Ideas¶

11 December 2008
in Ideas
4 min read

Aldo de Moor and I are rapidly approaching the end of our mid-week work retreat. The fresh sea breeze and the occasional glass of wine have helped us divide our attention between Real Work, and Serious Study. It resulted in an emerging framework or meta-model, with a few purposes:

Advance our earlier modelling work with new insights, and assess where we think things are by now.
Enable us to combine our years of experience in talking about various parts of the puzzle in a common structure.
Provide an overarching framework to look at the various models we have come to use or see over time.

It’s very much still a work in progress, but while twittering about our progress, I got into a conversation (via Facebook) with John Bywater of the Appropriate Software Foundation, which helped me clarify a bit of my thinking. I met John just over five years ago at Summer Source, where he introduced me to the concept of pattern languages. At that time, it was still too abstract for me to apply in my actual work, but over the years, patterns have become more common-place, for instance in PHP programming and in wikis.

Why a framework?

Over the years, I’ve been involved in several projects that crudely could be characterised as: a non-profit or governmental organisation takes the lead, and wants to embrace the internet in their attempt to increase effective collaboration and learning of people and organisations they work with. A few typical examples:

A development organisation wants to improve learning and knowledge management among their international offices, local staff, beneficiaries, and relevant experts.
A policy organisation wants to draw upon a multitude of opinions and experiences, to draft a policy proposal to be submitted to decision-making processes.
An advocacy organisation wants to coordinate their activities across a global network of grassroots, autonomous member organisations.
A campaigning organisation wants to enable their constituency to self-organise activities that create both local change and global impact.

The starting point can be a very detailed question, like “how can we use web 2.0”, “what platform should we use”, “how can we write a document together”, “how can we manage our projects”, or “how do we set up a knowledge management strategy”. There usually is a deeper question behind this, and I usually find myself approaching a project from three perspectives:

“Purpose”: what is the vision and mission of the organisation, how are they partnering with other organisations, and who are the people they try to involve?
“Process”: how do people work together, what policies and strategies are there, and what communities exist already?
“Technology”: what platforms can be used, what tools are people using to perform their work, and how does it link with the rest of the internet and ICT in general?

More often than not, there is a gap between the “purpose people”, who think in organisational strategies and communication impacts, and the “technology people”, who manage the tools, both ends often in a more central role. In between are the “process people” who work in the field. The challenge is then to find a way to “make things flow” between all of them.

Putting models together

With my colleagues, I have basically tried to answer the overarching (or underlying) question of how to tie it all together in several of such projects. We often did this by combining a few models we knew with our own thinking, to come up with the next iteration of our own concept. The models I know seem to address only part of the picture I sketched earlier: looking at community building, business planning, monitoring and evaluation, Community of Practice, life-cycle management, strategic networking, user experience design, agile development, and so on. How do they connect, or overlap? And how can they strengthen each other.

What we came up with, is a framework that combines the “purpose, process, technology” dimension with sphere of influence: how much control does the leading organisation have in a specific area of their environment. You completely control your own strategy, you can work in partnerships with others, and you try to offer value to individuals elsewhere.

In a matrix, with some examples of model elements for each part:

	“core”	“periphery”	“world”
Purpose	Programme vision, mission, strategy business plan	Partnership strategic networking “movement as network”	“Market” market research competitive analysis
	“communication” identity design brand mantra common story
Process	Intervention knowledge management strategy monitoring and evaluation	Community processes and roles community of practice life cycle	Network social network analysis
	“engagement” pyramid of engagement communication matrix tool selection
Technology	Web platform technology roadmap tool configuration	User experience information architecture usability visual design	Internet web 2.0 benchmarking metrics

This is a first version of our framework, and we’ll try to map the various models we have worked with, or know of, onto this framework, to see if it holds. In different parts of the life cycle (plan, create, maintain, adapt), you’ll need different types of models, and you’ll likely put the emphasis on different parts of the framework.

To be continued…

4 December 2008
in Ideas, Research
4 min read

“Doing things together online”

Recently, a couple of events allowed me to look again at how groups of people “do things together online”.

I’ve had a chance to meet up a few times in a short period with Aldo de Moor, and that helped us reflect on where things have come since we first drafted the contours of our “social context model”, nearly ten years ago now.

Add a few potential projects in the pipeline that deal with global networks of people who should produce something together. And the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into the NABUUR concept, to see how it is still pretty unique.

Aldo and I quickly concluded that although a lot is happening, and happening fast, there actually has been little progress in what we see as the hardest part of (online) collaboration: supporting work flows. Sure enough, people find ways to use the techno-centric tools that emerge, and services like Basecamp are making inroads into this. But most platforms still have some way to go.

With the rise of general-purpose social networking platforms, more and more organisations look at ways to also have such a platform. Let’s first distinguish two aspects:

One is to create a meeting point for like-minded people, to (eventually) work on a group activity.
Another aspect is to use it for “social media marketing”, to let people talk to their peers about an idea or campaign.

General-purpose platforms like Facebook, MySpace, Hyves are great tools for the social media marketing. With technologies like OpenSocial and Facebook Apps, you might even be able to structure your meeting points inside such a platform. Or you just build a “store-front” like a group or fan page that tries to draw people into your own platform of meeting points.

So now you are gathering groups of like-minded people. Now what?

Many platforms seem to stop at this “gathering phase” around a more or less single step: sign a petition, raise funds, pass on some viral video, feel solidarity around your idea. To me, it often feels “evangelic”, people take turns and “come out”, talk publicly about their deep-felt passion and ideas. However, there is no support or follow-up to actually help you through implementing your ideas, and often even little opportunity to actually have a real group conversation. It’s more like a flash mob, depending heavily on the social marketing to go viral.

Pledgebank helps you make a pledge and get solidarity from others
ChangeEverything lets you express the change you want to make
Kiva and MyC4 let groups of people raise money to invest in business

Keep the members informed

Some platforms make it a bit more sticky, and do offer tools to develop a group identity, essential for group members to build stronger commitment, and a level of (individual) accountability. This usually happens with tools like discussion forums, blogs, document and file sharing, and perhaps an agenda or wiki. Since the first BBSs of the 1980s, the technology has become easier to use (task-level improvements), but has not developed a lot of workflow support yet (group process improvements). The execution happens “outsite”, with progress reports online, and few tools to track progress or results.

Change.org gathers people around causes, keeping each other informed
Voor de Wereld van Morgen helps actions to gather support by others
Amazee is actually mentioning “collaborate” as part of the activity (but still needs to deliver)

Track progress

And then there are a few initiatives that actually try to help a group translate their goals into individual tasks and phases, closer towards a work breakdown structure, and then offer tools to let group members keep track of tasks and results. The main example of successful communities collaborating together online are open source projects, where group process patterns have emerged, and tools like issue trackers, road maps, and revision control actually support group members. Attempts in other fields seem to be still exploring how to make such group process patterns understandable for “everyone”.

NABUUR has “project rooms” with tasks you can do, and is adding story-telling and more social fun elements
OpenPlans helps keep track of tasks needed to realise the goals
Microvolunteerism is just starting to explore tools and formats to structure volunteer collaboration
BiDnetworks allows investors to also coach the projects they invested in

Reflections

The “group gathering” initiatives build mainly on personal motivations of members, offering a story-telling environment to strenthen and sustain such motivations and connect individual members. The “work process” initiatives are pretty results-oriented, with very implicit reference to motivations of members.

Bringing these approaches together is a first step. They cover different parts of the sociality model, and address different levels in the social context model. But then there still will be gaps.

Next week, Aldo and I will be on a work-retreat, something we do more often, to mix day-time work with night-time deep reflections. We’re both stoked to dust off and develop our social context model, and I hope to have another look at the sociality angle as well.

21 May 2008
in Ideas
3 min read

Moving from "Open source" to "Open roadmap"

Many NGOs are good at forming strategic alliances to achieve their objectives (they’re usually also good at competing each other nearly to death, often at the same time, but I’ll keep that for a different post maybe). Yet, at the level of web technology, this usually seems to be limited to the level of exchanging tips and tricks, perhaps some RSS feeds, and referring each other to providers and vendors.

Two major developments are changing that situation now:

Many organisations are investing in Drupal for their web platforms. This creates an eco-system where it’s easier to exchange actual technology, and to talk about it on a higher level of abstraction of artefacts and concepts.
There’s an exploding interest in the NGO world to align strategies and investments in technology. The “Tool Pool” discussion revived at the Ecampaigning Forum, and the NetSquared conference next week brings this closer as well. Not to mention to emergence of more and more BarCamps like Social Innovation Camp.

From the code level: Easier sharing in the form of Drupal modules obviously is a great step forward, but still leaves you to reverse engineer the code and functionality of a module, to find out what the objectives and constraints were at the time of building.

From the organisational level: The predominant thinking still follows the pattern of coming together, listing needs, identifying commonalities, then trying to pool resources and plan towards development. It doesn’t facilitate a “long tail” approach with more ad-hoc alliances based on existing schedules and deadlines.

Enter the “open road map”

The middle ground in this is starting to share road maps in a more standardised way: to formulate organisational needs in terms of technical functionality, and indicate “organisational value” as well as expected “workload” (and maybe even available resources or indicative planning).

There are two main processes that need to be in place to make this “open road map” work:

Organisations should develop and maintain product road maps for their online platforms, and make those available openly. In that way, (in-house or external) developers can easily get an overview of multiple road maps, and identify overlaps. Occasional developers can also more easily contribute to a feature that will quickly be used.
Development should be done in an agile way: relatively short iterations with new releases, and a mindset of continuously assessing opportunities and priorities. When developers signal overlaps, organisations can change their plans and truly join forces, without jeopardising their end goal.

I’ve taken the opportunity as “NetSquared project lead” for the Oneworld Connect project to explore how to translate organisational objectives into feature requests for engineers to work on, working towards a roadmap via a wiki.

And so I was excited when my friend Rob Purdie (who has managed migrations to Drupal for Greenpeace UK and Amnesty International, and is currently working with Concern) organised the first of hopefully an ongoing series of Drupal for NGOs meetups in London, and suggested a session called How To Build a Product Road Map, with the dream that it helps participants identify road map overlaps and then collaborate.

I hope to see this “open road map” develop quickly in various conversations in the next two-three weeks already 🙂

11 January 2008
in Ideas, Research
3 min read

Designing sociality for Nabuur

Nabuur has been pioneering online volunteering since 2001, and is currently redesigning their organisation: how to put "web 2.0" into the DNA of everything that’s happening? And how to engineer that, rather than try and hope it works?

So I spent the day with Nabuur team members, who invited René Jansen to facilitate drilling down to the core of their activities. René is one of the authors of "The Realm of Sociality: Notes on the design of social software", a paper which won the Best Paper Award 2007 at the “International Conference on Information Systems” in Montreal, last December, and (to me, at least) introduces the concept of "sociality" as the centre of the design process.

The model uses theories of "Practice", "Identity", "Social Structure" and "Situated Experience" to define four realms of design areas to focus on. I’ve just downloaded the paper to read a more indepth explanation (and be able to explain it myself). It was a good framework to guide the discussions to a few crucial dilemmas and hard choices.

What Nabuur does

Nabuur offers opportunities to volunteer for villages and communities in developing countries: a local representative describes a project that would help improve circumstances for people in his or her community, and people anywhere on the world can contribute research, knowledge, connections, and organise resources from behind their computers. It works, and leads to wonderful results. But Nabuur needs to, and definitely wants to grow far beyond the 150 villages and 10,000 volunteers it has.

The focus used to be on the villages themselves. Last year I was already involved in a redesign that would speak more to the various personas that would use the site. The resulting website was orientated first towards "doing a task" and getting more results from the efforts of volunteers (basically focusing on Dave, a persona who wanted concrete tasks and outcomes).

But the reaction of existing neighbours was mostly negative: they felt the site was broken and "stolen" from them, and needed to be fixed (ASAP please). Incrementally improving the interface for other personas was stalled, and the team reflected on the question "what went wrong?".

A new approach

In terms of the model of René and his colleagues, the heart of the sociality around which the design revolved was shifting from village to project, and now maybe moving to the local representative or to the experience of contributing to improvement in people’s lives. A choice had to be made, and the way to do it was by determining the core social practice of Nabuur.

A social practice is "a way people do something together" (the paper probably has a real definition), and we identified and discussed four candidates:

Bringing supply and demand together: a marketplace of people with skills and time, and villages with work to be done.
Achieving something together: a project bank where people work in a team to deliver results.
Helping neighbours: a community where people help to address acute needs of each other.
Sharing stories: experiencing a trajectory together, and telling stories about it to each other and others.

Listening to the neighbours, who experienced a gap between "them in the office", and "us who do the work", the Nabuur team wants to focus on a truly social approach, positioning themselves and the whole Nabuur development among the neighbours as well. And the practice that is furthest from sterile transactions, and leads to the warmest social ties is sharing stories (around the work in villages and communities, of course, but also around Nabuur as a whole.)

"Writing our experience together"

The practice of "writing our experience together" can encapsulate actual projects being completed and results being delivered, but puts celebrating those achievements on the foreground (right now, the successes are still mainly hidden gems). It will lead to some difficult choices and self-restraint in reviewing the functional specifications: let’s really not build a knowledge repository or community of practice, but really first try to connect with existing initiatives. Only if it doesn’t exist anywhere on the ‘net, yet is crucial to work being done, and maybe even then on a site separate from the Nabuur.com site.

I’m pleased with the outcome: it aligns with many take-aways from NetSquared in May last year, and it opens many ways to improve engagement of the neighbours, and also exposed a lot more of the groundbreaking changes in how international development is done here. And looking forward to working with James and Pelle to translate this into a new site!