Designing a Wiki Carnival about social media

The story of how thousands of people are collaborating worldwide to develop Wikipedia is pretty familiar. It is a brilliant example of the power of collaborative, social media ... but just creating a space online doesn't make it happen. It can take months to build a community of contributors: but maybe there's another way. Would you like to help Michele Martin and I find out - and in the process explore what we can do with social media? Read on for our idea and how you might help.
While developing an A-Z of social media a few weeks back I spotted, amongst the wealth of goodies emerging from US-based bloggers, a wiki about Best Practices in Using Web 2.0 in Nonprofits developed by Michele Martin of The Bamboo Project. My idea for the A-Z - supported by the NCVO ICT Foresight team - is that it could grow into a guide for anyone aiming to use blogs, wikis, and other social media in voluntary and community groups and the public sector, or across sectors.
I contacted Michele, and we put together some first ideas over Skype, on Google Docs, emails, and tweaks to the wikis. We couldn't quite get how to move things forward until Beth Kanter came up with the idea of modeling a wiki carnival on a blog carnival.
Here's what we then put together.

Our Plan
Borrowing from Kivi Leroux Miller's Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants we'd like to run a Wiki Carnival to gather materials and information. Our plan is this:
From March 5-11, we'll be putting out a call for participants to:

• Send links to Michele or me of any of your blog items that you believe should be linked in the wiki. Even better write a new item!
• Send us a video or podcast or link related to using Web 2.0/social media tools that might be helpful. We're particularly interested in real-world examples, case studies, etc.
• Let us know what del.icio.us tags you use ... maybe socialmedia, collaboration ... then we can look for stuff you have bookmarked
• Recommend other blogs, books, articles that you think will be useful.
• Send us questions you'd like answered or ideas you have for resources that would be helpful to you in using social media with nonprofits.

You can either e-mail us the information or you will be able to post in either of our wikis on special pages that Michele and I will set up specifically for the Carnival.
Once the Carnival week ends, Michele and I will sort through everything, organize it and post into the appropriate locations in our wikis. We'll also share with you a write-up of what we got, as well as identify any gaps in information that we have, unanswered questions, etc.
Depending on what we get back, we anticipate that we'll run a Round 2 (or possibly a few more rounds) to fill in the gaps that we identify.
Right now we're running this idea up the flagpole to see if you have any ideas or suggestions for how we could run this most effectively. We want this to be a collaborative, community-building process and we definitely need your input to get it going.
So what do you think? Drop me an e-mail or leave me a note in comments. At this stage we are just asking for responses to the idea - though anything else relevant welcome too. Are there other social media wiki builders out there? Here's Michele's blog post on the carnival.
Flickr Photo

Technorati Tags: collaboration, nptechuk, snnonprofit, Web_2.0

Comments

[Ed]

Hi David, it sounds like an excellent idea. I would definitely help out but I am away on holiday and distancing myself from computing related activity for three weeks.

[ian]

I agree this looks great. I'll spread the word and try to develop some thoughts myself - probably around the thoughts in my e-mail to you.

[Claudia Ceraso]

Hello David. This sounds very interesting.

Not exactly sure if this helps, but I leave you a link to a recent post about my new eduwiki. My main focus is English Language Teaching. I'll keep posting about the development of this new community as time permits.
http://eltnotes.blogspot.com/2007/02/on-wiki-threshold.html

The post includes at the end a link to my del.icio.us collection of wiki related stuff.