Community Led Activities

Community-Led Activities Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email [email_address] UKOLN is supported by: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/online/emerge-2007-06/
About This Talk
Questions to be addressed:
What useful work can be done without significant project funding?
What are the benefits of community-led activities?
How can community activities help to enhance project proposals?
How can community-led activities help to embed project-funded deliverables?
This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (but note caveat) Resources bookmarked using ‘ jisc-emerge-2007-06-07 ' tag

About The Speaker
Brian Kelly:
UK Web Focus – an advisory post which provides advices on making effective use of the on Web (with focus on standards, emerging Web technologies)
Involved in Web work since January 1993
Providing support on Web 2.0 / social networks to Emerge project
About UKOLN:
National centre of expertise in digital information management
Based at the University of Bath
Funded by MLA and JISC to support the cultural heritage and higher/further education sectors
Introduction

About This Talk
View of history of development work (over-simplified):
Project proposals developed by individuals, institutions or groups in competition with others
Successful bids develop deliverables, with community engagement limited to formal tasks
Vision for exploiting Communities of Practices:
Benefits of openness being appreciated (open source, open standards, open data, …)
Benefits of social networks being appreciated ( wisdom of crowds )
Social networking technologies are pervasive
We (individuals, groups, institutions) can be enriched by community engagement
Introduction Note current debate on approaches for institutional repositories

IR Debate Will formal projects be slow to respond to changes to the environment (technical, cultural)? Can projects do “quick and dirty” – even if that’s what users want? Are we repeating Coloured Books? http://www.slideshare.net/eduservfoundation/ http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/

Aims of Session
This talk (and follow-up discussion) aims to:
Provide a better understanding of benefits of community-led activities
Give examples of community-led activities
Invite suggestions and discussion on community-led activities for Emerge community
Introduction “ If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” Within the context of U&I / Emerge’s remit for rapid development, testing, learning, iteration, etc. which may lead to new best practices for development work

Why Community?
Successful deliverables require range of expertise:
Visionary, innovative thinking
User-focussed thinking
Development expertise
Dissemination expertise
User engagement
…
Using a community can enable better products to be delivered
Understanding

Why Community-Led?
Its what we expect these days:
We encourage students to take responsibility for aspects of their own learning
Why should we expect all ideas & initiatives in projects to develop within projects teams, advisory groups and input from funders?
It provides diversity:
Staff development
Exploitation of new ideas, technologies, …
Avoids the “ We tried that in the C20 th and it didn’t work ” mentality
Challenges orthodoxies which may no longer be valid
…
Understanding

Why Now?
Why is it appropriate to take this approach now?
Technical infrastructure in place: RSS, ‘cool URIs’, clean(-ish) HTML and CSS
Web 2.0 focus on user-generated content
Diverse set of application environments available
Easy to use (users won’t want training or read manuals)
Understanding This covers the technical reasons why it is timely to exploit social networking software. Non-technical reasons are out-of-scope for this talk.

Why Not?
What if Google, … goes out of business?
What about copyright, data protection, …?
But I’m a developer – I’ll be out of a job 
I’m a manager – what about use in mission-critical areas?
Understanding

Why Not? Really?
What if Google, … goes out of business?
What about copyright, data protection, …?
But I’m a developer – I’ll be out of a job 
I’m a manager – what about use in mission-critical areas?
Can you guarantee ongoing provision of your deliverables, your institutions’ or the government’s? And what if Google thrives? Risk assessment & management; we’ve been here in 1990s - and the world may change (cf. YouTube & Warner music) World doesn’t owe you a job writing software which isn’t needed! You’ll have a job doing the integration, support, … Risk assessment & management; provision of alternatives; migration plans; user engagement; sharing experiences, … Understanding “ Risk Assessment For Use Of Third Party Web 2.0 Services ”, QA Focus

Why Not? (2)
We need to do server-side proper development
Our SysAdmins say:
Too busy
It’s complicated; we’d need to upgrade Perl libraries, install new version of database, wait until a full moon; …
Sorry, can’t open that port – “There be dragons”
Add you own story here

Why Not? Really? (2)
It’s not just about del.icio.us, Flickr, Facebook, …
You can also use third party ISPs, which can provide 2-click interfaces to applications e.g. Site5’s Fantastico/Cpanel provides:
Moodle
Wordpress
Drupla
PHP …
…
Or use Amazon S3 / EC2 to rent storage, CPU cycles, APIs, …
For ~ $6/month!

The IWMW Community (1)
Institutional Web management profession:
Newish profession (circa 1994-5)
Initial enthusiasm, then awareness of role as pawn in institutional power struggles 
Establishment of:
web-support then website-info-mgt mailing lists set up in mid-1990s
Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) established in 1997
Held annually since then
150+ delegates attend
Now several generations of participants
Examples

The IWMW Community (2)
Strengths of the community:
Shared goals and interests
Shared challenges (lack of resources, unreasonable expectations, difficult users  , …)
Annual F2F helps community building
Weaknesses:
Focus on helping with specific (often technical) problems and sharing solutions
Limited opportunities for strategic thinking
Limited exploitation strengths of community and social network technology (still many primarily using JISCMail lists – but some isolated uses of blogs, wikis, …)
Examples

IWMW 2007
IWMW 2007:
University of York on 16-18 July (now fully subscribed)
Building on technical innovations from previous years (WiFi network, real-time chat, wikis, folksonomies, …)
This year:
Innovation Competition encouraging submissions which are:
User-focussed
Light-weight
‘ Cool’ – user response of “Wow”, “I wish I’d thought of that!”, “We must do that”, …
Examples

Supporting The Competition (1)
To encourage community-led development work:
Provide data for techies to exploit
Provide open access (CC) to avoid legal problems
Examples http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/ events/workshops/iwmw/rss-feeds

Supporting The Competition (2)
To encourage community-led development work:
Provide data for techies to exploit
Provide open access (CC) to avoid legal problems
Provide service which interests users (& funders – is the UK community involved?)
Provide open service which others can build on (e.g. timelines, clouds, …)
http://www.acme.com/GeoRSS/?xmlsrc=... Note icon may represent multiple speakers from an institution or region

Managing The Risks
What if nobody enters the competition?
Avoiding The Problem
We can incentivize the competition (a prize – depending on budget and sponsorship, kudos, …)
We can highlight personal benefits (add to CV)
We can highlight organisational benefits (University of X won an award for Y)
We can encourage our friends to enter
We can provide examples of developments ourselves
Learning For Next Year
We can gain feedback and encourage competitors & non-competitors to share their experiences
We can encourage them to join in next year (its new for them and they weren’t sure of what to do)
Examples

Ideas For Competition
Some ideas (but should I be explicit?):
Location map of all 11 IWMWs. Done – but can it be enhanced (e.g. cloud maps from abstracts of speakers’ talks)
Map of location of all plenary speakers (done)
Delegate maps. Are we attracting participants from across the country? Which institutions have never attended? What’s the carbon cost of delegates travelling? (Note data protection, privacy, etc. issues)
Timeline. V0.1 done – but potential for richer timelines
RSS feeds – many provided for use by others
YouTube video, Second Life, …
Examples

About The Learning
The competition may be fun and useful applications developed
More importantly it’s an opportunity to:
Try something new
Gain feedback from friendly audience
Gain understanding of potential of lightweight Web 2.0 technologies
Understand how your data can be reused by others (to everyone’s benefit)
Break down the ‘we must do everything ourselves’ attitude
Examples

Application To Emerge
Emerge Community Generated Activity Policy RFC
For a community to be successful:
Members have common interests
Feeling of openness
Members need to develop
Links with others
Energy and enthusiasm
This relates closely with the approaches taken with the IWMW community
Emerge See Community generated activity policy , <http://jiscemerge.org.uk/vle/mod/resource/view.php?id=14>

Groupings
How should effective groups emerge?
Common interests in topics or diversity of interests?
Common personal interests (fellow techies) or diversity of interests?
And what other groups may there be?
Suggestions Topic Areas PLEs Virtual environments Mobile technologies Usability … Personal Areas Technical expertise User engagement Advocacy Writing, scripting, broadcasting ,… Speaking, performing, role-playing, … Research … What Else? … …

Questions For Discussion
Some issues:
Are you happy with the rationale for community-led activities?
What areas do you think would be appropriate as community-led activities?
How will you progress this?
What other issues would you like to discuss today?
Suggestions

My Thoughts
Simple individual activities:
Sharing info on good venues for events: e.g. with WiFi) – del.icio.us tag of recommended-venues ( recommended-hotels , …)
…
Group activity: risk assessment for Web 2.0 services
Contribute to wiki (Wikipedia?) on governance of service (ownership, bank balance, …)
Whois++ to establish dates, ownership, ..
Document experiences (use cases, successes, failures, management approaches, …)
Make this stuff open and widely available
Suggestions

Questions
Any questions?

Community Led Activities

by Brian Kelly on Jun 06, 2007

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 1

Statistics

Community Led Activities — Presentation Transcript