Need Your Advice Re: Social Media

I think those wikis sound like a great forum to share ideas, if people are already invested in that concept. I think something that Taproot could definitely benefit from, though, is some more push element to their social media presence.

Your audience is full of marketers and many of us are entangled in social media. If there were feeds for me to follow on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (I know there's the group, but I mean beyond that) and the like, I would certainly follow them to read articles, leave comments, vote in polls, whatnot. Even though I am in the social media tangle, I am not a wiki-person, so I may not participate on that platform as much as I might in a discussion forum or (obviously) a discourse via blogging.

My 2 cents is to aim for the ongoing dialog and community building (wiki to me is trying to get at an answer, where something along the lines of Solution Lab, however inane and jingoistic their solutions may be, promotes dialog.)

I think also that I may be less likely to look for solutions when I am working on a project than to read and comment on an article that enters my news feeds.

Oh, and an afterthought: project management software on a social platform (such as this free one http://www.dashboardpm.com/index.php) might be a good way to impact both collaboration and project management. Perhaps something like that could be applied to forums and community development.

Check out brightidea.com's WebStorm software.

Fast Company is one of the many companies using the WebStorm collaborative software

https://na5.brightidea.com/ct/ct_list.bi?c={1636853C-E68B-4D48-AE3A-EE955F1BE352}

This sounds like a great idea.

Your community may be interested in a kind of Wiki with a new twist.

It supports the collaborative writing of knowledge as syllogism-style rules in executable, open vocabulary English.

Folks can then use the same pages to 'run' the knowledge, and to get English explanations of the results.

As befits a Wiki, shared use is free. Just point a browser to www.reengineeringllc.com .

There you will find papers, presentations, and of course the system itself, with many examples that you can view, run and change .

Thanks for comments. Enjoy! -- Adrian

A few years ago I became a Delegate for my alma mater. As a Delegate, my primary responsibilities included attending an yearly conference to get an update on the University, be fed some marketing and act as a consultant on a range of issues the school was facing for the given year. This seemed like a great way to leverage the wealth of insight shared amongst the delegates. That said, I felt the University could better leverage this collective expertise throughout the year if they engaged it more.

It’s great to see Taproot thinking through how it can better leverage and engage it’s volunteers to provide further support to its existing organizations. As Ben Little mentioned, many folks want to stay engaged, if engaged. While I agree that wiki’s don’t get as much attention as most are intimidated by writing something that still seems formal, many will respond to questions, comment on blogs or help market something to their friends.

Taproot should build an online community of volunteers that would keep track of their participation. Many people are driven by recognition more than money and this could be an inexpensive way to further tap the collective expertise. This system should then monitor the participation and track by user what they’re involved in. For example, if an organization wanted help with a financial plan, the volunteer that helps would get credited for this effort. Then, similar to LinkedIn’s recommendation feature, the organization would leave a comment saying how wonderful it was to have the volunteers help. This would help the volunteer continue to refine their skills while building an external referral. There could be a question and answer board that again would track who’s helping to answer organizations questions.

So, I’d focus on the volunteer and build a system to track their participation and give it the credit and recognition it deserves. This in turn will drive more engagement from an increasingly larger audience. Taproot meets Yahoo! Answers meets LinkedIn.

I think Ben is on to something. Creating a wiki seems like you're looking to create something that makes it easier for you to benefit from the community. You need to help your participants benefit from the dialogue. The best way to do that is go where they are and make it easier for them to keep it up. I'd look at adding RSS feeds and a forum or even a firef.ly chat room to you blog before I started a wiki.

Just my two cents.

The first idea, knowledge wiki, appears to be more promising. From experience observing technical discussions on the unix (DARPA) network (later internet) since 1981, most people are busy with their own jobs and hardly ever post a solution in the absence of a need for one. In practice, people are moved more frequently to post problems that they are grappling with. The subscribed group which has a common interest in that area then tends to post possible solutions. A satisfactory solution is quickly arrived at. The technology for creating the forum platform should be chosen carefully. People love email. It appears to have the right balance private notation with the semi-public act of transmission. Highly successful forums for discussing technical issues were the Usenet groups (later acquired by Google and now Google Groups) which were a form of threaded email lists later known as listservs. The wiki may not be a particularly good technology platform for inducing participation. I have set up wikis at several companies and have invariably found participation discouraging. Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dyanmic Learning Environment) is a relatively recent technology developed with participatory learning in mind. It was created on the basis of a social constructionist theory of learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism) and is on over 40,000 sites in 199 countries (http://moodle.org/sites/). UCLA's "Common Collaborative Learning Environment" is one of its biggest users (http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/review/moodle-and-social-constructionism)
It is important to note that it does not guarantee a successful collaborative learning environment, but may be the technology platform more conducive to one.

I think that it is a great idea to use the wikis and learn from others after someone has worked on a project. Another possibility would be to have a collaborative forum, where people can share as they are working and get questions answers.

I think this would be implementing the same tools just using them differently.

I great example is:

http://www.endovascular.org/
People that are all over the country (or world) can log on, and start sharing.

I hope that is helpful! Have a great weekend.

There is great value in asking for help and different points of view. When it comes to developing a Brand strategy/positioning, it would be helpful to share insights from other projects to help develop differentiated and meaningful positioning.
The forum would essentially expands the team from the core team working on an endeavor to bringing in the resources to expand the working team through helpful insights.

Two ideas:

Wikis are a good start, but there are times when volunteers need answers to questions not already documented. I think a set of email lists (by volunteer type) could go a long way to increasing cross-team communication and idea and expertise proliferation. As a web programmer, I often have questions I know other people have run into -- but when Google fails, it would be helpful to have a group of like-minded and like-experienced volunteers can share tips and ideas.

Additionally, I think the major challenge that many volunteer teams face is coordination and collaboration. My team is using Google Groups right now, which helps to a point (we get a group email list and a file storage area), but there are paid tools which better facilitate collaboration. Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com) is a great tool I use at work -- for $149/month, the Taproot foundation can support all its teams across the country with email lists, message boards, file storage, collaborative document editing, to-do lists, etc. There may be other alternatives as well.

These suggestions are really helpful. It seems like there are a couple of key issues emerging (I still need to get my head around Richard's Moodle post):

1) Push vs. Pull Engagement

2) Community to Support Projects vs. Broader Engagement

3) Content Creation (wiki) vs. Feedback / Questions (LinkedIn answers)

4) Structure vs. Unstructured vs. Hybrid

This leaves me wondering where to start? How do you seed a community to get the initial engagement necessary to make it all work? Which feature(s) would drive initial adoption from which we could build out more functionality? Or, do we need it all day one?

I think that everyone involved in Taproot volunteering is very busy. Most of us are not likely to spend time perusing wikis or blogs for the chance to input solutions. We are much more likely to respond to specific requests for input and insight. My suggestion is you find a tool that can push questions to the Taproot family but can capture inputs and responses to a central repository for use by others.

What a great exchange you've generated, Aaron. I've watched so many organizations attempt to set up the perfect tool for their own network of volunteers - but the truth is, it's tough to get it just right (especially on the first try). Rather than trying to develop the perfect solution, I would go the route of trying any combination of the ideas listed above and see what sticks with your users. That's the beauty of the new social web - you can try a lot of different things, in a lot of different places, at a relatively low to no cost and see what resonates.

I will point you in the direction of one specific tool that has worked well for the tutoring and mentoring community, which is America Learns (www.americalearns.net). While it's not a perfect fit for your needs - it would be worth checking out. They have created a fairly structured platform where tutors and mentors within a specific program can share tips and tools with one another and in turn they are building the program's institutional memory of which activities and strategies are most useful.

Look forward to seeing where this great thread of ideas leads you.

Great questions and discussion, Aaron. You probably noticed that it has generated many times more comments than the vast majority of your posts; there are likely a variety of reasons for that, but I believe your specific call for idea/advice gave people something to sink their teeth into. Whatever push/pull delivery method you decide on, I'd consider ways to make it similarly action-oriented, and potentially even more so.

The ideas posted all have strengths and weaknesses, as do my suggestions, of which I'll focus on just one that hasn't already been proposed and just introduce two others in more general terms.

The architecture and design professions thrive on competitions--most often design competitions for specific project types or sites, but sometimes also "ideas competitions" for less tangible issues. There are likely a number of organizations that have employed a competition model in much the same way to address even less tangible social issues, but one that immediately comes to mind is Changemakers.net, which you probably know about through Ashoka. I have no real sense how effective or useful it's been, but revisiting their website for the first time in a while, it certainly appears to be well-populated, up-to-date, etc.

Competitions are easily criticized (and are effectively broken as a design delivery model): a chief reason among many is that they routinely generate dozens or even thousands of "solutions" to a single problem, regularly without any client interaction. They also represent a significant investment of time, idea, and resources on both sides of the giving/recieving spectrum, often without clear returns. But competitions do have a few things going for them: 1) incentives (prizes, recognition, etc.); 2) deadlines/timelines; and 3) a competitive atmosphere, ideally laced with a sense of community and some actual collaboration.

For all the aforementioned reasons, a competition model isn't a single solution or answer to your question. But it may be worth thinking about it in the context of these other ideas.

On another subject, re: earlier posts about Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter integration, I think the single-most effective use of those services -- the way they're currently constituted -- is for recruitment (incl. brand-building, etc.). I rarely see much content with the kind of depth that I think you're most interested in, except on Wikipedia itself. Perhaps there could be some kind of third-party application to fill the void on the Facebook platform, for example. But if you/Taproot/we could tap into the simple-to-use (and update) infrastructure of these existing social networking sites, we'd be golden.

In the end, much of this is going to come down to story-telling -- to inspire or motivate people to contribute; to frame the problems and solutions; and perhaps to package that information/knowledge for dissemination.

As I read the question posed and the thoughtful feedback it has elicited, it seems to be that what a lot of people are talking about is the concept of "communities of practice," or groups of people who can come together to work together to share insights about something they're passionate about. It also feels a bit reminiscent of open source/open innovation/peer production, where people can collaborate to produce an idea or a product.

The beautiful thing about communities of practice is that they can evolve slowly and organically. Basically, you need to find a few people who are really passionate about a specific issue (this lends itself to your knowledge wiki) or a specific approach (lends itself more to solutions wiki), and ask these people to begin posting about what they think, find in the media, experience, etc. As other Taproot volunteers come across these issue areas, they may be inspired to join the communities of practice to learn and share. The communities could function virtually (using some sort of social networking software) and/or in person via monthly storytelling sessions spearheaded by the self-selected community of practice leader.

COP topics could include Taproot's key issue areas and sub-sections of these issue areas (e.g., climate change).

In terms of an example, the open source electric car project has some rough forums dedicated to topics (http://www.osgv.org/nfphpbb/index.php). This might work...if the virtual component is more solution-focused, it might be interesting to take a look at the following open innovation product design site: http://www.redesignme.com.

Lastly, if the solution is a virtual one, I think it is really important to make it as personal as possible. People come to Taproot wanting to connect with others in their community. They want connectivity, not anonymity. I think some sort of online profile -- even if it's just a name and a photo or icon -- gives people a sense that their voice is being heard and a true feeling that their ideas are being recognized.

I've included the link to Nathaniel Whittemore's blog, do good well.

http://dogoodwell.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/platforms-for-giving-are-different-than-reasons-for-giving/

This article lists some social media consultants at the bottom (Beth Kanter, Britt Bravo, and Heather Mansfield) and includes a funny Slideshare, "What the F**k is Social Media" presentation. It's actually a post responding to one of your other posts about causes.com. Maybe you've already seen this, but thought I'd pass it along just in case!

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