Designing for Civil Society

Innovation Exchange and the RSA develop networks for social change

Earlier in the year I was involved, with Simon Berry and others, in attempting to win a £1.2 million government contract by writing an "open source" bid for an Open Innovation Exchange in public. We were shortlisted, but didn't win ... and now we can see what the successful team are offering. I have to say it is looking good, and may have some lessons for another innovative initiative, at the RSA.

The Innovation Exchange has been launched to foster innovation within the third sector and to find ways of improving relationships between social innovators, public service commissioners and investors. We have just announced the first two themes around which we seek to build networks, develop innovative capacity and further relationships between innovators, investors and commissioners. Our first two themes are supporting independent living and excluded young people. Please join the conversation online around innovative practice in response to these challenging themes. This is just the beginning. We wanted to get started quickly with launching the network online, with a view to working with you and the growing community in shaping all that we can do together. We’re building up to the launch of an ambitious online networking and collaboration platform by Spring 2008 - we’d really like to hear from you with ideas.

More here on the launch. The main partners in the Innovation Exchange are The Innovation Unit, acevo and social software specialists Headshift. We knew that Headshift would be pitching in with some pretty sophisticated ideas for the website: they won an award for the Demos site last year and have done a range of other innovative projects using a mix of blogs, wikis and other tools.
However, the Innovation Exchange team have not (yet, anyway) fallen into the trap of spending enormous sums of money on a highly complex system which may not get used. Instead they have set up a modest but effective blog-based site with the aim of moving to a more more substantial collaboration system in Spring 2008 once they have more experience of what's needed.
Once you register on the site you can add your own blog posts under the two themes of independent living and excluded young people.
The interim executive director is Jonathan Robinson, who has done so much to make The Hub in London and elsewhere such a brilliant model for incubating social innovation.
There's an outline of how the exchange will work - through networks and a Next Practice programme

The Innovation Exchange will establish and support Innovation Networks – large social networks focused on tackling specific social problems. Innovation Networks will be open to innovators on the demand side (public service commissioners and managers), on the supply side (practitioner innovators from any sector trying to tackle the problem) and to social investors from any sector (philanthropists, CSR funds, Foundations or government funds) interested in tackling the social problem. Over time we will look to evolve these networks to help scale up innovative or ‘next’ practice across the third sector.
Emerging from each Innovation Network will be a Next Practice programme to provide bespoke advice and brokerage support to fledgling innovation projects. The Next Practice Programme will focus on a sharper and more refined version of the problem set by the original Innovation Network. Each programme will be sponsored by a panel of social investors, public service commissioners and policy makers who will provide direction, focus and an external audience for the participants in the programme.

Meanwhile the RSA, which is engaged in its own programme of innovation involving its 27,000 Fellows, has set up an RSA Networks blog hosted by Mick Fealty, perhaps best known as Slugger O'Toole. You can see an interview with Mick here, from earlier in the year, where he likens hosting blog conversations to running a pub. He's been dealing with my slight provocations on site with outstanding good humour.

On the blog Sophia Parker wants to check how far Fellows will commit to the innovation programme, and asks for ideas about moving from networks to projects:

The first (question) is the extent to which we as the Fellows are up for this - by which I mean Matthew's vision of turning the Fellowship into a 'network for civic innovation'. How many of us will find the time and energy and commitment to work together in new ways? My hope and aspiration is that enough of us want to do it to really begin to make a difference. What do others think?
At this point, my thoughts are that this project is not about turning every single Fellow into a civic innovator. It is about giving people multiple 'ways in' to their organisation. For some, that will be finding other like-minded Fellows. For others, it will be about coming together in a local area to change something. We must find better ways of enabling these kinds of connections between Fellows. But it is also true that the RSA cannot directly support every single initiative that Fellows begin.
And that leads to my second question - how does the RSA decide in an open and transparent way which projects it should put serious resources behind? I feel strongly that the Fellows themselves should be involved in this process - but the question is how this happens: how can Fellows themselves shape the agenda that the RSA sets through its large-scale projects?

NESTA is funding the RSA programme,  and is one of the partners in the Innovation Exchange, so there may be a chance to connect productive and innovative thinking about networks on both fronts.
I'm also glad to say that the OpenRSA initiative that a group of us have been promoting in support of the "official" RSA initiative has just got some unexpected recognition. The California-based team at Wikispaces, who host our site, have chosen OpenRSA as their space of the month.
The RSA Networks site could benefit from some additional functionality, as Mark and I have suggested, so perhaps its time to join up.

Technorati Tags: openinex, openrsa, rsanetworks, rsa

Social media challenges and opportunities for nonprofits

The Guardian today carries an excellent article by Megan Griffith on the importance of social networking and social media to nonprofit organisations. It raises themes dealt with in a longer report, available here, that Megan has authored for Third Sector Foresight.

People have always come together through membership of formal organisations and informal groups, whether for mutual support, to provide a service or to campaign for change. It is this coming together that is the lifeblood of civil society.
The rapid growth of the internet and its ability to connect people in new ways is impacting on the relationships that individuals have with each other and with organisations, and on the communities of which they are a part.
If the late 19th century was the golden age of mutual institutions, clubs and societies, the early 21st century is a new golden age of networks and online communities, a virtual replication of what went before. This presents new opportunities and challenges for voluntary organisations.
From the earliest email lists and bulletin boards, to the blogs and social networking sites such as MySpace which grew rapidly and gained wider coverage in 2006, the ease with which individuals can now be linked across electronic spaces mean that niche communities can be identified and their interests aggregated.
In particular, this has enabled marginalised groups to communicate, support each other and to mobilise more easily and effectively than was previously possible.

OK, I'm a little biased because I contributed to the report, but Megan has pulled complex ideas together from a wide range of sources, and in the main report looks at the potential impact of new media on membership, information management, transparency of operation, collaboration, fundraising and marketing. I'll be speaking tomorrow at the ICT Hub conference on these issues, when the report will be available. Megan adds in The Guardian:

For many voluntary organisations, online social networks such as these have the potential to be disruptive; that is, they have the power to change the model of organising upon which many voluntary organisations, and particularly membership bodies, are based.
The connections that ICT facilitates suggest that some organisations increasingly may be bypassed, and that power may shift away from top-down hierarchical organisations and towards more fluid and participative networks where there is less need for a centralised "bricks and mortar" coordinating organisation.

After quoting a number of examples, Megan highlights the importance of dialogue with, rather than broadcast communication from an organisation

The idea that it is the network that generates content - ideas, policies, advice - is in some ways what the voluntary sector has always done, and done well. But in other ways this represents a leap in the dark for organisations for whom being "on message" is seen as an important discipline.
Bertie Bosredon, head of new media at Breast Cancer Care, explains: "A charity's brand does not have the same protection as a commercial company because your supporters feel strongly about the charity they support and feel they have some ownership of the brand.
"You don't have 100% control over what they say and this can sometimes become an issue. So blogs can be powerful but they must be carefully managed and resourced."
Where organisations traditionally may have focused their communications on pushing information out from the centre, people now also expect organisations to pull in information from other sources. As such, cultures of engagement present more of a challenge than the technologies.

It's these issues of control and collaboration that I want to explore tomorrow - neatly summarised by Beth Kanter and Bev Trayner as Are you Yes 2.0 or No 2.0?

Previously: Nonprofit leadership means networking, socially and openly

Technorati Tags: nptech, nptechuk, socialmedia, socialnetworking

Glossary of social media - please use, please help

I've just finished writing a glossary of social media aimed at helping non-techies understand terms that enthusiasts take for granted, like blog, wiki, tag, podcast, feed - and also thrown in some interpretation of why common words like conversation, culture, openness have particular importance.
You can read the short version in the continuation of this post, and also here.
However, the longer version here may be of more interest to those more familiar with social media ... and I would really welcome any comments and/or additions you can offer in the discussion tab. I'm grateful in particular to Nancy White, Alexandra  Samuel and Michele Martin for covering some of the ground before ... but all mistakes and misinterpretations are mine.
I've written a number of other glossaries or A-Zs (links below) and always find the task a mixture of tedium (making sure the main terms are covered) and self-generating creativity. As soon as I start on one term, with a mix of definition and (I hope) useful interpretation another related term comes to mind, that requires inclusion, research, or re-interpretation.
The glossary becomes a way of mapping out the field, finding links and key people. I plan to make more use of that research by adding other pages to the social media wiki with a lot of cross-referencing to Michele Martin's Web 2.0 Best practice for nonprofits wiki. We had a great Skype call yesterday - as Michele reports here - and I'll follow up soon with more on that.
The glossary - short or long - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 License so you may use and rework with attribution and similar licensing if you find it useful. If you know of any other similar glossaries, please let me know.
Other A-Z/glossaries I've done:

• A-Z of effective participation (1994)
• A-Z of partnerships and networks  (1998)
• A-Z of (non tech) networking (2006)

The latest glossary has been developed with funding from the NCVO ICT Foresight Unit. Thanks to Megan Griffith and Karl Wilding for that, and their continuing encouragement.  There'll shortly be a report from Megan on what social networking and social media may mean for UK voluntary and community organisations.

Social marketers launch social networking for social entrepreneurs

Social entrepreneurs and social networks are both hot ... or is it cool ... topics, so let's put the two together. I'm interested, but do I want to join the new i-genius site when I get an email from Kim Bedi asking if I will add a link to my site, and put up a profile?

i-genius is a world community of social entrepreneurs and seeks to inspire a new generation of social innovators.

When I ask to know more, Kim sends me this launch release:

Top dating sites which enable people to establish networks for sex and relationships have helped shape the creation of a new website to support social entrepreneurs.
Established by i-genius, this new site seeks to create a world community of social entrepreneurs and inspire a new generation of social innovators.
Created by its founder Tommy Hutchinson and business partner Mike Ward, the site is driven by user generated content allowing social entrepreneurs to upload their individual profiles and through blogs and video blogs enable other users to follow their journey as they establish their social projects and businesses.
Speaking at the Global Entrepreneur Monitor conference today, Tommy Hutchinson said “Networks are crucial to the success of social entrepreneurs.  i-genius has taken the very best features and technology of user-generated friendship and online dating networks such as myspace and Facebook to create a site which encourages social entrepreneurs from around the world to establish partnerships between people from diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds.”

The "sex and relationships" stuff has the feel of an agency desperate to get a "simple to understand" angle, as does the "Amazing People Doing Amazing Things" strap line. Tommy has a video about social entrepreneurship - and one blog post I want to work with people who turn me on from last month.
I would like to know more about Tommy's appearance at the Global Entrepreneur Monitor conference mentioned in the press release. The quote read to me as something said publicly, maybe even in a keynote, relating igenius and GEM. However, the GEM programme shows Tommy on a couple of panels. I'm interested in how Tommy worked the quote into his panel contribution ... or was it, well, more of an aside?
Anyway, I've registered to see how the site works and got the usual profile options of interests, the services I'm looking for or offering, and tags. I then get a personal page that enables me to post blog items. The pathway from registration to personal page is simple. That's a plus in appealing to people not familiar with the more arcane arts of blogs. On the other hand the term "user generated content" in the press release is not a good way to describe what social networkers do. It comes from the pre-networking world of publishers, readers and viewers.
So far I can't see how igenius does anything you can't get from Linked in, or ecademy, or many of the other social networking sites. I'm not sure if the promoters recognise that social networking needs more than "we've built the site, come and join". What about events? Oh, here's the i-genius World Summit:

The i-genius summit is bringing over 100 of the most creative and innovative social entrepreneurs from around the world together with leaders in government, business investors and NGOs to participate in a unique event.
Hosted in one of the world’s most environmental friendly hotel, the new Indigo Pearl in Phuket, Thailand, the summit will be provide an enriching experience to all the participants and an inspiration to those who will be viewing the proceedings through online media outlets.

Hmm, I get the style. Who's behind igenius? The About Us section of the site is very light on detail, but a little Googling - and a logo on the Home Page - finds Tommy and Michael Ward at Equator Media, which has the same address as igenius.

Equator Media is a social marketing agency. We work with our clients and partners to create positive social and environmental change. Integrity and authenticity will always be the core pillars of our work.

We want to inspire change on important issues. Africa, climate change, drugs, food, health, and social entrepreneurs are just some of the issues that we’re currently working on. 

Equator Media lists Channel 4 as a partner, and says it is their "official agency". Equator Media are also partners with social media company caféDiverso "to develop channels and partnerships for their new book and media series 'Everyone has a good story'."
Tommy and Michael Ward also both feature here and here on a blogs and vlogs site about ethical and social concerns ... food markets and young people. Tommy is chair of the youth charity Kikass.
The igenius site has worthy logos along the bottom: Unesco, British Council, Ashoka, African Foundation for Development, Make Your Mark: Start Talking Ideas. No quotes from any of them, though in an email from Kim they are described as funders and partners.

I think about whether I want to be part of a network of people calling themselves igeniuses. I don't. I go to my profile page to de-register, but can't find how to. I have to write to the editor.
Perhaps I'm being cynical and unfair in my comments on igenius. If so, I'm sorry ... but the way it currently presents made me cross and suspicious.  Igenius may be a totally worthy effort, launched in a rush, with lots more features and clarification to come.
Here - for what they are worth - are some suggestions:

• Update the About Us page to make clear who is behind the project, and the role of the various bodies cited at the bottom of the Home Page. Let's hear what they have to say about igenius.
• In future announcements make clear whether igenius statements (like the quote in the press release) really are associated with big players (like GEM). Otherwise it looks like an attempt at endorsement by association.
• Clarify in the Terms of Use whether igenius - or Equator Media partners - can use stories provided by those contributing to the site.
• Clarify the de-registration process.
• Start blogging - and reading blogs - to get more feel for the world of social networking. It's not the same as social marketing.

Hope this helps.  I was approached by igenius to put in a link....

Move beyond blogging - start buzzing

Steve Bridger has definitely topped my rather prosaic social reporter role with the proposal that nonprofits need a "buzz director", who takes a creative rather than technical approach to social media. This would give whoever lands the role some influence. As well as encouraging colleagues to blog and use other tools, they should:

• Talk to everybody. Listen. Make it easy for colleagues to find you, or manufacture the conditions by which serendipity is more likely to occur.
• If you see the never-ending strategic review dragging your new colleagues down, remind them of the reasons they joined your organisation in the first place. Get them passionate (and close) to your cause once again. Share their passion. Be energetic. Be useful.
• Your role is to create a buzz around your cause (and secondarily, your not-for-profit ‘brand’). But resist any desire (or pressure) to “own” the cause. Far better to identify the communities where your supporters and activists are already and join in the conversation.
  

As well as a host of other ideas about using social media, Steve counsels:

• Don’t get too big for your boots and call all this a ‘project’ because it will run into the rails. Don’t call it a pilot as no one will take it seriously enough.
• Do prepare a monthly report of activity and ensure it is distributed widely within the organisation.
• Not-for-profits unwilling to consider some or all of the above, risk becoming irrelevant. How will your organisation be different in three years time?

Nick Booth, over at Podnosh, definitely sees a major role, not least because organisations need a reflective process to understand properly what makes them special. That has to be interactive.

For me Steve’s description of a ‘buzz director’ reads a little like the qualities you may wish for in a leader.
Any individual devoting so much effort to understanding the cause, relating to actual and potential supporters and talking to the team should also play a pivotal role in refining the point of the organisation, defining what it is that could make you great.

However, I take comfort in the reporter role from Jeff Jarvis - appropriately at BuzzMachine - citing Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger:

He predicted that reporters will become converged newsgathers. All reporters will work in at least five media and networked journalism would see professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, but he left open the question of who would edit it. “I think you have to prepared to be surprised and you have to experiment like mad.”

That's easy then. Everyone will have to be able to do everything ... whatever they are called.

Social media, social web, social networking ... time for the social reporter

Online forums need hosts and moderators, workshops need facilitators, networks require some weaving to develop links. But how, for example, do you do that fast around an event, capture content, and follow through afterwards? I'm pondering the possible role of the social reporter.
I'm interested from two angles. The first is the practicality of setting up and supporting multi-use blogs sites like this for people attending events, and so mix face-to-face and online. The ideal is to help people register, post their profiles, contribute through blogging and commenting, while at the same time being offered links to wider networks and good briefing material. Contributions at the event will be reported through blog items, audio and video. Afterwards there may be further contributions to other sites, maybe some joint work on a wiki.
Except ... it doesn't just happen. Unless the event is about social media few people will be comfortable with the tools. There isn't time to build a community gradually, nor the critical mass of users to get a lot of spontaneous contributions. Just seeding the space isn't enough ... more intensive gardening is required.
Of course, you may say none of this is worth the effort, and face-to-face events don't benefit from before and afters online, but for now let's say it is worth experimenting in different ways. If that's the case, then someone has to find external resources, spot stories of interest to participants, look for common interests in profiles and make introductions, post items an help others to so, shoot video ... and so on. I think it's a mix of facilitation and journalism.
My second interest is the journalism angle ... something I used to do in print. When someone asks these days what I do, I end up stumbling around ... "I use social media for social benefit ... help people collaborate in workshops and online .... you know, blogs and wikis and that sort of thing". It used to be much easier to say I was a reporter.
It occurs to me that I should try calling myself a social reporter; it feels more comfortable for this purpose than knowledge activist or technology steward.
For me it has the advantage of confirming some fraternal links with people like Nick Booth of Podnosh, who blogs and podcasts in his local community in Birmingham, while reflecting on what's needed to shift from the news values of traditional journalism to something more socially beneficial. We need to move from conflict, celebrity and criticism to collaboration, celebration, creativity.
It seems to me that the role of social reporter could be important as we see a shift from "all in one place" online communities to the sort of blog communities described by Nancy White. It chimes in with the work I'm doing with Bev Trayner in developing sites that may support communities of practice (and learning a lot from Bev along with way on CoPs). 'Social reporter" also reminds me I have a lot to learn from Beth Kanter on how to use the wealth of web and personal media tools now available. It ties in with work to explore what social networking may mean for nonprofits, over at the mediablends site. Maybe I'll end up with something useful to contribute to the exciting work on conversations and storytelling generously put into the public domain by the guys at Anecdote. They really seem to know how to mix face-to-face and online.
There are many other great examples of people doing really innovative work using social media for social benefit ... so much so it can be a bit intimidating. Hence the need - for me anyway - to find a way of describing the work that is a bit personal, a bit general. Social reporter may be it. As part of my rather cursory research I tried Wikipedia ... nothing there. I Googled the term and found a certain amount about people who audit the environmental and social impact of business. Hmmm. But then I found reference to others who seemed to get invited to a lot of parties. Phew, that's alright then. Don't want to lose all the traditional benefits.

Blog communities: Nancy White explains being in many places at once

Nancy White, recently in London  talking about Internet tribes, has now written an article about blog communities and how they differ from forums, email lists and other ways we communicate with each other and relate online: Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community? at The Knowledge Tree.

If you aren't a social technology person, don't switch off ... because behind the tech stuff are some profound issues of how we do things as individuals in our own spaces, how we collaborate in groups, and how we get together in communities.
In the non-internet world architects, planners and developers often determined how public or private, congenial or not our places may be. The more handy DIYers among us build our own. Organisers, wardens, police, colleagues, friends, brokers all assist or control our relationships in localities or across far-flung networks.
I think Nancy's article is important because she offers us an understandable way of looking at how the social architecture of the internet is changing. More and more people are taking the DIY route by creating their own places (blogs) and talking to others from there ... instead of going to  the equivalent of the pub, the match, church or community centre. However, the physical-online analogy of place soon breaks down, because as Nancy explains, these days you can be in many places at once:

Until recently, the term ‘online community’ implied a community who interacted online within some bounded set of technologies. In the early years, bulletin board systems (BBSs) and forums (also known as discussion boards) joined email lists as tools that enabled a defined set of people to interact around some shared purpose, over time. These were usually clearly bounded communities. The boundaries were created by the tools themselves – usernames, passwords, registrations or joining of a list. The technological act of joining was the most visible indicator of being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the community. Communities could be public or private and visible only to those who joined. Many of us interested in the application of online community to learning and work, ‘grew up’ in this era of bounded communities. We often brought with us our assumptions that online conversation, a core to our learning and work, would naturally happen in forums or email. We happily played with wikis as shared writing or repository spaces. We adopted blogs as personal publishing platforms, but community always found its infrastructural roots in forums and email lists, tools that many of us felt defined online conversation. Then blog adoption accelerated.
People began to blog in specific niches, from gaming, to politics, to third grade classroom curriculum, to chocolate; ecosystems of people writing about things they cared about. They started finding each other, commenting on each others’ blogs. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and feedreaders began to offer new possibilities about how we discovered and read blog posts. Other Web 2.0 tools such as tagging and mashups created ways to aggregate and remix the individual offerings into a unique package, customised by each of us to our own preferences.
The game had changed. And with it changed some of our assumptions about what online community looks like, how individual and collective identity, power and control show up in these communities, and, at the core, the balance between the individual and the group.

In order to explain what's going on, Nancy develops the ideas she set out in London. First she suggests that there are three types of blog community - those around a solo blogger, those around a topic, and those developed on the same platform. Nancy then takes the idea of blog communities as networks, enhanced by different functions and types of participants identified by Ramalingam:
    * filters
    * amplifyers
    * convenors
    * facilitators
    * investors and
    * community builders.
As Nancy says Ramalingham’s (2005) six functions echo some of the work of Cross and Parker who describe types within a social network, i.e. Central Connectors, Unsung Heroes, Bottlenecks, Boundary Spanners and Peripheral People.
(The article gives excellent references as well as glossary of terms.)
Nancy goes on to give us an analysis of how the three different types of blog communities operate in terms of power, identity, modes of interaction and scalability.

In the social architecture, we see the most signficant set of differences around the issues of control/power and identity. This is a classic expression of the tension between the individual and the group that shows up in all social formations. From a design perspective, how might we intend the balance between individual and group to show up? If we want an individual focus, blogs give some of that in all forms, but has primacy in the blog centric formation.
Interestingly, all three offer a range of interaction options, although the power dynamics changes with the relationships in those dynamics. For example, while anyone potentially could comment in any three forms, the blog centric blogger could most easily prevent that interaction within the community. Power is key here. The topic centric community has the most distributed power. The boundaried community power distribution ultimately depends on the choices of the site administrator. In the single blog centric power clearly sits at the centre, as does identity.

Nancy emphasises that she is really just setting out some ideas, raising questions, and inviting comments.... and offers us more than the article as a launch pad. You can find some of the research collect under the tag blog_communities on del.icio.us. The article offers a link to a live gathering and conversation on September 25/26 (depending on time zone). You can read the article as blog item, or download as a file. You can listen to Nancy's podcast of the whole thing. All here.
The research has clearly made Nancy rethink the importance of new-style blog communities compared with old-style online community. She wrote recently:

I have been seriously thinking about totally redesigning my online facilitation workshop because we have entered a new phase of online interaction and many of the old assumptions are insufficient, the modalities are far more diverse .... and the challenges of multi-membership and what that means to our time and attention is significant.

This has echos of Robin Hamman on the death of online community, and earlier Amy Jo Kim saying forums were "old-skool" with the buzz moving to blogs. Something is definitely going on ... new territories are emerging. Nancy is giving us some early maps.

The professional digital divide: 80/20 the wrong way

It's reassuring, if depressing, to find global networker and commentator Dave Pollard reflecting my own more limited experience of the extent to which people use online tools. He identifies a 80/20 professional digital divide In Social Networking: Why are Conversation and Collaboration Tools so Underused?:

You've  seen it a million times: At a meeting with a dozen people, some of them  take notes and others don't, and if you have a chance to see the notes  afterwards you wonder if the people were actually at the same meeting.  The people connected in by phone or online were even more clued out,  somehow missing everything important that came out of the meeting. And  a month later, the minutes of the meeting come out, and you read them  and ask yourself: When during the meeting did we agree to do that?
One  of the purposes of the new flood of social networking tools is to try  to organize, facilitate and improve the effectiveness of conversations  and collaborative activities. The power and promise of these tools was  and is considerable, and a year ago Steve Barth  even predicted the demise of group e-mails (in favour of next-gen wikis  and other more dynamic tools). But most of these tools remain  underused, or hardly used at all.

My general experience is that maybe one in ten people in nonprofits and public organisations that I meet go beyond basic email and web. It's a bit higher in many corporate settings, I believe, and of course smart freelances and people in the business can be way ahead and escape the technology trap. Dave offers a more sophisticated analysis than the one in ten, and a useful table to organise these divisions:

Used by Most People
* telephone
* group e-mail
* face-to-face meetings without any personal documentation of learnings or decisions

Used by Those on the Right Side of the Digital Divide Only (say, 20%)
* Skype and other free global enhanced VOIP telephony tools
* discussion forums/groups
* weblogs
* face-to-face meetings with personal notes or mindmap documentation

Used by Power Internet Users Only (say, 2%)
* wikis
* Google Writely and other online document sharing tools
* sophisticated collaboration & coordination tools and 'spaces'
* face-to-face meetings using Open Space or other advanced highly-effective conversation and collaboration techniques

Dave goes on to give a list of explanations: the tools may be unfamiliar, unintuitive, or awkward in many contexts; people's poor meeting skills can make things worse; tech training doesn't offer the opportunity to experiment. We shouldn't forget the people we wish to collaborate with may not be online ... and anyway we may not yet know who are the "right" people. We need to find them ... which may be difficult if they aren't using networking tools. We end up talking to the 2 per cent.
As I asked myself a couple of years back, does any of this really matter? As Dave points out, it can mean a lot of wasted time, unnecessary travel, and exclusion of important interests. It also cuts to the heart of the big drive toward edemocracy. If there is to be a bottom-up reframing of democracy, and new approaches to engagement, then we are going to need a lot more than 20 per cent take up. There's a real danger that the 2 per cent of enthusiasts convince the 80 per cent of policy makers and officials that new online methods are a great idea, neatly sidestepping the continuing digital divide (just because people are connected, doesn't mean they can participate effectively). The 80 per cent won't challenge this if they don't really understand how everything works ... they won't want to show their ignorance.
Dave is not that optimistic about tackling this issue:

Many people seem to believe the answer is to  make the tools better and wait for the rest of the world (or the next  generation) to catch up with the 2% or 20%. But I'm not so sure. The  digital divide seems to grow ever wider, not narrower, and if a tool as  simple, free and intuitive as Skype can't replace the telephone even  for tech-savvy users, what hope is there for more complicated,  sophisticated tools?
And while better education and training  in conversational and collaboration skills, and in the use of enabling  tools, would certainly help, my guess is that we're too busy, or don't  consider it urgent or important enough, to make acquiring these skills  and tool familiarity a priority, so it just ain't going to happen. A  generation from now someone will write an article very much like this  one, and nothing will have changed.

Fortunately he has a positive suggestion:

So let's try an experiment  in online collaboration, using Google Writely, one of the right-column  tools, and see if we can come up, through conversation and  collaboration, with some better answers, or at least an understanding  of why social networking tools aren't going to change the world. You  can find a copy of this article on Google Writely here. 

Dave then goes on to invite you to email him so he can sign you up to Writely, and to contribute ideas and answers to some questions he poses. See his post for details.
So many commentators on social networking concentrate on the 2 per cent of enthusiasts, throw in more tools and exhortation, and I think can just end up making people feel yet more depressed an disempowered.... so I applaud Dave's reality check and practical suggestion. He also does a lot of face-to-face networking, so I'm hoping for a report from a workshop to address these issues too. Or maybe we could also do a bit of that and report back. One approach would be to encourage people to create some stories about how tools can be really useful in their situation. That might help bring how far use of tools relates to people's personality and preferences. Anyway, thanks for the conversation starter Dave. I'm signing up.

Update: Dave has now published the results of the Writely collaboration. I did sign up, but didn't join in because it was, well, messy. As Dave says: "The collective work-product of Writely, like that of most wiki tools, is truly ugly unless some uber-editor comes in and does clean-up work." I'm sure it works better if people have collaborated before, and have some protocols to work on... and anyway, there were some good ideas buried in there.

Why bother with "membership" in future?

I had a fascinating conversation the other day with the director of a UK nonprofit organisation that has about a thousand individuals and organisations paying annual fees for online services, newsletters, events and all the other stuff that goes with association membership.
As a pretty entrepreneurial outfit the organisation also has dozens of projects on the go with scores of public, private and nonprofit partners. Then there's the host of other people who just want to keep in touch, all making a great cloud of contacts and relationships that are more or less active at any time.
It costs the organisation a lot to maintain these relationships. It costs the members quite a bit in annual fees. We talked about the ways that things could be improved - but the core question we ended up with was: "What's the nature of association membership? What's the point of it these days?"
It used to be that you joined associations because it was a way of meeting like-minded people and getting help, facilities, information and other things difficult or costly to organise for yourself. These days it is much easier to find people and resources online, and to mix and match these assets into project teams, communities of practice, and informal networks.
In addition, the best ideas often come from crossing professional and interest boundaries. That means you have to pay quite a lot of membership fees if you feel conventional associations are the way to get these contacts. Or you join social networking sites like ecademy and LinkedIn as well as building your own networks, perhaps using new applications like the People Aggregator.
There's nothing particularly new in these observations ... except I suspect not many nonprofit associations see what may be coming over the horizon. And even if you do sniff something new and threatening in the air, what do you do about it? Most of your members are probably just about coping with basic email and web. You'll be lucky if your staff and Board are up to speed on the changes that new technologies are bringing.  Their mindset may well be: why change now when only the minority are doing it differently?
I recommend looking at a blog and forthcoming book appropriate entitled "We Have Always Done it That Way? which offers 101 ideas for associations in the future. It won't offer off-the-shelf solutions to my questioning director friend, because it is based on US experience and does assume fairly high tech competence among association members. The non-tech ideas require some translation into the UK culture, and our legal and funding regimes. I think those translations will be made, and have recently bumped into a few people from the social software and knowledge management fields lucky enough to have nonprofit clients waking up to the challenge.
Meanwhile I'm happy to spend a fair bit on membership of the distinctly upmarket Institute of Directors (as well as other lower-cost nonprofits) even if I don't agree with their political line most of the time. Why? Well, there's the free meeting facilities in different cities, excellent seminars, legal and other services, and the generally excellent level of service. I feel looked after.... and you get half a case of fine wines if you recruit a new member. Anyone want to sign up and split that?

Internet tribes examined ... sociably

Internet users contributing content can appear to be rather different tribes. There are the independent bloggers who are single voices loosely linked, and the hoards gathering together in forums and chat rooms. Then there are the social networkers using  platforms that provide blogs and other facilities in one place - for example, ecademy for business and myspace for younger networkers.
It can be very confusing, particularly if you are trying to work out which way to go to help people talk or work together online.
Fortunate the professionals who work on these different models have generally resisted the sort of techie wars that can so easily develop, and this was very evident at tonight's meeting of emint, originally set up by online community managers. We had news that emint is formalising its constitution and making some close links with an organisation representing social networks. There may be funding in prospect. I think I got that right ... but this was maximum sociability in a Covent Garden pub, so we may have to wait for a more formal communique.
Meanwhile we had Nancy White, over from Seattle for a few weeks in the UK, directly addressing the question: "What happens when you talk about Blogs and Community in one breath?"
To quote from the invite  "Nancy is an internationally recognised expert in understanding and practising online group facilitation of distributed work, learning and community groups - work which requires her to fluidly take on the roles of presenter, writer, teacher, coach, facilitator, and rapporteur."  She knows the business. Until a few years ago she was in the "communities" tribe, and - she says - only took up blogging to demonstrate to herself that it wasn't much use. She found otherwise ... a few posts and she was overwhelmed with "welcome to the blogosphere" comments and links, making explicit a social network much wider than she expected.
Nancy says she currently sees three types of blog-based "communities":

• people who cluster, comment and blog around one strong voice - perhaps a political commentator
• bloggers with a shared passion who link to each other and operate as crowd. Apparently foodies are very strong online in the US.
• bloggers who use one multi-blog platform for their shared interest. Nancy gave the example of parents of premature babies sharing their stories at March of Dimes.

Nancy also threw in a a reference to the six non-exclusive functions of networks, drawn - I think - from the work of Richard Portes and Stephen Yeo. These are explained here as filter, amplify, Invest/provide, convene, build communities, and facilitate.
I had to leave part-way through the ensuing discussion, but it seemed to me that we were beginning to get some really useful ways of thinking about communities, networks, blogs in terms of what we hope that they will achieve.

Robin Hamman who co-organised the event with Lizzie Jackson, was wielding a serious microphone on behalf of Radio Five Live's Up all Night: pods and blogs so we may get a more definitive account of the evening. The main lesson from these occasions, of course, is that you can't do it all online. It takes networky people, a good venue and your networking juice of choice.
Why emint? Well, the first meeting was in The Mint.

Update: Robin Hamman has blogged the event here, and Lizzie Jackson has explained on the emint list that emint is indeed formalised in that it has a steering committee and constitution. Funding will be on the agenda at the next annual general meeting.
Nancy has now put up a full version of her talk, in five blog posts starting here and ending here.