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Passion, the Participatory Web, and the Potentials of ICT

87be0f794d47686bababb8fb0981de51_MD5.jpg I haven’t been able to go to the Web2ForDev meetings so far, but have encountered the typical problems of ICT and knowledge sharing in rural areas around the world. So when Christian Kreutz approached me to contribute to a publication by GTZ, the Deutsche Gesellschaft for Technische Zusammenarbeit (German Technical Cooperation), on how NABUUR offered a new way of connecting people and letting knowledge flow, I got in touch with Raul Caceres, who has done amazing work as a NABUUR volunteer, resulting in a United Nations Volunteer of the Year Award, and an invitation to speak at the Nobel Summit on Public Services. Together, we wrote one of the seven articles in “The Participatory Web – New Potentials of ICT in Rural Areas”.

Christian offers a great overview of the publication on his blog, and reminds us: “Obvious challenges are low connectivity particularly in rural areas, low literacy rate, lack of media competence to use the web and well function models to provide and target information.” But when glancing over some of the other excellent contributions, and reflecting on our own, I felt we mainly write about the functional, but somehow don’t get across that one aspect that really makes it tick: people’s passion.

In working with NABUUR over a last few years now, meeting volunteers, and reading, seeing, and hearing the stories, there is one crucial aspect that makes it so different: passion. Especially when people connect one-to-one, peer-to-peer. The one big challenge that’s not in Christian’s list, and often overseen: organisation. Organisations are important, do wonderful work too, but from within an organisation, it’s often hard to take an outside perspective, and ask the question: what if we try to do this without an organisation? What do organisations do to people’s passion?

Connecting people with passion makes challenges more like steps on the way: you don’t look at the challenge, you look at what’s behind it. And overcoming the challenge makes you feel even more connected than you already did. Life won’t be instantly easier, but life will be fueled with an energy that transforms you. And thereby it transforms a little bit of society.

These are just two examples around NABUUR. They give me energy and inspiration to do what I do. It’s organising, and all the way across the “mission, vision, strategy” paradigm. But not based on functional interactions with a motivational coat of paint. Rather than looking at Return On Investment (or Return On Insight), look at Return On Passion. Then look at these tools again, and at the way you can organise around them.

Plumbing on the web

Social Media Plumbing:

../../../assets/posts/19356120bac308f4517a384baf1364b8_MD5.png

Flow chart

A post by Robert Scoble made me have another look at rooms in FriendFeed. I set things up over the weekend, and decided to document it, to maybe succeed in explaining what this is all about. Here’s my situation:

  • I post content on various social media sites through various tools
  • I want some of that content to appear on my own website
  • I switch platforms quite often, or start using them in a different way, so keeping it up to date should be easy

So I decided to start a FriendFeed room with content that I want to appear on my site 1, and use their feed widget to then display it on my home page. It still took some effort (to get the styling how I wanted it), but it’s done, and here’s how.

Connecting the pipes

The schematic picture 2 shows how things connect:

I surf the web and come across pages or sites that interest me.

I collect all the stuff in a FriendFeed room from various sources:

My next steps will be to set up similar aggregators other collections of life streams, to feed into other places. And to draw some more pretty pictures on how it is all connected 🙂

1 My website runs on Drupal, which could aggregate things directly, but Drupal still rarely delivers the “should be easy” part, and I wanted to move forward with content, not code or config.

2 I’ve made this scheme in Xmind, a mind-mapping tool that recently went (partly) open source. I’ll post the source file soon.

Update: the source for the image is now attached.

  • in Ideas
  • 4 min read

A framework for “online social network models”

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”
PurposeProgramme
  • vision, mission, strategy
  • business plan
Partnership
  • strategic networking
  • “movement as network”
“Market”
  • market research
  • competitive analysis
“communication”
  • identity design
  • brand mantra
  • common story
ProcessIntervention
  • 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
TechnologyWeb 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…

“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:

  1. One is to create a meeting point for like-minded people, to (eventually) work on a group activity.
  2. 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.

NABUUR volunteer opportunities in Social Actions

../../../../assets/posts/f0b7df916cfbfd56ea01482e1f0b8f7c_MD5.pngI think I first met Peter Deitz at Web of Change, talking about his work as micro-philanthropy consultant, and his idea to mash up the actionable opportunities on all the platforms for social change. That became Social Actions, a platform where you can find things to do: join an event, sign a petition, donate to a cause, give out a loan, volunteer.

Those things you can do come from a variety of sources, like Care2, GlobalGiving, Kiva, Idealist.org, and starting this week, also from NABUUR, the online volunteer network.

../../../../assets/posts/c2c477027efa496ad851445582f08e47_MD5.jpgIt’s the outcome of a meeting Siegfried and I had at NetSquared with Peter, Christine Egger, and Phil Klein in May this year.

Social Actions won several prizes around that time, which really got things moving faster and faster. Amidst the turmoil of migrating NABUUR to Drupal, and Social Actions stepping into a roller-coaster speed-up of development, we managed to output the NABUR volunteer tasks in RSS to feed into the Social Actions search engine.

In the meantime, Social Actions has released a “Related ways to take action” widget that you can put on your blog or website. It will suggest things you can do based on the content of the page, and I have good hopes that that will also help NABUUR tasks get more attention by being listed elsewhere. And hopefully we’ll take a next step towards a “world-wide do good” widget to give people a chance to donate, loan, or act.

Peter also has managed to keep the discussion moving about a suitable microformat to add more semantic information to such an RSS feed. That should allow for even more targeted display of opportunities to do good.

A special thanks as well to Billy and Marny and the folks at Techsoup who organised NetSquared. The groundwork for the NABUUR-Social Actions connection was laid out there, and we’ll continue to build on that 🙂

Moving to Ubuntu – Rolf Kleef

I’ve finally made to switch: my desktop now is open source! I’ve pushed back for quite some time, had too many programs that still required Windows, and generally just wasn’t ready. But now I did it. My laptop needed a fresh install, and I tried out the latest Ubuntu (going under names like 8.04 and Hardy and Hardy Heron). And decided to stay with it, after trying out things for several weeks. Why?

../../../../assets/posts/d5a41843e0369e411ca6676ba0e051f1_MD5.png

My Ubuntu desktop

  • Windows XP was running smoothly, but I found myself duplicating efforts on figuring out how to do things on Windows, when I just did them on a Linux server, to have a good local development environment. And I had already switched to mostly open source software for my day-to-day work.
  • Linux is catching up with the usability thing. The latest Ubuntu managed to present a desktop that didn’t feel like falling back into the last century, and it recognised most hardware. Particularly, I now could get my wireless working without a lot of effort, something I didn’t manage 2 years ago.
  • I’ve been able to find reasonable alternatives for almost all software I used. Sometimes it is a bit half-baked, but then again, it covers the 80% of the cases I use it for, and at least I can do my work the way I did, most of the time. Installation and removal of “supported packages” definitely is easier. And a lot of software is more “hackable” (example in a next post).
  • VirtualBox is like the VMware I had (but now it’s free), and it allows me to run a Windows XP virtual PC inside my Ubuntu desktop. Sadly, though, it fails on the only thing I really need: reporting my invoices and expense declarations…

There’s still stuff to be desired, too:

  • Most of the special features of my laptop seem to be unavailable, even though it’s not really the latest model. It is a Sony, with several Intel components, where Intel is supposed to be reasonably open source friendly. But the LED light for the wireless doesn’t work, and I can’t do dual screen (on the other hand, I can do 1920×1200 resolution on my external screen, which wasn’t possible under Windows)
  • I easily find myself searching the interwebs for solutions, with information from 2006 or even 2007 that seems to be completely irrelevant to my version, and lots of software that is hardly documented at all. A lot would be more or less “impossible” without knowing quite a bit of the technology under the hood, and ample time to research and hack away.

Meeting “my project” and the N2Y3 community IRL

NetSquared already has started. Sitting next to again an impressive cake, the room is buzzing while I write my intro. Rolf Kleef, from Amsterdam, here to enjoy San Francisco for some three weeks, and doing the last little bits with Roshani and Mike of Oneworld US to be ready for two rollercoaster days!

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  • 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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 roadmap”

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 roadmap” work:

  1. Organisations should develop and maintain product roadmaps for their online platforms, and make those available openly. In that way, (inhouse or external) developers can easily get an overview of multiple roadmaps, and identify overlaps. Occasional developers can also more easily contribute to a feature that will quickly be used.
  2. 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 jeapordising 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 Roadmap, with the dream that it helps participants identify roadmap overlaps and then collaborate.

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

Going Open! Thursday at the Transnational Institute

First post here after a long silence… maybe too busy with twitter, Nabuur, WebEnq, Ecampaigning Forum, NetSquared. And now preparing my short intro into "open everything" to set the stage for Thursday’s meetup of the E-collaboration group.

Within a smaller group, we had some discussions about "open", and about how choosing technology for your campaign or organisation is also a political, cultural, and ethical choice. Features and price often dominate, and lots of stuff on the internet is for free. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch: there are many lessons we learned in development aid that equally apply when your organisation gets such "free" web development aid. Lets not spend decades to learn them again.

So while on the one hand, people are trail-blazing the concept of "open everything", there are, on the other hand, many people working in international cooperation who are just starting to look at why all this "open" matters, and how it can help them achieve their mission.

We’ll be trying to bridge that gap on Thursday afternoon:

12.00 – 13.00 Welcome, coffee & tea

13.00 – 13.20 Getting acquainted

Plenary

13.20 – 13.30 Introduction into the "OPEN" field by Rolf Kleef

13.30 – 14.00 Concepts behind Open Standards and Free Software (Open Source) by Anne Sedee

Group workshops

14.00 – 14.45 Two group workshops

Plenary

14.45 – 15.15 "Learning in Freedom: Open Content and Open Educational Resources" by David Jacovkis (Free Knowledge Institute)

15.15 – 15.30 Coffee and tea break

Group workshops

15.30 – 16.30 Two group workshops

  • ‘making knowledge open and accessible’, experiences from the development community by Peter Ballantyne (Euforic)
  • Debate Game: People bring in a case about an open/ closed dilemma

Evaluation & closing

16.30 – 17.00 Presentations and evaluation.

17.00 – 18.00 Borrel

The meeting will take place on 22nd May 2008 at Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. There are still a few places left, so get in touch if you want to join!

Getting in the mood for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge with Oneworld Connect

In my third year coming to NetSquared, I find myself in a new role: as one of 21 designated “project leads” who will be trying to connect the featured projects with the developers ready to work on an NGO project.

I’m working with Roshani Kothari and Michael Litz of the Oneworld Connect project, and together we’ve started a wiki page with what we’d like to work on. I’m posting the story here too: please help us develop this further, shape our thoughts, and connect our ambitions to the endless possibilities 🙂

OneWorld in a nutshell

“ OneWorld.net is the premiere global hub for groups and individuals who care about international issues—a town hall for today’s interconnected world.”

Since 1995, OneWorld has developed a massive site: 500,000+ articles and multi-media in 11 languages. OneWorld has a strong track record of innovation in the digital public space including CMS-driven site (1995), radio(1998), video(2001), and first UN speech by US politician through 2nd Life (2007).

Our challenge in a nutshell

We need to make our work more navigable and user customized, and provide new ways for our users to connect to 2000+ partner orgs and to each other.

  1. Map mashup is a first step in enhancing visualization.
  2. Widget will enable users to submit content via website and cellphones, and
  3. Metadata will enable easy sharing of information.

Technically: the current massive CMS is being de-centralized, to better tailor to the regional needs and context of each of the 12 Oneworld editorial centers in the world. OneWorld US and several others are migrating to Drupal, some to Plone, and a few have tailored proprietary systems.

HELP US WITH…

Here are ideas we want to work on. Help us define them in more detail, or help us Just Build Them.

1. Visualization through maps and timelines

  • Geo-tagging existing content. 500,000 articles in 11 languages, from the days before ubiquitous geo-tagging… now what?
  • Showing the underexposed stories. Can we give extra weight to stories that are not (yet) high on Yahoo and Google News, CNN, and the likes?
  • Highlighting the connections. Stories are connected in time, and to organizations and campaigns. How to show those connections on a map? In a timeline?

2. Widgets for feedback and inputs

  • Let our registered users take their selections with them. To their blogs and their Facebook and MySpace profiles. And allow rating from there (would that be mashing FiveStar and Subscriptions into a Widget Generator module?)
  • Allow replies and feedback from those widgets too! Local content, additional stories or links to blogs, video, images.
  • If that works with a good API, it should be easy to make interfaces available for mobile phones and other platforms too, right?

3. Decentralizing, not disconnecting

We need to keep the Oneworld centers connected, and exchange content with rich metadata information. How to keep distributed content in sync?

  • Synchronization with a centralized repository?
  • RDF Synchronization Connectors between sites? Drupal-to-Drupal, Drupal-to-Plone?

(Accidently, having a nice Drupal-to-Drupal content synchronization tool might help a lot with general testing-staging-live deployment setups too!)

Get in touch if you want to help Oneworld Connect! Leave a comment here, skype rolfkleef, email rolf[at]drostan.org, or add to/edit the wiki page!