A living experiment in online collaboration
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April 29th, 2005 by Alex
The blogiverse is having fun with Just Letters, a little flash game that is a great living experiment in online collaboration. All you need is your browser, so go check it out!
Just Letters is an interesting window on how people can work together when the demands of collaboration are low enough, even if the apparent rewards are not much greater. As I write this, there are 215 people playing with the app on 5 different virtual refridgerators…many of them working cooperatively with invisible strangers. Any more concrete lessons on e-collaboration that we can glean from this project?
Justice in a nutshell
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April 28th, 2005 by Alex
My past research on hacktivism took me far enough into the hacker world to appreciate the difference between hackers and script kiddies. In a nutshell, real hackers are computer experts who use their impressive skills for peace, love and kindness, while script kiddies are non-experts who learn just enough to use their unremarkable skills to do stupid (and often destructive) things that give real hackers a bad name.
But our good friends at ODTAA put us onto a lovely exchange that represents a little comeuppance for all those who roll their eyes at script kiddie shanigans.
Auf deutsch, check out: StopHipHop.de
Or for an English-language version please see this page from Google’s cache.
Stakeholder communications go online
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April 26th, 2005 by Alex
Thanks to Kristan Boudreau of BC Hydro for pointing me to a paper by Carol Adams and Geoffrey Frost on “Stakeholder Engagement Strategies: Possibilities for the Internet.“(PDF) The authors undertook a comparative study of how companies in Australia, Germany and the UK use web sites as a tool for communicating with stakeholders, based on more than 100 questionnaires completed by web managers and content creators.
While the report primarily focuses on one-way communication of information to stakeholders, rather than interaction with stakeholders, it’s a interesting picture of the starting point for any shift towards online engagement. If organizations want to use the Internet to engage their stakeholders, they have to begin with using the Internet as an effective channel of information delivery. And according to this research, they don’t always pull that off.
Adams and Frost do a nice job of summarizing both the advantages and drawbacks of web-based communication and as a way of delivering information to stakeholders. The advantages include instant availability of information, flexibility of information delivery, and environmental benefits (through reduced paper use). Disadvanges include lack of Internet access among some stakeholders, lack of ability to target information to specific users, difficulty of delivery large documents efficiently online, costs of maintaining a site, effectiveness of the communications medium, and concerns about the authenticity of online information.
To me, this list of advantages and disadvantages underlines two key points that I bring up over and over again in conversations about online engagement. First, that good technology can’t make up for poor strategy: online as well as offline, effective communications depends on a solid understanding of your audience, medium and tools. The net can be a poor communications medium or a great one, depending on your strategy, implementation and goals.
Which brings me to my second point…which is that the choice of medium must always be informed by one’s communications goals. In most situations those goals will best be served by a combination of on- and offline engagement channels. The concerns that Adams and Frost raise about web-based information delivery will generally be addressed with a communications strategy that uses online information as a complement to traditional channels like print, phone or TV. Most crucially, effective online communications can help to address the shortcomings of these other media by providing the very strengths of information availability, flexibility and resource conservation that are noted in this report.
One Damn Thing After Another
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April 17th, 2005 by awsamuel
One Damn Thing After Another
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April 17th, 2005 by awsamuel
Gnomedex 5.0
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April 16th, 2005 by Alexandra
The next mega-gathering of West Coast bloggers, coming up June 23-25 in Seattle. Looks to be a great way to connect with the latest thinking on blogging, tagging, social software and all those other Web 2.0 buzzwords.
Gnomedex 5.0
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April 16th, 2005 by Alexandra
The next mega-gathering of West Coast bloggers, coming up June 23-25 in Seattle. Looks to be a great way to connect with the latest thinking on blogging, tagging, social software and all those other Web 2.0 buzzwords.
BlogherCon 2005
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April 16th, 2005 by Alexandra
The first BlogherCon — a blogging conference for women — is planned for July 30, 2005 in Santa Clara California. The schedule of events will be announced May 1.
BlogherCon 2005
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April 16th, 2005 by Alexandra
The first BlogherCon — a blogging conference for women — is planned for July 30, 2005 in Santa Clara California. The schedule of events will be announced May 1.
Rad Geek’s Projects » FeedWordPress
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April 16th, 2005 by Alexandra
I’ve been exploring the wonderful world of RSS aggregation for the past few months. (RSS newbies, check out the Wikipedia introduction.) I wanted to go beyond aggregating content for my own use, into the realm of aggregation as a way to support the blogging process. And finally, here’s the tool to do the job.
FeedWordPress is a way of building RSS aggregation right into a blog. Any RSS feed can be streamed into your blog so that it creates new posts automatically. I’ve got some ideas of how to make this work effectively, so stay tuned for updates on the experiment.
Online engagement: strength in numbers
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April 15th, 2005 by Alex
The Canadian Policy Research Network has released a new paper called “Democracy — Updating the Owner’s Manual” by Mary Pat MacKinnon, the Director of CPRN’s Public Involvement Network.
The paper provides a very useful introduction to citizen engagement, informed by CPRN’s own extensive experience in engaging over 2,000 Canadians in public dialogue. Mary Pat suggests four reasons that citizen engagement matters:
- To safeguard democracy
- To support democracy with informed, engaged citizens
- To improve policy outcomes
- To nurture democracy for future generations
And among the challenge that Mary Pat identifies for citizen engagement practitioners, she asks:
How do we scale up to institutionalize democratic participation at all levels of government, within public service and parliaments? How do we capture the full effects of public involvement – how do we improve our ability to evaluate and communicate results to the public?
This is just the challenge that online engagement is uniquely able to address. Face-to-face engagement imposes enormous informational, personal and financial demands. Would-be participants have to keep informed about a range of issues and events if they want to be ready when the consultation wagon comes through town. They have to juggle scheduling pressures, geographic barriers, and inhibitions about speaking up in a room full of strangers. And the cost of organizing a series of town hall meetings requires a significant resource commitment.
Online engagement and online support for face-to-face engagement can address some of these challenges by transcending many of the informational, personal and financial obstacles to large-scale participation. Many countries – Canada included – offer consultation portals that list current requests for input and links to relevant background information. Online discussions give people the opportunity to participate whenever and wherever is most convenient for them, and makes it easier to speak up. Most crucially, online consultations can engage a much wider range and larger number of participants than would otherwise be logistically or financially feasible.
But to realize that potential, we need to push beyond the resource-intensive focus on professionally moderated small-group discussions. That’s the model that still dominates the online consultation field, even though it imposes many of the same barriers and costs that limit face-to-face engagement. If we reduce every engagement process to 50-person moderated groups, we’re never going to break through the glass ceiling that counts 1,000 people as massive participation.
And what’s at stake is far more than numbers. If we agree with Mary Pat that “a well functioning democracy requires a well informed and engaged citizenry,” then we need to think about the tipping point at which a sprinkling of consultation participants starts to foster a broader culture of engagement and participation. Face-to-face engagement is a crucial part of developing that culture, but I suspect that only online engagement is capable of getting us to the numbers that will turn citizen participation into a pervasive, enriching and habitual part of public decision-making.
Participants - Toolkit Citizen Participation
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April 15th, 2005 by Alex
This site describes itself as:
a growing group of civil society (NGO) and local government organisations from all over the world, working together to promote participatory local governance.
Our site offers information on tools which promote citizen participation, a forum for discussions and it holds articles for further reference.