ONLINE EVENT-Online Social Networking/ Intro

Some additional thoughts...most of the discussion thus far seems to be focusing on how to better use existing social networking tools. I tend to think more about how online social networking could do better to respond to needs that are left unadressed and how it could better assist the natural (offline) social networking habits that we all share.

For example, would love to hear some thoughts about...

1) Social Networking is for the Tech savvy: Like most Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Services, Social Networking sites are designed primarily by Geeks and the well educated for other Geeks and the educated elites (people like me). While this trend is starting to change as more people become comfortable using online technologies, many people will continue to be left out due to language, cultural, educational and other barriers that “trickle down technology” does not address. Is anyone working with from the ground up to develop products and services in this space that are by, for, and with people who are least likely to benefit from them? Another related question is who in this space is relying on enthnographies, human-centered design, and other bottom up approaches to determine where social networking needs and opportunities exist, rather than relying on the currrent and technology-driven model?
2) Offline and Online networking combined: It seems like the online Social Networking world, albeit very young, is still caught in the binary paradigm of you are either networking online or offline and you can't do both simultaneously. Why can’t we combine the two for an even greater impact? For example whenever I go to a conference I think “wow, look at all of these interesting people that I would like to meet and connect with”. Of course, lacking any better tools, I am forced to only meet as many people as I can approach directly within the time I am physically present. Not only do I miss connecting with a lot of people this way, but I have no way of knowing who I should connect with. A simple answer would be to have everyone fill out a brief card when they register for the conference that includes their profile, picture, and a couple of “who I want to meet” and “what I need to get” statements that the conference organizers can organize on a wall or even electronically for all to see. Even better, wouldn't it be great if I could use current social mobile software and tagging technologies to alert me on my mobile device when someone with a shared interest appears in a common registry or is in my physical proximity. Then I could approach them directly or follow up later if I am preoccupied. This, in my mind, is a sensible way to combine online and offline social networking. Some folks are already working on this (see Dodgeball.com or sixsense.com, etc.) but think about the applications in the world of social services and nonprofits where people could connect online and offline on the basis of available services and needs…Any of our experts know of interesting efforts along these lines???

3) Ability to capture and manage social networking results: While the current social networking tools are really helpful in getting us connected with like minded folks or those with shared interests, I am wondering if there is a way to also track those results for future reference? For example, if I connect with someone via an online social networking tool, I would love to have a way to record and save information about the process, the content of our exchange, who else we connected with, what websites/blogs I was led to as a result, and what follow up is needed. Is anyone working on “Mapping” tools that help to us to track our social networking beyond just better coordination of multiple tools?

Finally, a suggestion that social networking go back to the social (people) part to be truly effective.


Paul Lamb
Principal
Man on A Mission Consulting
pauljlamb@gmail.com
Tel: 510-815-6091
"Can you envision the nonprofit of 2016?"

Paul,

Thanks for sharing the StreetTech story. I think it underscores one of the powerful tenents of FOAF style networking that LinkedIn offers. I was invited to LinkedIn by an old buddy from Macromedia and found LinkedIn awesome to find out where my old pals went after spending so many years there... so I like the idea of getting program participants (like StreetTech students) involved so they can also see where each other are going.

I'm working to get some of these ideas embedded in one of the leading social change schools out here in California.

Cheers,
John Lorance
CompuMentor/TechSoup

Responding to Paul Lamb

"Another related question is who in this space is relying on enthnographies, human-centered design, and other bottom up approaches to determine where social networking needs and opportunities exist, rather than relying on the currrent and technology-driven model?"

I hope my project Helpalot is doing this. The top goal is to make it more easy for people to find a charity that fits with their intention and to make it easy to find out how trustable that charity is. Social networking for my project is actually a key component in delivering quality content. It's not the goal by itself (although it brings some nice extra qualities). I'm not sure if that's in line with your question, but it's not technology driven.

"Offline and Online networking combined"

First: We have our social skills in real life for social networking. We must nog forget that :), but tools could increase the chance to find people we like to talk to.

"..social mobile software and tagging technologies to alert me on my mobile device when someone with a shared interest appears in a common registry or is in my physical proximity"

That sounds like a tech-savvy solution. In a conference there might be some low-tech possibilities like wearing a colored badge that indicates your goals and expertise. I'm not saying the tech solution won't work, but it has to be better then the colored badges.

(reading my post back, it sounds a little negative, but I actually agree on just about everything you wrote)

Those are some huge points, Paul.

Every group I work with seems to have people with strong connectivity (ie check their email daily), weak connectivity (check email less than weekly) or no connectivity (may or may not have a computer.) And this is the staff and volunteer base.

Your point #2 is especially intriguing. A social networking tool--sort of a Customer Relationship Management too--that would help you manage contacts on or offline would be very groovy.

Each contact could have a preferred method of communication. Broadcast announcements could go out by email to those who have email as a preference, snail mail to those who have post as a preference, and a phone list could be created for those who prefer to be contacted by phone.

Since your contact information has area code and zip code fields these could be used as attributes for all kinds of "event triggers," conferences, impropmtu meetings while traveling, etc.

Kind of makes a person wish he were a programmer.

This post is in response to David from Gather.com. David, I think you make a really good point about user engagement being the key, particulary since -- as people in this discussion have noted -- the sheer amount of social-networking sites out there can seem overwhelming.

I'd be curious to know what kind of successes The Nature Conservatory have with their Earth Day promotion. That might make a good case-study article for TechSoup.org. Please let me know how it turns out.

In response to Paul Lamb re: StreetTech.

Your post is a great example of how social networking provided a concrete benefit to those seeking high-tech employment. It would be interesting if you could get some of the StreetTech students who used LinkedIn to particpate in this disucission. I think they might be able to provide a unique perspective on this subject.

Admittedly, I'm not super entrenched in the whole social-networking sphere, but in my limited experiences using Tribe, Friendster, and Ryze, I've found that managing even three accounts in three different communities can get unweildy very quickly. (I can't even imagine trying to manage more than that many accounts!)

What if someone were to create a "multi-protocol" tool to pull all of your account information for all of your social networking communities into one place? (Sorta like Gaim and Trillian do for IM.)

Would that even work? If so, what does everyone think about that?

~Alexandra
------------------
senior editor
TechSoup

Hi Thanks for all your thoughts, this is an interesting discussion to read. I'd like to add to the online/offline comments. I am consulting for a womans *** cancer advocacy and awareness group in Northern California called the Humboldt Community Health Project in Arcata.
We have been funded to create a content management system for all things relating to *** health that clients, staff and service providers can avail themselves to. We post non-copyrighted abstracts of recent developments in this field then let staff, users and service providers generate annotations with locally and personally relevent information. We expect a large percentage of participants to be tech-averse so we will be planning for offline use. This will allow for snail-mail or word-of-mouth updates in areas of interest, having a volunteer assist a user to participate, offline content access for health fairs, video and audio record keeping, etc.
Since HCBHP's client base is so variable wrt tech abilities, our biggest challenge will be to get the greatest buy in by offering the right amount of flexibility.

Paul, the central person I know of in the area of "user centered design" of these technical networks is Michael Gurstein, formerly with the N.J. Institute of Technology, but now working from Vancouver as a consultant I believe. Mike has an article--I think it was published in First Monday a couple years ago on this topic. He also is the editor of the Journal of Community Informatics (on line and free) which often publishes relevant stuff in this vein as the community informatics field is VERY user-centered.

Kenneth Pigg
Univ. of Missouri
Dept. of Rural Sociology
piggk@missouri.edu

akrasne said:

"What if someone were to create a "multi-protocol" tool to pull all of your account information for all of your social networking communities into one place? (Sorta like Gaim and Trillian do for IM.)"

That sounds like a great idea. Sounds like a difficult plan, because I think there is no common protocol on how the data is stored. The social network data is the 'core value' of those sites, so they probably don't want to make it easy to copy & paste this data.

My project Helpalot is still at a conceptual stage (slowly going towards building a first test version). Using an open standard of some sort sounds like a good idea. Does one exist? Perhaps I would need to make up my own open standard, but that might be a whole new project by itself. I'd like to from an expert in this field (XML, open standards, etc) if something like this exists.

at Kenneth Pigg

I had never heard of First Monday, but thanks for the link. The site looks like a great research resource.

http://www.firstmonday.org/

I googled; was this the piece you where refering to?

Paul, when I read this "Why can’t we combine the two for an even greater impact? For example whenever I go to a conference I think “wow, look at all of these interesting people that I would like to meet and connect with”. " I jumped in my seat.

For the past year I've been attending face to face events where people pass out great information to groups of people in large and small forums, yet they don't build a structure to help these people connect with each other, with the speakers, or with the hosts in an on-going effort to solve the problem. Here's one of the messages I posted in my own blog in response to one of these events: .Can we Work Together?

Since I host a face to face conference in Chicago, I've been piloting this concept of having an on-line platform to support the face to face event. Visit http://www.tutormentorconference.bigstep.com and you can read about the conference and the eConference.

On May 17 IUPUI will be hosting an event. I'd love to have someone from Care2 and a few other social network forums that have been discussed do a workshop in this forum, aimed at teaching tutor/mentor leaders to build networking capacity within the services you offer. My marketing can bring the people, IUPUI hosts the space, you just need to make the time to do a workshop.

My organization is a very small non profit and our technology and networking are supported by volunteers from many different places. I'd like to see some university people in this discussion, so that we could invite them to engage their students as the manpower that could help more non profits adopt some of these strategies.

If we can get some organizations started, the experience will motivate them to do more to grow how they use this technology for their own benefit.

I resonate with the comments made about many social networks being limited to people within the network. While I can pull my non-Tribe blog into my Tribe profile (and likely vice-versa), some of the extended FOAF stuff doesn't necessarily come across to my other online locations. And I can't see if the Tribesters are connected to the Flicksters.

I'm beginning to believe more and more that what is going to happen in the next few years is that the destination "site" will be less important than your personal identify profile - i.e. my blog posts on particular topics should show up here; my photos tagged with a particular tag should show up there; my Tribe network connects to my Flickr network to my emai address book; and all of it is accessible via a single personalized functionality portal (as opposed to content portal).

Kirkpatrick mentioned the possibility of a platform agnostic single user sign-on. While many systems (including Drupal) share user logins across their own platforms, OpenID is trying to develop a system that will work across platforms. This may be the start of the kind of system I describe above - sign in once, and you can post content, photo-share and link to people across several differnet networks. It's already working on [URL=http://www.lifewiki.net/openid/OpenIDServers]several different platforms.

Because otherwise, I'm not going to log in to more than 2 different networks to keep up with people. I already have 2 blogs, one social network, one photo network _and_ I'm trying to build a distribution list for a small, specific community (otherwise known as an "audience" in the theatre world. ;-)). If I have to go to one more place to talk, listen, read, write or share, it ain't happening.

(It's getting late over here in the Netherlands, so I'm going to sleep)

I'm a day late to this online event which, officially, is over now, but since TechSoup discussions are never *really* over, I'm assuming it's not too late to post.

I've suggested hot-new social networking tools like MySpace only to organizations needing to reach young people. Why am I not a real advocate? Because most nonprofits are struggling to keep just their simple web sites up-to-date. They just don't have time nor the staff to figure out how to use all these many, many social networking tools and also to keep their information up-to-date on all these various locations as well.

If a nonprofit has a web site, has an email newsletter, staff members who occassionally use online discussion groups, and volunteer recruitment posts to VolunteerMatch, I consider that nonprofit *very* techsavvy. By contrast, I think a lot of you would consider such a nonprofit oh-so-behind the times.

IMO, the only way most nonprofits are going to be able to use all these many social networking tools being promoted is to find very dedicated, very knowledgeable and very trustworthy volunteers to engage in these activities for them. The vast majority of funders are just never going to fund paid staff to engage in all of these online activities (they still balk at paying for things like copy machines or computers).

What would be helpful is to see two or three concrete, detailed examples, in as non-techy terms as possible, of nonprofits (particularly if their focus is NOT tech-related) using even one of these social networking tools effectively, to recruit volunteers, to bring new donors on board, and maybe even to connect with potential clients. These examples should include details on how such organizations can manage all these massive amounts of information, who actually inputs all of the information again and again in all these closed communities, how to choose which community for what, etc.

Online communities, whether on YahooGroups or via email, as well as the "old" WWW, are already connecting me with way more people and organizations than I can keep up with. I've been playng around with Omidyar.net when I have time, but so far, I'm just not getting excited by the social networking software phenom.

I tried really hard not to sound cynical in this post...