I've been doing a small research project
pulling together a list of conferences that people who work with
nonprofits and technology and social change might be attend or
present. To challenge my set ways of doing internet research Web 1.0 style and tolerance for change, I decided to do a seperate action learning experiment on my own dime and reflect in real time along with doing the work:
- What are some useful techniques social search techniques that might yield richer leads and connections?
- What social networking tools are the best ones to integrate?
- What thinking shifts are needed to make your social search more successful?
- Is it worth it to integrate social search into your practice?
When doing research like this, always think about two things -- the subject matter and the subject matter expert. Ask not what do I need to know, but who knows this? Then figure out what your topic is. Seek out the whos to the get to the what. This sounds like an Abbott and Castello bit. I knew this already, but it has been so long since I taught Internet Searching skills that I've forgotten it.
Out of habit, I started off doing the research in my usual ways - posts to listservs, search engine, private emails, and posts to forums. Since the task was to identify conferences and create a listing, that's what I searched for. I got about half dozen or so pretty useful leads. But, I wondered how the heck I could ever complete this assignment.
It dawned on me that I could play with some of those social search tools and went over to the ChaCha search engine where I searched with a human guide. My experience is here. The guide helped me understand that I was looking for both specific conferences as well as lists of conferences in those areas by knowledgeable people. The guide also helped me refine some of the keywords or search terms. It also helped me identify a few additional leads pretty quickly.
This made me think about searching through the resources in delicious tagged with Nptech + a variety of keywords including "conferences." I also went through my network on delicious of people who are power taggers and might know also about conferences. This lead to a bunch more leads. My experience is here.
The big moment of slapping my farhead and saying "I should have had a V8!" came from a comment left by Gavin and summarized in this post. He suggested a sociography approach -- find the experts (the who) and ask them the what. So, I decided to use Linked Question/Answer feature despite Alan Levine's "LimitedIn" post.
The first step was to compose the question. The next step was to send it my contacts. I went through my contacts one-by-one asking myself - is this person(s) a king (Sub-Galactic Commander) or queen of conferences? The idea of reciprocity is important -- I also didn't want to ask too many people that I hadn't already given a few pro bono minutes of my brain time in the past -- answering a friendly email request or whatever.
I fired off about 100 requests via the LinkedIn interface. (I've accumulated more LinkedIn contacts than flickr contacts)
Now, how is this different from, say, using your OutLooks address book and sending off mail merge email? A few ways, actually.
1. The question not only goes out to your network contacts, but your contacts' contacts. Not via email, but if they log into their LinkedIn account, they see a "Questions from your Network" list.
2. You are also asked to categorized the question. I put it into nonprofits. I didn't realize this, but there are folks that follow the questions in that category.
3. The responses, if you choose, get forwarded to your email, but also are aggregated inside of LinkedIn. That's nice not to add email overload.
I got a few responses that were like, "great question, I'll get to it later." Or the, "sorry, I can't invest this type amount of time unless you paid me to help with your paid client work." I totally understand and respect those respones ... but for the most part people share freely with their knowledge in a sort of gift economy way.
As responses came in, I was cutting and pasting conference names in workspace and contacting identified "experts." This was the mad GTD part of the process. Some of the experts were people I hadn't heard of, others were people I knew well, and finally there people I knew of, but wasn't connected via LinkedIn.
This LinkedIn experiment resulted in about 56 specific conference leads. Some leads were conferences that I knew about and the NTC Conference was mentioned the most times. In total, I have about 75! I also made 3 new LinkedIn connections. Someone offered me a pointer to this article about information foraging theory. Someone else put the idea out there of placing the information on the nptech.info site.
So, if had to do this all over again, I'd flip the process upside down. I'd focus on the WHO first and the tools that can connect me easily and quickly with the WHOs (Linked In) and then go for the what by interviewing them. I would fill in the missing pieces and refine with chacha, serach engines, private email, or listserv queries.
I'm not sure if these process steps would make the research work more efficient, but it might cut down on the anxiety one feels when confronted with a chaotic, undifferentiated stream of data. Of course, the more efficient approach would be to get people to add the info themselves directly into a wiki. Then add some type of social rating system. A few folks took the step of adding on their info the wiki space, but that's a topic for a whole other action learning experiment.