The document discusses strategies for sustaining the ICT Guides service in the long term through the use of social software and Web 2.0 tools. It proposes facilitating scholarly communities and developing a taxonomy of computational methods to highlight digital arts and humanities projects. The key strategies outlined are encouraging community collaboration and ownership through asynchronous participation, simplicity, aggregating high-quality overlapping content across networks, and creating conditions for communities to sustain themselves.

1. ICT Guides
Building and facilitating
scholarly communities
with social software
and Web 2.0
Craig Bellamy
AHDS, King’s College London

2. What is ICT Guides?
 AIMS of the service
1. To highlight digital arts and
humanities projects
2. To facilitate epistemic communities
(communities of practice)
3. To develop a taxonomy of
computational methods

21. Summary
 ICT Guides promotes the use of ICT
in teaching and research
 A taxonomy of methods helps to
define/ build our community
 How to sustain the service in the
long-term? (Using Web 2.0 tools and
methods)

22. Sustaining ICT Guides
 How do we sustain ICT Guides in the
long term?
 What are scholarly communities and
Web 2.0?
 Towards a community-led and
maintained guide?

23. Collaboration
 Must have a clear goal
 What do you want people to do on
the site and how are you going to
achieve this?
 Encourage the community to grow
itself

24. Asynchronous time
 Volunteer work is best suited to
asynchronous time
 Asynchronous time can be ‘free
time’

25. Simplicity and trust
 Wikipedia and volunteerism
 Minimal ‘branding’ promotes a sense
of community ownership and shared
identity

27. Overlapping communities
 The conversation is already
happening!
 Tap into the conversation and
contribute to it and take from it
 Some communities do things better
than others; take advantage of this

33. High-quality content
 High quality content is the best way
to get the word out
 Site should have the ability to be
recommended easily

35. Networks of cooperating
data
 Content aggregation and content
syndication
 Exchange links (comment on other
peoples blogs etc.)

36. End
 Can we build communities?
 We can create ‘conditions’ for
communities to build and sustain
themselves
 There are ‘latent links’ in epistemic
communities (linking distributed
knowledge)
 http://ahds.ac.uk/ictguides/