Blogging. Events. Andygibson. Ruralnet. Moving from from wow to how. Nancy White highlights the issue of the Second Wave Adoption of social media, prompting us to think about moving from excitement to implementation: In education, there is a vanguard of smart, innovative people who are coming up with really wonderful uses of new internet based technologies (sometimes referred to as "web 2.0" stuff), but they are not always seeing adoption in their groups and organizations. Not just in education. The reality check on new technologies is people, and their willingness in business, nonprofits, public bodies to use them - or not. Nancy offers some great slides, and points out that Bev Trayner has been articulating some of the questions in in her blog: Are we focusing on the right value to the people we are asking to use these new tools and ways of working?
Nancy links us to Annette Kramer on How to Implement Web 2.0 In Practice? Beth Trayner Kanter picks up Nancy's post with a reference to her own thinking on the participatory nonprofit, adding: Meeting Harry's friends at the social media cafe. Audience isn't "audience" any more. It's online. I've been talking to some broadcasters recently about now they are rebalancing their work to take more account of the online world, and how they find out what "the audience" think about their efforts. I'm particularly interested in the second bit: how to consult, engage, discuss with what-used-to-be-known-as Audience (viewers and listeners) when trust in TV news is falling and we spend more time on the Net than watching TV.
Some of the concern to engage stems from loss of ratings and ad revenue - and finding where eyeballs will go next. Some research, like the BBC Trust review of bbc.co.uk, is a formal process to ensure the people who make programmes are fulfilling their duty to provide appropriate services to license payers. I'm not a great media expert, and my conversations were limited, so forgive me if this sounds a bit naive - but I think there is a shift of model needed here. Technorati Tags: e-democracy, engagement. Attitude is more important than experience in collaboration. Whatever methods and structures you come up with for partnerships and involvement with other interests, it's always down to the people concerned to make it work - or not.
So who do you need? A new study, reported by Dave Pollard, explores what it take to create The Ideal Collaborative Team. The conclusion is that most people experienced in collaboration would rather have inexperienced people with a positive attitude than highly experienced people who lack enthusiasm, candor or commitment.
Dave reports from his work with Mitch Ditkoff, Tim Moore and Carolyn Allen: Two criteria, enthusiasm for the subject of the collaboration, and open-mindedness and curiosity, are rated as the most important criteria by virtually all segments of respondents. More than half of all respondents rated these qualities as indispensable in a collaboration partner. Dave and his collaborators also struck up a conversation among themselves to reflect, from their experience, on the essentials of collaboration. What are collaboration "thingies" - beyond wine and pizza.
Earlier this week John Craig and colleagues, who are developing the Third Sector Innovation Exchange, invited a bunch of us along to share ideas over wine and pizza on what it takes to make collaborations work. I ended up pondering on how "thingies" might help - of which more later. The Innovation Exchange is being funded by the UK Government to "find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".
What this means, as I understand it, is that the exchange wants to find social entrepreneurs, nonprofits and others with good ideas, and then support them in working with public bodies who might buy their products and services, and funders who could invest. At the same time they have to encourage organisations who may be conventional in procurement to be more adventurous. The evening was fantastically helpful for me, if challenging, so many thanks to those who attended. Web critic calls We-Think "a grand narrative" Last night NESTA hosted a debate between Charles Leadbeater and Andrew Keen, to launch Charlie's book We-Think. This promotes the collaborative potential of the Web, as Charlie explained here: An idea is set in motion by being shared.
The scope available to use for pooling, exchanging and developing ideas determines the extent of our innovation and creativity and so fundamentally our prosperity, well-being and hope for the future. Ideas grow by being articulated, tested, refined, borrowed, amended, adapted and extended, activities that can rarely take place entirely in the head of an individual; but which invariably they involve many people sharing different insights and criticisms. The web allows shared creativity of this kind to involve more people, discussing more questions from more angles with more ideas in play, at least it does as long as people organise themselves in the right way.
And here's Charlie: Click to play ... we are teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Click to play. Nonprofit uncollaboration. In Fortune favours the brave consultant Paul Caplan reports on his work helping UK voluntary organisation explore the potential of what he appropriately calls the Live Web, and then muses on why the potential for collaboration is not being fully realised: Currently doing some work for the nice people at the Finance Hub, another UK government initiative like my benefactors at the ICT Hub, designed to get the voluntary and community sector working better and taking over from the collapsing state sector (who slipped that in?).
Anyway, been seeing the inside of a lot of trains again as I travel around the country meeting VCOs and the organisations that support them. Once again I am amazed at the levels of energy, committment and passion out there in the real world. If these Hub initiatives actually worked and brought that sector together, and I was in government, I’d be more worried about that than a bunch of angry motorists and a petition. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work out: