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Archive for the ‘SociALCHEMY’ Category

I’ve been thinking about where we’re headed, what with the approaching climate changes and the irreconcilable balance sheets for national debt, health care costs, aging population, deteriorating infrastructure…the list goes on.

For years I’ve agreed with those who see the necessity of greater localization – more interdependency and collaboration among people living in the same place. There is a trend in this direction, fueled by undeniable evidence that we can no longer rely on national government or even state government to fill the social service and infrastructure gaps. At the same time, we face rising fuel prices and limits on carbon emissions that make transportation less affordable.

Where we live is becoming less trivial to our lives. How we live together in our home locales is becoming more vital. But we are out of practice.

Having been part of two fairly revolutionary experiments in community, I have some rare perspective on how bootstrapped communities form and mature. I can’t say that The Farm and The WELL were successes in terms of their original planning. But they did demonstrate characteristics of what I call extreme community as compared the norm - heightened mutual interdependency and super practical communications.

I’m going to be exploring this concept here in the blog, and I’ll soon have up a site for x-community.org (Yes, extremecommunity.com is taken, by whom and for what purpose, I don’t know.)

I’ll be describing what distinguishes my Versions 1, 2 and 3 of extreme community and make the case that Version 3.0 is going to be developing fast over the next decade.

When a modern organization has a need for improving its communication within and across its boundaries, it is likely to look into changing the social tools its uses and the way it uses those tools. Then it faces the question, “How do we know what will work and brings actual improvement?” This can be especially troubling given the many choices of social tools and many ways these tools can be combined and used.

This is usually the point where I’m brought in.

A tried and true approach to testing new tools and social platforms is the pilot project, where solutions are tested on a small scale before being implemented more widely across the company. Cheap, relatively unobtrusive and controlled – pilots usually seem to fit the bill.

But as Michael Idinopulus (Vice-President, Professional Services and Customer Success at Socialtext) writes in this blog post, the pilot project can’t be relied on in all cases to provide a valid test of a new combination of social media and practice.

The problem, as he describes it, is the wide gap in social dynamics between how some social platforms perform for a small group and how they perform on an enterprise-wide basis. Idinopulos uses the term participation threshold to explain the difference between social platforms that work well for a few people using them occasionally (low participation threshold) and those that don’t become effective until many people are using them frequently and regularly (high threshold).

Historically, Enterprise 2.0 implementations have focused on collaborative tools’ fairly high participation thresholds: blogs and wikis. That’s not by design, it’s by default. Until recently, those were the only Enterprise 2.0 tools that showed potential for high-value business use. Since these activities required a lot of engagement, we smothered our pilot participants with training and encouragement–which forced us to keep the pilots small.

Today, Enterprise 2.0 participation is a whole different game. At the “low threshold” end of the curve, we have low-engagement tools like social messaging (internal “Twitter”), social bookmarking. By leading your implementation with these low-threshold tools, you lower the risk of implementation while still launching at the scale required for success.

Just because there are so many social tools available on the Web does not mean that you need to find the most powerful or feature-filled or customizable technology to supercharge your organization.

Usually, you’ll find that “just good enough” tools will allow you to make improvements without the frustrations of learning and configuring a complex solution that eats up your time and saps your team’s morale.

Yesterday, Beth Kanter – recognized champion of non-profits looking to adopt social media – published a guest post by David Venn describing what he has learned, in his work with mentally challenged youth, about “why organizational simplicity is key to social media success.” In introducing Venn’s piece, Beth gave this nice reminder of priorities in

Simplicity is a good thing and it’s been a theme of the book I’m co-
writing with Allison. The array of social media can appear to be very
complex. But social media and social networks respond to the same
needs that drive people; the need to connect with one another in
meaningful ways through conversation. Social change happens through
conversations, and the job of nonprofits is to organize themselves in
such ways as to catalyze and manage those conversations.

Organizations that can really adapt and use social media need to
simplify. Simplicity boils down to:

1. Identify the essential
2. Network the rest

It’s about letting go – the staff or the organization doesn’t have to
do it all. It’s also about having the ability to stop doing programs
or activities that don’t work. It’s also about streamlining decision-
making and being more nimble.

I’m a founding consultant with the collaborative firm GuildSmiths. I am a GuildSmith, member of a team of specialists who offer insightful guidance in the the uses of social media by organizations.

DIYeL (pronounced “dial”) is a project of the GuildSmiths. DIYeL means Do-It-Yourself eLearning, but we don’t build or install eLearning systems. Instead, we help you build, install and master your own systems, blending media that already exists with media you create — and putting almost all of it in the public commons. Sound counter-intuitive? Step and and chat with us. Sound great? Contact me; we’d love to help you build your own eLearning systems.

Most of my clients come to me wondering which social applications they should adopt and faithfully follow. Where can they get the most traction with their customers, communities and markets?

It’s a constantly changing environment, with some social platforms very obviously popular and on the media radar (Facebook and Twitter), others working at more general but still influential levels (online video, wikis).

Since adoption and adaptation require investments in time by people on payroll, these clients are not inclined to gamble on technologies that won’t survive the very competitive Jungle of Social Apps.

The history of the Web so far has been one of rising and falling dominant platforms. There’s not much reason to think that will change. So it’s always interesting to see Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle where its analysts place the day’s concepts, programs, genres and technologies on a curve that includes features like the Technology Trigger, the Peak of Inflated Expectation, the Trough of Disillusionment and the Slope of Enlightenment. If you make it to that upward slope, you can look forward to the unexciting Plateau of Productivity.

Read Write Web reflects my feelings about Gartner’s curve when it points out that

Overall, this report is an interesting high level view of the state of technology. It’s quite business focused though, so Gartner perhaps overlooks some of the more exciting new consumer Web trends that we’ve been writing about this year on ReadWriteWeb: real-time Web, Internet of Things, mobile web, to name a few.

Pew Internet published an update on one of its Internet Life surveys that showed a steady increase happening in “the percentage of adults who look online for information about mental health issues” over the past two years.

From 2002-2006, online searches for information about mental health issues remained relatively stable, around 22%. In 2008, however, the percentage of internet users to look online for information about depression, anxiety, stress or mental health issues rose to 28%, a statistically significant increase.

Anil Dash makes good case that the revolutionary, game-changing approach to using the Internet that is represented by Google’s Wave technologies, may not catch on simply because it requires such a shift from the way the Web has organically evolved over the past decade. The Web and its applications have been following a path of incremental progress, while Wave asks that many assumptions and habits be discarded in favor of an approach that may very well offer advantages, but is an abrupt departure from what Anil calls “the Web Way.”

It’s impossible to project how the world and our use of the Internet might change for the better if everyone switched over to Wave. There are many technological leaps being proposed to us these days that would require a similar social disruption, from battery-powered vehicles to everyone switching to mass transit and living in eco-villages. Good for us, good for the planet, but asking a lot in terms of adaptation and adjustment.

And yet, we need look back only 15 years to a time when only a small population had made the leap to the Web, and there were no pocketable cell phones. We are a very adaptable people if we have a good enough reason to change.

Maybe Wave will build a bridge to make the transition smoother than it would need to be today.

One of the necessities and products of social networking is trust. Without a minimum level, no one would interact through the Web, and through building relationships at an acceptable pace through these networks, most people can establish enough trust  with selected others to do some sharing or exchange of valued stuff.

So how can trust improve the environment? Combining social networking with carpooling  might be a good starting point.

Too many cars on the road with only a driver inside. Too much carbon pumped into the atmosphere. Too much money being spent on car maintenance and fuel. Mass transit isn’t the answer for everyone. So that leaves carpools.

The New York Times reported on a startup called Zimride that, in the classic carpooling model, “connects drivers with riders looking to carpool to class or work.” But carpooling has always suffered from the perception that one’s fellow passengers might not turn out to be tolerable for the ride to and from work.

Zimride’s  founders are betting that green consciousness combined with the familiarity and trust gained through social networking will make their service worth using. Facebook thinks they have a good idea and has invested in the new company.

I’m working with my client, the Farmer-Veteran Coalition, to reach out to more veterans, farmers and supporters via the Web. I maintain their website and blog – build on WordPress, and I’m working with Deputy Director Gail Wadsworth to develop email campaigns for this new organization.

Using Salesforce to build the web-to-lead intake forms, I’ve enabled our three “customer” groups to contact us, describe their needs or services offered, and join our email list. Salesforce, in turn, allows us to generate the lists for email campaigns, which MailChimp sends out and tracks, feeding back in to Salesforce.

All of these services are free to non-profits (WordPress and Salesforce) or exceedingly cheap (MailChimp). We’re also using Google Apps to manage our communications and documents – another free service.

What’s most amazing and appreciated is that each of these companies have adapted their products to interact smoothly with the others. This vertical integration of independent platforms is one of the hallmarks of today’s social Web.

The ReadWriteWeb folks keep cranking out great stuff – reporting, analysis, practical instruction.

This is from their series guiding startups. I especially like this part:

Six Milestones from 30 Seconds to 3 Years

Here is what an insanely great Web product looks like to the average user right now and through the next 3 years:

• 30 seconds: “I get it.”
• 3 minutes: “I’ve used it and still get it, and it has not annoyed me yet.”
• 3 days: “I find this really useful or fun.”
• 3 weeks: “I am raving about this to other people.”
• 3 months: “I couldn’t imagine not having this, and I’m boring my friends telling them about it.”
• 3 years: “How weird to see this on Oprah.”