Social bookmarking for knowledge workers in development

Peter Ballantyne proposed to do a project about our tagging experiment. We are using the unique tag NPK4dev (non-profit knowledge management for development) to tag resources on knowledge management in a development context (you can see the tagcloud here). We worked for one afternoon with 7 people, after which everyone disappeared except Christian, George and myself. The three of us then continued to produce this video to explain the usefulness of social bookmarking for individuals and groups with a common interest. We used the commoncraft videos about RSS and wikis for our inspiration! We had to make it in roughly 1,5 hours, so we didn’t have time to make more drawings. We had to do it three times (the first two times we made major mistakes). The first time we had placed the drawings neatly in a row, so our task of putting the images was easy. The third time, though, every thing was a mess, so we were crazily searching for the relevant images.

Click To Play

Christian was so nice to make a timeline of the NPK4Dev tag that we are using to tag resources about knowledge management in a development setting. (here’s the blogpost) The timeline is brilliant, you can see blogging and ‘howto’ are big hits topic and recently agriculture scored high. If you’d be a facilitator of a community of practice and everyone (or the majority) of the people are tagging, it would be a perfect tools to monitor the interests.

Some new ideas I gained:

• The way Christian is able to digest flows of information and pick up interesting stuff amazed me as compared to other people who complaint about information overload when a list produces more than 3 mails per week. I guess the keeping track of RSS feeds and scanning information is a new skill. – let alone reading it. It also depends on how you define your professional need for keeping up with information and recent developments.

• We can make a next step with our tag by offering several subfeeds by combining tags. For instance npk4dev+blogging can make for a feed on blogging for development. npk4dev+news can generate a news feed.

• If you’d be a facilitator of a community of practice and everyone (or the majority) of the people are tagging, it would be a perfect tools to monitor the interests and it can help you in the preparation of events etc.

• You can combine the feed with a customized search engine eg. google coop to make searching in the links easier.

• It’d help to make sense of the flow if you could highlight excellent resources, either by rating, or by adding a tag like top10. Then you could highlight the top resources in another space (wiki, newsletter, whatever) for people for whom following the feed doesn’t work.

• Generally speaking, you help the users (especially for people without broadband connections) by working on the information, by printing lists, printing top information, adding top resources in websites or wikis, sharing summaries in discussion lists, etc. (you’d have to work out what works for people).

• Magnolia seem to offer more and better features than delicious, like taggers profiles and community spaces and better tagcloud options. (hmm, should we all shift??)

Social bookmarking – a video

Click To Play

Community in business (2)

From CP2 discussion I took that table to KM4dev, read here about the process.
So what were some of the results of our discussions about self financing options for communities? After all this talking, I myself feel like I have really come to understand the issue at a deeper level. However if I look at the actual results they seem meager, almost cliché.
See below the smaller table.

possible sources of revenue	types	examples
Volunteer time		as in ultra-lights, and in many other communities as well. community members and leaders contribute their time for they see value (eg. learning, contacts, prior investment in network)
Membership fees	individual members
	corporate members
Transaction based fees	selling goods or services	books, events, training, reports, qualifications, recruitment/headhunting, ‘insight’ into community, advise, lobbying, consulting, research, publishing, advertising
	either within the community or outside
	sometimes services are custom made to client, eg sponsors who pay for specific task
parent organization / sponsorship for ‘general’ task	eg. FAO communities (are almost internal communities, fully dependent) eg2. the 6 dutch orgs who collabaratively sponsored km4dev2007-event
Donations	some blogs, many open source software projects
Public / research (EU?) projects	community may be result of project, or “carrier”of other projects

In KM4dev we had to report on our project, but powerpoint presentations were not allowed. We rebelled, and made a powerpoint as cheezy as possible. Here it is Community in business.ppt

Insights

• Financial models cannot be seen as separate from the content or organizational model of the community. Value for members is overriding principle in everything. Except in financial terms, site statistics help to understand what represents value to users.
• The real basic models are few (transaction, membership and some more that are difficult to classify under those main two), but variation within those is wide. Transaction fees over products and or services seems what is most interesting, most divers. Within that, there seem to be no real “basic models” that have proved to work for large numbers of communities.
• Advertising by itself is not usually a viable option for communities that are not huge.
• The lack of legal entity is a constraint as well as a blessing. Work-arounds are to borrow the entity and structures of others. If rotated this can result in a autonomous community.
• The ultra-light model, for many reasons, seems to be the only “no-headache” option.

Questions

• Can we find a few well-documented or well-known communities of each type, to act as case-studies?
• Sometimes communities stop existing because funding stops. Is there a moral and a commercial ground for ‘taking over’ communities that run out of funding; like a foster home for orphaned communities?
• Can we think of a cost-covering basic model for communities for local development?
• How can communities and associations collaborate?
• Most communities “grow” from companies or ngo’s. Can it be the other way around? Can an existing community jointly decide to become a company or ngo? What does it mean for the commuity? Examples?
• Sermo is an example where the communitiy is funded because insurance companies like (=pay) to watch the ongoing interactions between physicians. What are parallels in other settings? Policy makers like to “watch” agricultural communities, migrant communities, marketeers may want to watch consumer communities. Who might be interested in your community?
• There is quite some thinking on sustainability of organizations. Can we borrow / think similarly for communities?

Josien Kapma – Portugal

Communities in business

 

 

The question

How can communities be self-financing? In my dealing with our group of dairy farmers it had often occurred to me: how to find some money to pay for the costs of running the community, and also for some of the work done? In all development work there is so much emphasis on sustainability, but for communities many seem to take for granted that they are externally financed.

CP2 – KM4dev – back to CP2 – and onwards

When looking at how other communities do it, it was clear that many struggle with it. I decided to bring it in as a “project” for the KM4Dev workshop in Zeist, the Netherlands. Even before that, during the CP2 dialogue in Setúbal at the end of May 2007, this issue was discussed. Together with John D. Smith, and with help of others, we further looked into it after the dialogue. I brought the results of those discussions with me to KM4Dev. This is what the project at KM4dev had as an introduction:

• Title of the Project: Community in Business, exploring (self-)financing models for “communities” that use web2.0 tools

• Brief description: Web 2.0 tools offer possibilities to communicate, organize or collaborate where before this would not have been possible or too expensive. This could offer a huge potential for development. Communities can be formed for joint learning and information exchange, e.g. for local initiatives of a particular region, or of peers like farmers, or micro entrepreneurs. Such communities may have a large value for the users or for development in general, but may not be institutionally sustainable when costs, however low, cannot be met in the long run. Leaders and technology stewards burn up, if not rewarded sufficiently, whether in financial or other terms. Traditional financing models, either membership or transaction based fees, are no longer always applicable. On the other hand the web presence may offer new opportunities. How can these “communities” incorporate sound financial models? What are designs that in an early stage take this cost-coverage issue into account? What can local private businesses contribute?

With a small group of sometimes varying participants we worked on the project. At several sessions, and once extensively over dinner, we explored some of the issues:

• inventory of our experiences with similar communities, and the financing models in use, analysis of success stories;
• brainstorm of possible financing models (looking also at non-development sectors).

We did not come to the point of the other stages;

• elaboration of one or a few selected models for financing of communities.
• test, further develop and promote ‘proved’ models.

Some results in next posts.

Josien Kapma – Portugal

A step towards graphic facilitation: Micheline Chartrand

For a while I had been thinking about using some graphic facilitation but I kept shying away from it because I am not much of a graphic artist. Well , in her workshop, Nancy managed to “liberate me from my censor”. I found out that to practice graphic facilitation you didn’t need to be a talented artist, that with just a few tips in your pocket you could start experimenting with it.

 Among the many tips that Nancy shared here are a few I found particularly useful: 1)Precise your intent: record the discussion or stimulate creative thinking? 2) Use a global metaphore as the background structure (mandala, tree, mountain) 3) Use words as art 4) Draw simple shapes  5) Tie up the pieces together with lines, arrows 6) Draw shadows to emphasize the important stuff…

The beauty of graphics is that, because of their relative imprecision, they leave more space than text for negociation of common meaning. The tips I gathered today will also be useful to enhance my mindmapping repertoire (I use mind mapping to sort out my thoughts when I get confused).

In this workshop, I definitely learned something that I will apply. Thanks Nancy,

Micheline