update:  Found some additional materials from Nina Simond at Museum 2.0

Everyone's Smithsonian

View more Microsoft Word documents from Nina Simon.

Video of her lecture here. Conversation about this on the WestMuse Blog
in the comments.   There was a response from someone at the Smithsonian who answered Dave Cormier's query about why they are doing it and how to nurture the conversation.

Mike Edson is really the guy to address this, as the Web & New Media Strategy is his: http://Smithsonian20.si.edu but since I’m here:

The Voice Your Vision Project is just one more facet of the overall info gathering process. Video contribution seemed like a potentially engaging way to gather some public input, and YouTube was an easy place to set it up. This wasn’t a heavily analyzed endeavor, just another little piece of the puzzle.

The process has been designed to be very wide open within the Institution, so this seemed a easy and fun way to gather some input from the outside using New Media.

Nothing cynical, and no worry about losing funding. The Secretary is a Social Media booster. However, getting an institution as large as ours to undertake an integrated approach to New and Social Media is a big task. Building our systems from the ground up to both meet the internal needs of our researchers and other specialists while still filtering up to meet the needs of our constituents via our websites and our presence on an ever widening array of external social sites is going to take a lot of resources. We need begin to get a view from a lot of perspectives, and this is just one more slice of the pie.

So, not only are they opening up a two-way conversation, they are using social media best practices: listening and experimenting. Also being very transparent.

What lies beneath social media stress, fear, and barriers to adoption in nonprofits?

Understanding Techno Stress

View more presentations from kanter.

If you witnessed how Web 1.0 was adopted (or not) in the nonprofit workplace over the past 10-15 years, you'll notice that fear and silo culture are nothing new or unique as barriers to adoption. 

Steve MacLaughlin recently pointed this in an email.  He often uses the metaphor of not having your web strategy or data be an island.   Steve said silo culture has been a barrier to effective web strategy for years. "The Web is still its own silo in many organizations. It isn't used as part of an overarching strategy.  When nonprofits started using the web, it was largely disconnected from what the rest of the org was doing. It started out as something done by communications or marketing or "owned" by IT. That makes sense, but it created a silo."

This sent me back into my archives from over ten years ago when Web 1.0 was going mainstream in nonprofit workplaces, along with the need to develop technology plans.    Similar adoption issues and themes surfaced as I identified in my recent post on social media policy. 

When I facilitated technology and web workshops for nonprofits in the 1990's, I did a lot of workshops on TechnoStress where small groups would identify their concerns and then literally draw a picture of them.  These are some drawings and reflections from nonprofit staff members in the early to mid-1990's about using the web, email, etc. Today, they might not view these now mainstreamed web tools in that way. But would some of the same fears surface about social media? 

Yes.

The term "TechnoStress" was coined by Michelle Weil and Larry Rosen title of a wonderful book.  TechnoStress is the stress we feel both personally and organizationally when a new technology is introduced into our work lives.  This book was written in 1997 just as Web 1.0 started to cross the chasm.

The authors were concerned about people who were not using the Internet and being excluded from the benefits.  They estimate that about 10-15 of the population are eager to adopt new technologies, another 50% need to have the value proven, and the rest are fearful of new technology. If you are one of the 10-15% of early adopters in social media, it is important to understand how to provide assistance to help others cross the chasm, whether individually or as an organization.

Amy Sample Ward shared a collection of links recently pointing to my post about silo culture.  In a follow up email, she asked what might be different about the adoption issues for social media?

What makes this different is that the technology that is driving this change - the "social graph" or the map of connectedness that we're creating through participation in online social networks.  This technology impacts us personally first before it enters the workplace.  In the past, adoption of technologies like Web 1.0 and the personal computer were driven by the workplace. 

What lies beneath the use of these social media tools?  Whether you're using them to support your organization's marketing and fundraising, for activism, or collaboration across organizations.   It's working in a networked way.   It can mean:

• Leveraging personal networks of individuals:    These tools allow us as individuals to build powerful networks and social capital - and this can be used to help our organization's achieve goals.  The tools make the line between personal/organizational is quite squishy and that's a change management issue.

• Moving from .org to more networked organizations:   Can nonprofits continue to be silos in and of themselves - not to mention continue to work internally as silos in an age of social media?    As my colleague Allison Fine says it is the need to move to network speak and think about the nonprofit staff, volunteers, board, and funders as nodes within their network which is only part of a much larger network of people and resources.

What change management process is needed to move away from organizational silos or islands to fully leverage the social graph and power of social media for nonprofits? What are the consequences of ignoring the need to make this shift?  Do all organizations need to adopt social media or not - or at least this new way of working?

Resource List:

Dave Cormier, Rhizomatic Education: Community As Curriculum
Joitske Huslebosch, Can You Shift Your Organization's Culture By Introducing Social Media?
Steve MacLaughlin, No Constituent Is An Island
Amy Sample Ward, Moving Away from Organizations To What?
Michael Gilbert, The Permeable Organization
Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger,  Cluetrain Manifesto, Chapter 5 The Hyperlinked Organization
Ton Zijlstra, How We Might View Organizations
David Wilcox, Social Media Supports the Shadow
Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom, The Starfish and The Spider
Memetricbrand, A Networked Mindset
Working Wikily - Resources for Network Effectiveness
and paper "Working Wikily"

Power Law of Participation: How does it differ for collective charitable giving?

Flickr Photo from Ross Mayfield

Still reflecting on the question "Are Fundraising Groundwells A Massive Opportunity or Distraction for Nonprofit Organizations?"  Found this oldish post in my bookmark collection called Power Law of Participation for social software by Ross Mayfield. 

When users participate in high engagement activities, connecting with one another, a different kind of value is being created.  But my core point isn't just the difference between these forms of group intelligence -- but actually how the co-exist in the best communities.

How does Twestival change or morph this graph?

Twestival: Here Comes Everyone To Raise Money On Twitter for Charity:Water

Last August, I saw the impact of Twitter's velocity first-hand with a fundraising experiment.  I was able to raise $2,500 in 90 minutes at Gnomedex using offline/online tactics.  I wondered whether or not those results would be replicable?   Right before Thanksgiving, the TweetsGiving effort helped Epic Change raise over $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania seeking $10 donations.  As Lucy Bernholz noted, this might be one more example that fundraising on Twitter is less marginal and moving to the middle.  

Back in November, I wrote a post "Twitter As Charitable Giving Spreader: A Brief History and Meta Analysis of Fundraising With Twitter."  Almost all the fundraising campaigns using Twitter at that point were organized by a single person or organization and used Twitter to spread the solicitation, but directed the actual donation off of Twitter to complete it.   Most were using Twitter as one channel in a multi-channel campaign and asked for small donations ($10), although gave incentives for larger gifts.

During the holiday giving season in December, several micro-fundraising campaigns used tipjoy, a payment system, that makes it as easy to donate as sending a 140-character Tweet (a message sent to your friends on Twitter) and even smaller donation amounts.    The boldest of these experiments was launched by Twitter maven, Laura Fitton (@pistachio) and raised almost $25,000 for charity:water, a nonprofit focused on bringing safe drinking water to villages in need around the world.   Charity:water has been a favorite charity of Web 2.0 rock stars.   Tre, who writes a blog called Thought by thought has several detailed posts analyzing the campaign here and here. 

Laura Fitton's idea for the campaign marked a departure from current online philanthropic behavior which takes several steps from receiving a solicitation "ask" to typing in your credit card number and clicking on a donate button.  Her campaign structure condensed those steps, perhaps making Twitter's velocity possible for charities or individuals working on behalf of charities to raise money at even faster speeds that we've already seen.   And, she has also challenged the notion of the size of a "small donation." She asked her 12,500 followers to donate just $2.

Does the future of online fundraising lie in mobile social networks that have an easy built-in payment system for in-the-moment charitable giving of very small amounts by thousands and thousands of people?   As Laura noted in a comment, "Imagine it for public radio: hear something great on the drive to work? What if you could effortlessly tip a dollar or two in appreciation? Or tweeting your order & payment ahead to your coffee shop? Or donating to a cause during a presentation or speech that motivated the giver? In tough economic times anything that can spread the load more evenly, reduce friction and make giving more spontaneous could go a long way towards making up some of the pinch nonprofits are feeling in this downturn."

Look out, the next reiteration of micro fundraising on Twitter is coming on February 12, 2009 and will combine online twitter fundraising with a groundswell of offline self organizing events.   Called Twestival, Twitter users will meet up in over 100 plus cities to socialize offline, meet other Twitter users, enjoy some fun, have a few drinks, and raise money for charity: water.  This event combines the lessons learned from previous fundraising activities on Twitter:

• A local, face-to-face component based on the popular "Tweet Ups" or "Net2Tuesday" meetups
• Decentralized event organizing, it's grassroots and anyone can organize a local event
• The charity isn't the central organizer of the event - it appears that they are letting their stakeholders run with it and not imposing "branding and messaging" standards.  Each localized event is putting its own unique flair to the event.
• Micro donations using TipJoy
• Focus 24 hour event with broadcasts and all local partners participating to raise awareness (a sort of Blog Action Day on steroids)

According to the web site, the event will unfold in three phases:

• Phase one: Launch the homepage with a list of cities which have already registered. Over the next day, organizers will be given a password and instruction to upload information to their own city site (start thinking about a first blog post). Please have a bit of patience as we are working as quickly as we can.
• Phase two: All of the cities should be linked up to the homepage. Features to donate, bid on an auction, raffle and other fundraising projects will come online as buttons as they are completed.
• Phase three: On 12 February 2009, Twestival will be working with partners to have live broadcasts of the events around the world.

This event will certainly make fundraising on Twitter move front and center as well as demonstrate how the age of connectedness and social media is continuing to have a profound influence in changing the way charities raise money.   I suspect the amount raised will be impressive.

More from

Miriam Kagan, Twestival

What do you think?

Pearls of Wisdom from Working Wikily: What Does A Network Look Like

Illustration from David Wilcox

Back in May, I discovered and feel in love with the phrase "Working Wikily" was coined by Lucy Bernholz.  I don't know how many phrases she's originated in the nonprofit, social media, and philanthropy - but this one is a gem.   It was also the title of a report "Working Wikily: How Networks Are Changing Social Change" a paper Gabriel Kasper and Diana Scearce of the Monitor Institute.  The paper provides concepts and specific examples.  It is heavily influenced by the writings of Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody)

I loved the phrase and concept so much I that I used for a series of reflections and learning related to the NTEN WeAreMedia project.

Now we have the Working Wikily Blog which is exploring making sense of networks and social change.  The contributors are the dream team from the Monitor Institute.

Lots of great stuff to dig into here.  Take for example, "Does Your Network Look Like This?  Then You Need To Do Some Network Weaving."

Working Wikily: Bridging Online/Offline Learning and Content Creation/Community Building

Flickr Photo by Key Lime Pie

This is part of series of reflections on what I've learned about working wikily through working on NTEN's  WeAreMedia wiki - not so much the content, but the community curriculum development and knowledge sharing process.   In past posts, I've talked about:

• The Secret Life of a Wiki Gardener:   Using a gardening metaphor, I drill down into the fine art of wiki facilitation.
• Balancing Participation On Homebase and Outposts:  How wiki participation can happen on the wiki and off the wiki and how to weave that participation together.
• A Visual Way to Track Participation:  Using a timeline application/widget, you can visually track who has added what to your wiki over time.  
• The Power of the Newbie and Sustaining Participation As you wiki grows over time and new people come into the community, how to make the user experience a good one.
• Establishing a Culture of Giving on Your Wiki:  This post looks at ways that you can encourage people to add to the wiki, not just browse.
• Getting out of the way:  How to encourage participation in the beginning - moderating with a light touch to encourage and grow community responsibility.

At the beginning of the project, Dave Cormier agreed to be my "critical friend."   (Here are a few resources defining critical friends - here, here and here).   But the short definition is:  "A critical friend is someone who is independent of the project who asks provocative questions, offers an alternative view, and helps facilitate fresh insights or alternative sources of information or expertise."   This has been invaluable learning process because Dave's insights have sparked the above reflections.

Dave's most recent critical friend post offers some thoughts about community.   He makes these points:

1. No matter how good a community, its ideas, its positioning, there are almost always a couple of people working their tails off to keep it what it is.
2. Community participation is almost entirely about the responsibility of the participant.

He goes on to say:

I’m going to be working with george siemens on a course starting (omg… next week) and will definitely be using the wearemedia project as a resource… we should, as good members of a community, update the part of the content that need updating as a manner of ‘responsibility’ or payment if you like, for using the material. I worry, however, about potentially adding confusing information while beth et al. are designing their delivery methods… something to think about.

This kind of relationship, though, seems like a good one. A couple of courses decide to use the same repository/ies for their work and that keeps the work uptodate as well as avoiding the duplication of effort. I wonder if something like this with wearemedia and alec’s 831 course would make a nice balance between two excellent resources. mmm… community.

If you look at the work plan, the content development part of the project is coming to a close (there's one module left to build on experimentation) and "instructional" part of the project is ramping up.

The wiki serves as a companion to the face-to-face workshops and Dave asks a very good question: How does one keep content this changeable uptodate?

Here's what lies ahead -- a division and then a bridge between online/offline learning and community/content.   The problem is how to accomplish that without it being too confusing.

Community Driven Content
The Wiki/Community generated material will be the place to keep less static, more changing information.  Where "responsible" community members and the wiki gardener (me) will add.  These sections are: 

• Strategic Social Media
• Tactical Approaches
• Tool Box

As drill you down into the sections, you'll see links to blog posts that people contributed to this effort as well as links and text/bullet points on the wiki itself. 

The challenge is how to keep the community engaged?  We've worked rather intensely - perhaps this becomes a slower community. 

Workshop Companion Content
At the very beginning of the project, people wanted to see "edited instructional content" - and Michele Martin wrote a great post about this.   The next task is going to be transform the Community Driven Content into a more instructional and static format intended as a companion for workshop participants. I also see them eventually contributing to the wiki.   This will happen over the next 6 weeks. 

Working Wikily: The Secret Life of A Wiki Gardener - It Ain't Just Weeding

Photo by one2c900d

This is part of series of reflections on what I am learning about working wikily through the WeAreMedia wiki.    In my last reflection, I talked about balancing participation on home base and outposts.  In this post, I'm going to take a deeper dive into the actual work tasks of a wiki gardener - it is a bit more than simply weeding.   

I created a 4 minute screencast with Jingproject that will give you a sense of the workflow.   I started to think about the gardening tasks using the metaphor of, well, gardening.   

1. Prepare your garden bed:  The garden bed is the actual page or section on the wiki where you want to get people to contribute content or where you'll place it after you scoop it from the outposts.   I create a page and it is a balancing act.  You need to avoid filling it up with too much content because people will think the page is complete and they have nothing to contribute or get overwhelmed.  On the other hand, if you give them a "naked" page - they won't have enough context to contribute easily - unless they are subject matter experts on the topic, have lots of time, and are highly motivated to contribute. 

I'm still learning that balance. But I usually start with a very short paragraph for context and leave questions or tables for people to fill-in.   The stuff that people like to contribute are:  their own links and brief descriptions, resources, and quick tips.   (Earlier in the project, I wrote about the different levels of contributions and engagement)

2.  Plant your seeds:   This is asking people to contribute.  I do this in several ways.  First, on the wiki's top page, I have include a "What We're Working On Right Now" (see here).  This stays fluid and try to point people to specific holes in the context or highlight good contributions.   In addition, this is how we let people know about new places to contribute:

• Blog Posts:  I do an overview post giving context and the questions.  I may follow up with a summary of what's been posted and point to specific holes.   The NTEN Blog also does a post.  In addition, folks who have signed onto the "Expertise Map" may also contribute a blog post to the module - which has turned out to be a superb way to build original content for the curriculum.

• Twitter:   I also use twitter to asks for specifics content chunks.  For example, yesterday, I asked for nonprofit examples of telling stories social media style.  I don't just ask questions, but eat my own dog food - engage people in conversations about it.  Take for example this, this, and that.

• Community Outreach:   We have over 100 people involved between wiki registered members(77), google group (82),  Swarm Lists (49), and Expertise Map (50).

3.  Tend To Your Garden - Water, Fertilize, and Weed:   After you do the first two steps, your content will start to grow and not very neatly.   You need to spend time in the garden walking the rows and observing.   So, for example after I asked for examples, I went back to the page and looked at it:

• I added "you can add more than one example" because someone asked me
• I noticed that the simple structure I created was not the right container and reorganized it.
• I noticed that people may be having trouble knowing how to add rows to the table, so I made a screencast.

4.   Harvest and Enjoy:  The next step with this is to summarize the content that has been added on my blog - as reward and ask for more - but try to get people to add it in the right spot and fill in the description.  Also, I flesh out the examples suggested via twitter. This might be good candidates for case studies.  So, I put them on a separate page and am trying to get folks to add their stories. 

So, that's a sneak peek into the secret life of a wiki gardener.    What's your best wiki gardening tip?  How do you make this work flow more efficient? 

See also Social Media Classroom

Working Wikily: Balancing Participation on the Homebase and Outposts

Photo by RoadSide Pictures

The WeAreMedia project is housed on a wiki, but the conversations and contributions don't always take place on homebase (the wiki), sometimes they happen at outposts like people's blogs, in the comments, and other places.  So, one role of the wiki gardener is to not only make sure homebase is neat and tidy, but to scoop up the distributed content and make sure it is linked in the right place.

Listening in both locations

That's why it is really important to set up listening posts in both locations.  Luckily, the wiki application we're using has the ability to track every page and every discussion area either through email or RSS.  I've found myself doing a combination - setting email alerts on important pages - for example so I welcome new people who join the expertise map which now has 47 people on it or swarm list.

To listen in the outposts, I have set up google alerts (URL and phrase), technorati, and summize (search on Twitter).   When someone mentions the project or has gone the extra mile to contribute content on their own blog, I try to thank them and then incorporate that into the appropriate wiki page.

Participation in both locations

In facilitating this community discussion to get at the curriculum, I've used blog posts that point people to the wiki page, one-on-one emails to specific people who self-identify, tweets, FriendFeed NpTech Room posts, and a little on Facebook.    I'm not trying to control where the conversation takes place - I want it to be as easy as possible for someone to make a contribution and if that happens off the wiki, that's okay.  As the wiki gardener, I just need to be able to gather up these valuable nuggets of insights from nonprofit technology professionals, and add them to the wiki curriculum or do some light editing of what's there.    The challenge is to extend this editorial or curatorial role to wiki participants which is a little daunting.

The Listening Module:  An Example

I don't have a set recipe yet for facilitating a discussion/brainstorm for the development of a curriculum and weaving community knowledge on a wiki yet.  So, every now and then, I deconstruct what I did - to examine what worked and what didn't.   

Last week after a brief pause, we launched the first of the tactical  modules to brainstorm on the wiki and these included - listen, participate, content, generating buzz, and social networking.  What's nice about these modules compared to the strategic ones, is that they are very concrete.   

The first module of this series was titled "Why Listening Is the First Step."  I have been setting up the pages with a few questions, leaving blank space, and filling in just a small amount.    I was delighted and surprised to see that a wiki participant, Robin Browne had, on their own, filled out this module.

Next, I started the conversation with this blog post, giving an overview of the content and asking for nonprofit stories and resources.  These types of items seem to be the easiest for people to contribute because it doesn't take a lot of time if they have the experience or know of a link or two to add.   

Some people added the questions over the wiki, while others left comments on the blog posts.     For those who left comments, I asked some follow up questions out in the comments and pinged them via email.  This was like doing a quick distributed interview for a mini-case study right there on the comments.   It became clear that people needed to see an example of what a mini-case study might look like,  so I wrote another blog post giving an example and asking for stories.  I mentioned this post on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook - and got into conversations with people who responded.   Then, I scooped up the various stories, made screen captures, hunted down names and links, and incorporated them into the module.

But, there's also been some deeper reflections, ideas, and converation happening on the outposts.

Gordon Meyer, who writes the Nonprofit Communicator Blog, wrote a thoughtful post called "Way Beyond News Alerts" that is a terrific addition to the WeAreMedia Listening Module.  He makes a good point about why listening is important and also points a cool new listening tool - Boardreader.

Non-Profit Chas has written an excellent post called "Shut Up and Listen to the Internet" which weaves together themes and idea from the listening module and the one launched this week on participation.

So, I'm hoping as we move forward through the tactical modules as well as the play with the tools week we're planning later this month, I hope we'll see both blog posts like those identified above as well as the continued level of participation - from the typo swatting to the listing of links to quick interviews in the comments -- all contributions are very much appreciated and valued.

My big question is how to make the tasks and job of a wiki gardener - the listening, summarizing, and tracking a bit more efficient.  Ideas?

Dipity Do Da - An Interactive Collaborative Timeline To Track Wiki Contributions

Dipity is a timeline tool that let's you edit a timeline collaboratively or pop in an RSS feed.  More here.

I put the RSS feed for the WeAreMedia wiki in - and it displays the changes in a timeline.  I wish I had known about dipity from the beginning -- gives you a sense of participation. It only captured the last couple of days of changes.

Working Wikily: The Power of the Newbie, Balance Quality/Quantity, Sustaining Participation

While putting together the list of "Twenty Something and Gen Y Social Change and Nonprofit Bloggers" I couldn't help but reflect back on when I was a twenty something.   I wanted to be a professional classical flutist.  I was lucky to study with Marcel Moyse, a famous French flutist who was living twenty miles down the road from me in Vermont.

His house/studio was on the top of a small mountain.  I climbed the mountain, knocked on his door and asked if he would take me on as student.   He turned me down three times before he said yes. (He was in his 80's and retired)  For my first lesson, he asked me to prepare a solo Bach sonata. 

For my first lesson, I played the piece for him.  After about two minutes, he waved his hand and yelled "Stop!"

In a thick French accent, he said,"You cannot play Bach well unless you make yourself like a baby - approach this piece with fresh eyes, like you are playing it for the first time."

That's also an important principle for working wikily.  Let me try to explain.

Vicky Davis (CoolCat Teacher) wrote a post two years ago called  "Power of the Newbie"  (Nancy White had us reflect on it for one of her online community workshops)   The term newbie is slang for a newcomer to an Internet activity.  It can have derogatory connotations, but is also often used for descriptive purposes only, without a value judgment.   Vicky says:

When you are a newbie, you have something that tech-experts do not have:  the perspective of a new user.

The "Power of the Newbie" came to life for me yesterday as part of the WeAreMedia Wiki Project  when I got a message from a new participant:

Finding the project confusing; not sure what I am looking at or where to begin--can you point me the way; not sure what I am looking at?

I had thought about the newcomer experience when we started the project and had created some orientation screencasts using JingProject.   However, that was at the beginning of the project when there was less content and fewer people on the expertise map -- so the screencast was confusing because it didn't match the reality of what was there.    And, to make matters worse, the screencast, created with the JingProject is in a flash format and the user didn't have the flash plugin installed on their browser!

The subject-matter on the wiki is changing as Qui Diaz points out.   But the user support items need to change as the community changes too!   As the "wiki gardener," that is an something that should be part of the regular maintenance -- putting on your newbie glasses and revising the support documents. 

Seth Godin asks, Should You Ignore the Noobs? I like how he frames confusion in a positive way and I think Seth's suggestion here is also very important.  But I don't think we should ignore noobs.

Why not consider making it easy for the confused to ask for help? And treat them with respect when they do. If you don't create a little confusion, it's unlikely you've built something remarkable.

That leads me to questions about how to make it easy for people to jump in mid-stream once there has already been content added.  How to make newcomers and others who may be lurking feel comfortable enough to contribute.

I wrote a reflection on the use of incentives for the community engagement module and asked participants to reflect on why they participated.  This yielded some excellent insights about wiki participation over time. 

• People are really busy. "I am constantly bombarded with to-do's: things I have to do for my job, blog posts I want to read and comment on, new tools I want to try out and research, etc. What the book incentive did for me was to spur me to immediate action, rather than making a mental note to contribute later. Sometimes "later" becomes "never" when the list gets too long."

• Keeping the format open and messy.  "The open registration implied that you would be cleaning up the formatting at a later date which for me at least, helped overcome the concern that I was adding content where it didn't belong, toying with the structure in a way different than what you'd requested."

• Desire to belong to community. "Contribution was made out of sense of wanting to belong to community and desire to contribute to work that benefits me/my work. Potential prize was only a bonus"

Amy Sample Ward wrote an entire blog post about the challenges of the facilitating a collaborative project and offering some excellent guidance on facilitation techniques.  She writes about the challenges:

If you have ever worked on a collaborative project, especially in a wiki, you may have noticed participants that only lurk in the shadows, contributors who burn out, conversations that get abandoned, or even just an overall loss of momentum as people revert to sending individual emails or not participating at all. 

Based on Gartner Research

Amy's comment connects with something I happen to stumble upon Gartner's virtual community behavior matrix.  They describe participation segments as:

• Up to 3% will be creators, providing original content. They can be advocates that promote products and services.
• Between 3% and 10% will be contributors who add to the conversation, but don’t initiate it. They can recommend products and services as customers move through a buying process, looking for purchasing advice.
• Between 10% and 20% will be opportunists, who can further contributions regarding purchasing decisions. Opportunists can add value to a conversation that’s taking place while walking through a considered purchase.
• Approximately 80% will be lurkers, essentially spectators, who reap the rewards of online community input but absorb only what is being communicated. They can still implicitly contribute and indirectly validate value from the rest of the community. All users start out as lurkers.

This might be an interesting benchmark to gauge participation - or at least give you some realistic expectations for participation.

Amy points out the challenges from the point of view of the organizer or facilitator:

• Managing participation of topic-related experts as the list of participants grows over time (and perhaps after the most applicable topic for him or her passes):  As more attention is given to the project across the blogosphere and elsewhere, more people who want to contribute sign on to the wiki.  It’s great to get more people involved, but it can be difficult for an organizer to be managing so many different areas of interest and expertise once the project modules are underway.

• Maintaining a natural flow or progression of topics within the wiki: Working wikily can sometimes mean that too many side conversations and tangents turn into stranded pages or that pages get started for a topic that seems important but folks lose track of it. Maintaining an orderly flow of information has really kept this project wiki to a manageable and navigable resource.

• Making it easy for very busy people to contribute beneficial information and knowledge efficiently: If you create it, they won’t necessarily come.  Or, if they do, they may not hang out long and contribute.  People, even if they are the ‘experts’ in the topic, are busy.  A very effective approach is to send an email or Twitter message (or any other tool you are using to ping the participants) that asks a specific question and links to the exact area where you want the information entered.  Basically, think of ways to make it hard for your participants to NOT contribute!

The early idea for the project included just two tracks - strategic and tactical, with the latter including a lot of information about specific social media tools.   I separated the tools from tactical,  but wonder now about combining them. (I'm thinking about something like this and wonder if it would lend itself to what Michelle Martin suggests here?) When we started the idea was the roll out a module at a time and work on it for a week.  This is has been good for the first six - but I wonder how to sustain it.

All this to end with some reflection questions:

• How to harness the power of the newbie as a community?
• How to balance quantity with quality of participation? 
• How to deepen the level of community participation - moving adding small snippets or points to collaborative writing.  Dave Cormier touches on the issue of community responsibility.
• How to sustain collaborative participation over time?

Working Wikily: Establishing A Giving or Gifting Culture in Wiki Community

If you have kids, you probably also read bedtime stories to them. In our house, we've read everything from Horton Hears a Who to Good Night Moon.  Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree is also a popular request,  despite the fact that it often makes me cry too.  It is a story about a tree that gives everything to a young boy at every stage of his life.

I thought about that story when I saw Dave Cormier's Connectivism Wiki or MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses).   The philosophy is:

I'd suggest we follow the ADD DON'T TAKE AWAY model of wiki building. Just keep adding sections... if you don't agree with the content, mark your objections in the discussion area or underneath of the disagreeable topic with your opinion.

So, I asked Dave via Twitter "Wow do you build a giving culture on a wiki?" He said that policy gives people a sense of freedom. He also pointed me to this reflection.   I think it was point 3 that connects:  Community learning, so that is what you call it!

Dave Cormier has been my critical friend as I write personal reflections on the community as curriculum process we're using to develop the content through the WeAreMedia Project.   Dave shared his most recent observations through some reflections of his project.  For the past two weeks, he has been teaching “educational technology and the adult learner."  The course had no existing curriculum and it provided a real life laboratory for him to have the curriculum come out of the community interactions that were happening in the classroom.  So, while we have different learners and different contexts, we are playing with the idea that the community is the curriculum.

He had three goals - all of which were to change the focus from ‘the material’ to the ‘experience’.  I'd say that our goals are similar in that we're not just building content together, but informally learning together.

Dave goes on to explain the concept of "Reverse Curriculum"

Reverse curriculum tends to develop out of the interests that the students show during the course and they get to record and create the material as part of their daily practice. It is part creative zone, part class note record and part review space. The constant revisitation of the material for sorting, upkeep and improvement also serves to reinforce the material.

In one way, our processes slightly differ here in that community isn't necessarily revisiting and resorting the materials.  Or at least that was not the formal expectation for participation.   Some participants, like Jocelyn Harmon, have done so on their own initiative.  Take for example this summary of the first module.

Another point about goals:

Community Literacies esp. Community commitment

Maybe the most important part of the of a course like this are the community literacies that are accumulated through a community enquiry into new material. The learners found that they could work together and rely on each other. They wrote nightly reflections and commented and helped each other with their work and reactions to the course. the sense of ‘competition’ between students evaporated. A sense of responsibility to the work at hand became stronger as the students found less and less direct guidance coming from the front of the room.

Our project is not organized as a "course" or learning experience for participants  -- and there is much reflection -- sometimes that occurs in the comments or in the sharing of words of wisdom around links added to the wiki.    Again, this is related to the difference in project intentions.

How to encourage a culture of giving and contributing on a deeper level beyond fixing typos or adding a link?  How to engage people more deeply and deepen some of the community learning literacies?  How to create a culture of giving?   That may well be a question for a different project or a different community, but something that I'm curious about.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Community As Curriculum a Syllabus
• Building Community Builds the Movement
• Working Wikily: Getting out of the Way
• Working Wikily: Critical Friends

Working Wikily: Slow Community in the Online Context

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After I gave the keynote in Australia at the ConnectingUp08 Conference, we opened it up for Q&A.  I always get a question somewhere along the lines of, "Do you ever unplug or go off line?"   Someone asked that and then suggested I check out the Slow Food Movement.   

I had forgotten about it until I saw Nancy White's most recent slideshow above about this post. 

What is Nancy talking about when she says "slow community"

• A community that does not only place value on rapid response and participation, which can continue to exist even if the pace of passing messages/signals slows down...
• A community that is aware of/reflects upon its own processes in order to ... learn? Enjoy?
• Some sense of quality, not just quantity of participation (how do we define quality?)
• This is more than "information overload, right?

This resonates with the NTEN WeAreMedia -- not quite sure how to articulate it - but how this community participate over time and the intensity of it ...  Is slow community a phase of maturation?

I also came across this article by FutureLab titled "Working With Online Learning Communities" by Ken Allan summarizes some key factors important to growing successful online learning communities and provides some relevant strategies for this in educational online communities.  Much of the principles can be applied to wiki facilitation and communities.   

I particularly like this bit from Caleb Clark:

• online learning communities are grown, not built
• online learning communities need leaders
• personal narrative is vital to online learning communities.

Clark identifies that “online learning communities grow best when there is value to being part of them”. He further elaborates that, “one of the hardest things to do in any online community is to get people to give information. One reason is that people just don't naturally think their way of doing things has value, when in fact it is the very heart of a community's value! This is especially true in online learning communities where the exchange of information is key to keeping students coming back.”            

Clark contends that “leaders are needed to define the environment, keep it safe, give it purpose, identity and keep it growing”. He gives a set of mantras for teacher/leaders in any online community:

• all you need is love
• control the environment, not the group
• lead by example
• let lurkers lurk
• short leading questions get conversations going
• be personally congratulatory and inquisitive
• route information in all directions
• care about the people in the community; this cannot be faked
• understand consensus and how to build it, and sense when it's been built and just not recognised, and when you have to make a decision despite all the talking.

WeAreMedia: Reflections on Working Wikily - Getting out of the way

Photo by Robert Francis

I'm very interested in learning how different types of networks or communities work in a networked way - this whole notion of working wikily.   The NTEN project WeAreMedia project is an excellent personal learning laboratory for reflection and insights about this topic.

One of the most valuable experiences I've had in my professional work is having critical friends  (You can see what that means here, here and here).   "A critical friend is someone who is independent of a project who asks provocative questions, offers an alternative view, and helps facilitate fresh insights or alternative sources of information or expertise."

Dave Cormier signed up to be a critical friend soon after the project launched and posted a reflection here.    He has a context for what may work and what may not for a community building process for a new media curriculum.   I wrote a response and Michele Martin added her thoughts too.

My big question is when, as the facilitator,  to get out of the way?

Levels of Participation

Dave wrote about levels of responsibility and in my mind I connected it to the activism ladders of engagement for activism.  Based on looking at examples of participation for the past two weeks, here are the categories and some examples:

(1)  Bystander:  Reads only

These are people who may read about the project or be invited to participate, click through to the url, and browse a few pages, but do not add or contribute.   Why don't they contribute?  Some reasons why may be:

• Not enough time
• Don't have knowledge to contribute or not interested in the topic
• For some reason, don't feel they are allowed to edit
• Not sure where to jump in because of the way information is structured
• Not sure how to use the wiki software and may feel too difficult or time consuming to figure out

That's why I've been trying to use the top page to guide people to where the general activity and individually point people to place where they feel comfortable contributing.

(2)  Gives Feedback:   

These are users who add to existing knowledge.

One of the design decisions in setting up the wiki was registration.  Should we require registration before people can jump in and edit?  We decided to make it easy as possible.  I'm noticing a lot of "edited by guest" changes coming through - so as long we don't get spam or mischief I think this good to encourage participation.  The downside is that we don't always know who made what edit.   

I also set it so anyone could post a comment on the wikispace discussion threads, although there doesn't seem to be a lot of spontaneous discussion on the wikispaces feature except for the name change which had 54 responses.  The wikispaces discussion feature on each page is great for brainstorming ideas, problem solving, or pre-writing.

There are two ways to give feedback - onshore and off shore.   Participants can give feedback on the wiki itself or respond away from the wiki - for example leaving a comment on a blog post, responding to a request on Twitter,  or sending an email to the project organizer.   This creates question in my mind about the balance between allowing easy access anywhere, anytime or focus participation on the wiki itself.

What does feedback look like?

• Correct typos - I'm really happy to see this happening.  We have a lot of copy editors filling in dropped words, correcting bad grammar, etc.
• Edit existing copy for phrasing - We used to call this word smithing.
• Adding content - adding links, phrases, bullet points, or whole paragraphs.  This has to be set up in the right way - for example.

Some people jump and give feedback on the wiki without being nudged - others have been nudged.

(3)  Joins the community

This is defined as someone who has taken the extra step to opt into taking ownership or responsibility for contributing content and possibly be contacted by the project.  There are multiple ways for people to opt into the community.

• Register for wikispaces - this means that if they are logged into their wikispace account we know what they edited.   Right now we're up to 30 members in less than 30 days!

• Join Expertise Map - I set this up as a community directory - so people could see who was here and know their expertise.  There is a question in the template that asks them to identify a module they might take the lead on. You have to register for wikispaces in order to add yourself.  And, to avoid any technical barriers, I added a screencast on how to add yourself.

• Join Swarm List - This was envision as a way to get people opt-in for participation that was very light.  We have 24 people signed up.

What are some others ways to encourage opt into the community and deeper level of engagement beyond feedback?

Levels of Collaboration

What does collaboration work by community members look like?  Again, it is scaffolded ... runs from coordination to engaging in the writing, contributing, and editing, and finally creating from scratch.   There are different ways that people are organizing to work together - facilitated and spontaneous.

An Individual Takes Leadership

• Elements of a Social Media Plan:  The call to participate came as a "let's remix this idea for nonprofits" and Scarlett Swerdlow took leadership and suggested a refinement of categories.   What made it easy for the facilitator was the swarm lists and expertise maps to match people to content to facilitate participation.
  

• Amy Sample Ward took leadership in this section and contributed a design for a small group exercise.

Small Group Collaboration

• The Don't Drink the Koolaid Worksheet:  The inspiration for this questionnaire came from John Kenyon in a comment here and follow up comments from several others.  A discussion was started and this group quickly put together a questionnaire.   It grew organically.  I pointed people at one another and then got out of the way.

Facilitated

• I've been experimenting with setting up pages with a question - and getting people to add their experience.    I set up two slightly different experiments.  For the first one, I set up a page with a question, blogged it, and added an example that someone had mentioned on another page.  Other people added some others.  The second experiment, I set up a page, added the question, but also put in some content - links to resources and slide show and blogged it.  No one added anything. 

Walking the Line Between Supporting and Getting out of the Way

I came across a blog post by Will Allen that talked about the social value of communities of practice.  The definition:

Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop collective resources including stories, experiences and ways of addressing recurring problems – in short they develop a shared practice. Etienne has been particularly influential in promoting the concept that deliberately fostering people to learn in this way can be a useful management practice.

This quote stuck with me:

The social value added (by communities of practice) is not based on (prescribed) design - but is based on what emerges from co-operation and collaboration.

This gets us back to that wonderful question of the sweet spot between networks and communities of practice?  Recently, I came across this post from the DoGoodWell Blog

In terms of what a nonprofit organization can draw from a community vs. a network, an over-simplified but still maybe useful way to think about the difference might be “depth” vs. “breadth.” Communities often have untapped depths of resources and assets that can be leveraged to create social change - everything from skills and talents to material possessions to relationships.  Because  members of communities have a deeper stake in one another, nonprofits often have the opportunity to draw more deeply from these assets. Networks, on the other hand, are often organized around a single common experience or goal. It seems to me there is an opportunity to draw from a greater breadth of individuals who organize themselves around the networks founding principle.

So, what is the fine art of facilitating this type of learning?  When do you get out of the way? 

Critical Friends and A Reflection Process for Working Wikily

 

I'm very interested in learning how different types of networks or communities work in a networked way - this whole notion of working wikily.   The NTEN project is an excellent learning laboratory for reflection and learning about this topic.

Dave Cormier published a paper recently entitled "Community as Curriculum" and that phrase has stuck with me as one way to think about workshop curriculum projects that are being developed in a networked way like the NTEN project.  I was  delighted last week to see this skype message pop up from Dave Cormier.

hey Beth... wondering if i might poke my nose into this knowledge building experiment. currently very curious about the interplay of blog (as socially contructed time based creatures) and wikis (which... uh... are not) and how knowledge transfers from one to another in 'first wave' (technologically savvy) proto-communities.

I responded with don't just poke - be a critical friend! (Dave points to a couple of resources defining critical friends - here, here and here).   "A critical friend is someone who is independent of the project who asks provocative questions, offers an alternative view, and helps facilitate fresh insights or alternative sources of information or expertise."

Dave has posted his first observation here.  He brings the lens of experience of a community building process for a new media curriculum.   He has a context for what may work and what may not.   After reviewing the wiki documents and process so far, he has posed two questions so far ...

• How are you contributing to people’s feelings of ‘responsibility’ to the knowledge creation process?

Dave is asking an question about how to encourage community participation and ownership.  How do you get people to contribute their knowledge - whether it be to a wiki page, leaving a comment on a blog post, or tagging a resource? 

I wonder if there are levels of responsibility - similar to the activism ladders of engagement.   

(1)  Bystander:  Reads only
(2)  Gives Feedback:   May add a comment to a blog post or add a link to a wiki page
(3)  Joins the community:  Signs up for a swarm list
(4)  Joins the expertise map/advisory group: Fills out a profile and identifies a module
(5)  Participants in the collaborative writing

Dave notes:

This works best when people feel a clean responsibility to the work at hand. There is a good start there with the personal profile ‘what module would you most like to contribute to’ section. I think the transition between volunteerism there and action by the leadership team is crucial.

Most of the participants in this project work in nonprofits that are limited in resources and time - so hoping to make participation not be labor intensive, find small - concrete chunks, and support any self-defined sub-cultures on the community. 

How do you walk the line between being a supportive facilitator and encouraging people to participate, without making it too overwhelming or difficult or have people feel like are not welcomed to contribute?  When do you as the wiki facilitator get out of the way?  Does the design that allows for multiple points of access and small chunks of contributions inhibit or encourage ownership and responsibility?

• What are your thoughts about the lifespan of your knowledge creation?

Dave points out that the "community as curriculum" concept suggests that "curriculum knowledge must always be emerging. It is constantly in flux and only by aggregating and assessing the community in real time, with constant new connections and renewed re-evaluation can the curriculum stay ‘current."   As Dave suggests, I think there will be some "products" for face-to-face training workshops - which may be longer lasting, but there will be other sections that will be updated.   The question of how or if this happens beyond a grant period is up to NTEN.

I like how Dave has described this process as curation!  However, we may be thinking of about it slightly different - a facilitative curator versus community driven curation.    And as Dave mentions, this happens through tagging.   We do have a history and context of the NpTech tagging community -- so how to encourage that?

Some Learnings on Practice

I asked Amy Sample Ward if she would share some thoughts based on her experience with launching and working on connectipedia in the process section of the wiki.   Amy offered a practical tip: "I have found that emailing those involved with a recent update on activity or content with links directly to the action and where they should also participate help elevate the tasks on people's to-do lists."   I put her advice to use a few times already, and it is an important lesson.   With wikispaces, it is important to use the overall site monitoring features so you know when people make contributions.

What are your thoughts on  encouraging community responsibility and ownership in working wikily?

 

Working Wikily ....

Flickr Photo by lafabriquedeblogs

The phrase "Working Wikily" was coined by Lucy Bernholz (I don't know how many phrases she's originated in the nonprofit, social media, and philanthropy - but this one is a gem).   It is also the title of a report "Working Wikily: How Networks Are Changing Social Change" a paper Gabriel Kasper and Diana Scearce of the Monitor Institute.  The paper provides concepts and specific examples.  It is heavily influenced by the writings of Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody)

What does working wikily mean?  The paper gives this definition:

"Wikis and other social media are engendering new, networked ways of behaving - ways of working wikily - that are characterized by principles of openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action."

I'm beginning a project with NTEN in the next few weeks that focuses on social media, nonprofits, and curriculum development.   We'll be using a wiki to create and house the curriculum materials which will be open source.   Right now I'm focused on thinking about one aspect of the project - What is the social (networked) process around curriculum development?   How can we work wikily effectively?  I participated in projects where we have worked wikily, but I haven't facilitated one.   So, this is new area of learning that I will be sharing over the coming months.

A couple of takeaways from the report:

• Basic Rules for operating in a Networked Way:
  • Promise, Tool, and Bargain - "The promise is the basic "why" for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the how.  And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect and what will be expected of you?

• Human Elements:  Trust and Fun matter.  Quote from Beth Novek, "Fun matters.  It's about harnessing the enthusiasm of the crowd, not just its wisdom. And you do that making things fun."

• There are different types of networks or working in a networked way - it isn't just one definition or approach.   These may include:

• Networks of organizations
• Networks of people
• Peer-to-peer networks of individuals working outside of organizations

• The issue of balancing control with the productivity of the network.

Attention Nonprofit Wiki Users: Let's Desconstruct Your Wiki!

Photo by Mushon

I put a question on Twitter, "What are your best Wiki adoption tips?"  Got some great tips from   Eduardo Jezierski, Watford Gap, Csuspect, Peter Campbell, EricaG, davidLeeking,  Seth Schneider,  Ericskiff, Kalabird, bethdunn, and Greg

But, I'd love to see a range of examples that de-construct the development of a wiki in a nonprofit setting.

If you've been following social media closely over the past 3-5 years, you know that this isn't an original idea.  Perhaps you most likely remember this amazing deconstruction by John Udell of the Wikipedia entry on “Heavy Metal Umlaut“. It really helped you understand the inner workings of the collaborative construction of content on Wikipedia. 

Fast forward three years later.  The use of wikis for communities of practice, behind the firewall, to support project teams, to reduce email, or whatever is becoming more common.  We're seeing more nonprofits using wikis and more nonprofits wondering about how to use wikis.   

One question I'm wondering myself - what does effective wiki facilitation really look like - literally ... I know there are many wiki patterns - how they evolve, are they are facilitated, what works, what doesn't -- just read Stewart Mader's book.   But I'd like to see nonprofits and hear nonprofit technology practitioners take on this.

I'd like to see some wiki screenshots -- the first iteration, the second (when people added content) and the last or later when the wiki facilitator did some editing or weeding or organizing.   

The screenshots below are grabbed from the podcamp.org wiki.  I didn't facilitate it, but I participated.  Keep in mind this is a community wiki space.  I don't know exactly how large the community - but they are wiki savvy.  You can see a simple example that I tried to extract myself from looking at the history.

Screenshot of podcamp Wiki.  This is a page for a call for sessions.  This is the first version of the page.    There are two requests - a call for sessions to present and a call for sessions wanted.  There is one or two examples.

A call for sessions goes out from conference organizers through many different channels - blogs, etc.   The community responds by adding their proposed session name and link to them. 

The Wiki moderators takes the list of sessions and starts to put it in a schedule.   The event organizers did some email contact with folks to tweak scheduling and aggregate sessions, etc.

Got a wiki development/facilitation nonprofit story you'd like to share with a couple of annotated screenshots? Leave a comment and point to them.   Add them to flickr with this tags: npwiki and nptech.  I'll round them up and do a pattern analysis.