JonCamfieldBlog

There's increasing buzz on using Twitter for non-profit goals; from the familiar sources of Idealist, NetSquared and of course Beth Kanter. It seems mostly cautious and curious at this point.

I say: why not Twitter? Now, there are of course levels of twittering and integration of twittering into your non-profit's business, and there may or may not be reasons to bother with creating and maintaining an active twitter "community," depending on your projects and audiences.

However, if you have an RSS feed of your organization's news; why not take a few minutes and set it up to also pipe into Twitter? You've immediately created a basic "mobile" strategy where people can sign up to receive news blurbs through SMS, enabled another path for people to get your updates, and it took almost no time, requires almost zero maintenance, and is free -- how can you beat that?

Of course, I'm just trying to make my Twitter-on-the-rise preduction for 08 come true, but I wrote late last year about the simple utility of Twitter as part of my overall "Write Once, Post Everywhere" (WOPE?) strategy.

Posted by Jon at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Engadget is reporting that Microsoft has posted a formal offer to buy Yahoo (and by proxy, flickr, del.icio.us, and steer the development of Flock (...into the ground).

Google, step up your game

Microsoft has a history (hotmail, mostly, excluded) of destroying the web startups it touches by trying to subsume them into their platforms. I wonder how fast I can move all my flickr photos to Picasaweb? I wonder if I can get a refund of my pro account?

Posted by Jon at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You normally don't expect such staid bodies as the OECD to go and start talking about Web 2.0 and user-created content (or "UCC" in their terminology), but then they go and create a huge report doing just that (Via DG):

This study describes the rapid growth of UCC and its increasing role in worldwide communication, and draws out implications for policy. Questions addressed include: What is user-created content? What are its key drivers, its scope and different forms? What are the new value chains and business models? What are the extent and form of social, cultural and economic opportunities and impacts? What are the associated challenges? Is there a government role, and what form could it take?

While it's not as groundbreaking or waxing-visionary as Benkler in Wealth of Networks, it is interesting to see how OECD is perceiving peer production:

User-created content is already an important economic phenomenon despite it originally being largely non-commercial. The spread of UCC and the amount of attention devoted to it by users appears to be a significant disruptive force for how content is created and consumed and for traditional content suppliers. This disruption creates both opportunities and challenges for established market participants and their strategies.

The OECD as one should expect ties it back to innovation policies, and doesn't shy away from talking about copyright and fair use:

The rapid rise of UCC is raising new questions for users, business and policymakers. Digital content policy issues are grouped under six headings: i) enhancing R&D, innovation and technology; ii) developing a competitive, non-discriminatory policy framework; iii) enhancing the infrastructure; iv) shaping business and regulatory environments; v) governments as producers and users of content and vi) better measurement.

[...]In the regulatory environment important questions relate to intellectual property rights and UCC: how to define “fair use” and other copyright exceptions, what are the effects of copyright on new sources of creativity, and how does IPR shape the coexistence of market and non-market creation and distribution of content. In addition, there are questions concerning the copyright liability of UCC platforms hosting potentially unauthorised content, and the impacts of digital rights management.

Of particular interest, the OECD seems to support a strong fair use doctrine; "For example, copyright issues arise when users post unaltered third party content on UCC platforms without authorisation" (emphasis mine) -- meaning that altered content; content with value-added creativity by the users, mashups, and the like, would not be copyright issues in this context. Score one for the OECD!

Posted by Jon at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few predictions for what we'll see online in 2008:

Facebook hits its limit. I predict some more ad snafus a la Beacon, and the 3rd party apps become overwhelming and all-too-reminiscent of MySpace. NB: The AdBlock Plus Extension and AdBlock Element Hider can block most FaceBook ads, and there's a GreaseMonkey script to reset MySpace pages to the default template.

Twitter is on the rise. Microblogging in general will increase, and someone will add in more community and meta-organizational features to it. There's a lot of 3rd party activity around Twitter to add in location awareness, tagging, and so on, so maybe Twitter, Inc. will take the hint. Also, with improved community/groups tools, lots of people figure out that Twitter's a fast way to have a mobile communications strategy, which will be much more important as iPhones and other web-capable phones are useful and popular enough to expand past the blackberry crowd.

Single Sign On gets closer OpenID has been quietly gaining steam, and will continue to do so. If Google and Yahoo decide to place nice, there's a big win. Microsoft will get pissy about this, but it might already be too late. Integration in general will become key. Evidentially, other people are thinking the same thing.

Social Bookmarking grows up Del.icio.us style and digg/stumbleupon style bookmarking sharing sites morph and follow my Twitter predictions; adding more social/community and organizational tools. They may even get mashed together.

GeoLocation is the new tag cloud 2007 saw everyone adding geolocation to their sites (Flickr Mappr, Google Maps API interfaces turning up everywhere, multiple FaceBook "where I've been" vanity maps, Twitter location tools...) with increasingly easy integration tools, adding mapping to anything remotely geographic will be in 2008 what adding tables and animated "email me" and construction-man graphics to your index.html was in 1998.

A new peer production site will show up Wikipedia and its ilk will continue going strong, but there's an increasing convergence of easy to use tools that enable users to collaboratively build information stores. It just takes one to hit a market ripe for user-generated content to really do well. My prediction? Education, spurred on by a need to support the implementation and follow-through lacking OLPC project and a global workforce that's been trapped doing creating and turning in make-work homework can now easily mobilize to add to global knowledge store.

Microsoft does dumb things in a quest to drive more people to buy Vista. This could include locking out non-Vista users to certain ActiveX driven webpages and/or their MS Office Online. Most of these will backfire and hopefully push more people to Apple and Linux. OK, so that one's almost a given. Update Microsoft's Office Service Pack 3 disables legacy file formats. Way to start the year, Bill.

Google buys Yahoo OK, that's a long shot, but it'd be awfully interesting, since Yahoo woke up to web 2.0 and made some strategic purchases (Flickr, del.icio.us...) and has done some great work with the Flock browser. I can only imagine Google getting a little territorial here. We're all in deep trouble if Google ever turns evil.

Posted by Jon at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

A recent thread of emails over on the 501 Tech Club DC email list brought more Web 2.0 resources to light. So in the spirit of sharing:

NetworkForGood has an excellent set of short articles on using social sites for fundraising.

http://www.cmswire.com/ Offers news on content management

http://www.squidoo.com/org20 Squidoo posts a list of top non-profits using innovative technologies; "These are organizations that give their volunteers and members a voice and get out of the way. They're pros at mobilizing awareness online. They're experimentors. Innovators. On a mission. They're fearless."

Beth Kanter has a good blog on web 2.0. Similarly, check out Contentious.com. There's some year-end roundups of Tech and social change links and , and the Zen of Non Profit Tech has a good year-end roundup too.

Posted by Jon at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Change.org has a wonderful mashup of 501 c 3 nonprofits arranged on a Google Map, as an example of a Good Idea (tm) for Google Maps usage. You can start at Exhibit to begin creating your own mashup code!

Posted by Jon at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A quick rundown of my recent posts looking at the value of using Open Source in combination with Web 2.0 tools for non-profits / NGOs and the like:

The Power of Open - an introduction to the economic background knowledge important to discuss how Web 2.0 and Open Source work (also discusses what Web 2.0 and Open Source mean).

Twitter - A sidetrack to peek at a new Web 2.0 service.

Web 2.0 101 - How Web 2.0 can work for you.

Popular Web 2.0 Sites - a quick overview of the current landscape of Web 2.0 sites useful to nonprofits.

Open Source Software - Desktop software that's created by global teams of volunteers.

A Better Browser - The fantastic marriage of Open Source and Web 2.0

A Better Browser II - Even more cool things you can do

Write Once, Post Everywhere - A close look at how Open Source and Web 2.0 can drastically reduce workload.

Open Source and Web 2.0 - How you can use Open Source software to run your website with built-in Web 2.0 goodness.

Posted by Jon at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In an earlier post I took you through some of my favorite desktop F/LOSS projects, and I've blathered on about the Flock browser separately. If you really want to embrace the social web, though, you should bring some of it home to your organization. Hosting your own blogs is a start, be it a stream of current news and events or as a discussion or soapbox for your CEO or media relations people. Wikis are powerful collaborative tools for both your internal staff projects as well as collaborative, evolving documents you work on with your constituents. Wikipedia runs on open source software called MediaWiki, which you can download for free and get running in under an hour (less on Linux systems, it can be a bit tricky with Windows servers). There are more open source blog options than I'd care to even begin to list, and which one you chose in the end will depend on how you plan to use it.

Before jumping head on and installing all these pieces individually (and without some customization, requiring separate logins for each separate piece), you should also consider a more fundamental change in your website -- moving to a Content Management System, or CMS. There are two very popular F/LOSS CMS systems out there today, Joomla and Drupal. Drupal constantly amazes me with its ease of use, but Joomla seems to be easier to conform to your existing web design, whereas Drupal is hard-headed about its concept-based layout. I've seen many amazing Drupal sites, and since they're both a breeze to get running with install wizards that will have you playing in the CMS in seconds (really), why not try both? If you don't want to install both, you can also look at OpenSourceCMS.com, which runs these and many many more, giving anyone access to go in and fool around (they automatically reset every hour).

These CMS systems can integrate many popular tools, and/or have versions of them built in, allowing you to have a single-sign-on for all of your various web 2.0 applications. Drupal and Joomla especially are designed with sharing and integration in mind, so they naturally work well with other web 2.0 sites by sending out and importing RSS feeds, plugging in at the API level with Google Maps, Flickr, and so on, often by downloading freely available plugin tools, created by a global team of volunteers working together to share their tools. As an extra bonus, most of the geek types working on these systems are also obsessed by following best practices and web standards, giving you cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility, even with mobile/cell phone browsers with a little work, and accessibility built in.

CMS systems also empower your staff to edit their own web pages instead of having to go through IT for each forgotten comma. They include easy to use editors, ranging from simple text to foll-on WYSIWYG interfaces. The degree of design freedom varies among the different CMSes, but remember that more freedom risks less cohesiveness in the overall site design.

Here's a few sites done using Joomla and/or Drupal, to give you a taste of the power built in to the systems -- these aren't hodgepodges of tinkerer code, but enterprise-class systems:

Development Seed

The World Bank's Buzz Monitor

ServiceVote

Of course, you can shell out the big bucks for custom software or commercial CMS tools, but you run the risk of that company going under and taking their software with them. With FLOSS, you will always have the source available -- this means never getting locked out or left behind, and always being able to go your own way and hire a different firm to modify the code, but you don't have one big company to call to add a new feature in (kinda). FLOSS is created by a global network of interested volunteers and requires additions to also be freely shared, so you can often find other people working on the same problems you might be encountering.

Remember, It's not good because it's free, it's free because it's good!

Posted by Jon at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been dancing around how open source software, strong standards, and the various web 2.0 technologies actually help your organization out. So let me show a few examples. This blog entry, and in fact all joncamfield.com/blog entries get written once, here at this website. From there, my blog software (Movable Type, tho any good blogging tool or CMS site will do this automagically) creates multiple views of the entry -- as part of a monthly archive, a topic-based archive, and the current blogs on the home page of JonCamfield.com. But that's just the beginning. It also publishes an RSS feed of the story, which itself is read ~2000 times each month through dedicated RSS readers embedded in web browsers, Google's "Reader" and Google Desktop, Thunderbird's RSS reader, and who knows what other feed-readers. I intentionally have stuck it into different places on the Internet. It pipes straight into my Facebook Notes and appears on my profile's news feed to my friends. Using an intermediate site called TwitterFeed, I import it into my Twitter account, and using an embedded RSS reader, it also shows up in my profile on servenet.org.

That's a lot of exposure for a one-time cost to write each article and an initial cost in time to set up the connections. It's this kind of multiplier effect that strategic, appropriate application of information and communication technologies can have, and indeed is one of the best, lowest-cost promises of "web 2.0"

Posted by Jon at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hopefully you're enjoying Flock now. If you already had accounts on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and/or del.icio.us, you've seen how amazingly easy it is to integrate those tools so that your friends updates just pop up automagically in the "People" sidebar (you can also update your Twitter/Facebook status, and check to see if you have any special notifications from these sites at the same time!). If you write for or have a blog, did you check out the feather-pen button which lets you set up multiple blogs so that you can submit stories straight from your browser? The Web Clipboard is the tool that got me to switch from Firefox to Flock (they're based off the same code, Flock just has some optimizations for web 2.0 tools). The Clipboard lets you drag and drop web images from sites to blogs to emails and more. Mac users may be less impressed with a lot of these tools, as Mac does a better job at integrating these tools already, but Windows users may need to make sure they're not drooling into their keyboards to much.

Did you notice the inline spellchecking? The ability to surf using tabbed browsing? And don't forget, you can also use addons that expand your power - sort tables inside your browser, block *all* advertisements, and more. I created a list of great firefox / flock extensions you can start with.

Do your part - use the flock buttons to promote Flock and tell your friends about it!

Posted by Jon at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The problem I face most often when trying to show someone a new powerful open source tool is that they just can't believe that the things I tell them are possible. Microsoft has had such a vice grip on the everyday computer experience that it's akin to telling someone that while they've been walking their whole life, it's actually possible for them -- for anyone -- to leap up and start flying like Superman. At the end of the day, it's just not within our conceptual limits to get that that's possible without seeing it and experiencing it.

That's why I implore you to take a moment and go download Flock right now, go through the installation process (you'll need administrative privileges, but they're working on fixing that!), and give it a twirl. Come back later, once you've learned to fly.

Posted by Jon at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you hadn't noticed, I now have a Twitter account which you can follow, have SMSed to your cell phone, and so on. I wrote a longer entry talking about what Twitter is and can be. It's basically microblogging providing interoperability between IM, cell phones, and the web - which, if you think about it, is ridiculously powerful.

Posted by Jon at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you think back to the opening Econ 101 entry, I ran through network effects, transaction costs, rivalrous and excludable goods, and their inverse, anti-rival goods, which combine the efforts of many in an ever-building and evolving structure where rule is the more the merrier - something, while not new to the world, but dramatically facilitated by modern information and communication technology. The promise of current projects is that nothing good is ever lost, and everything suboptimal or counter-productive will in time get smoothed over and fixed. It's something that only the growing body of scientific knowledge has historically been able to achieve with its standards on sharing and reproducable experimentation forcing honesty on the system.

So far we've been talking about this sharing in terms of websites and tools non-profits (or really, anyone with a good cause) can use, but many of these tools are themselves built with programs that were themselves created by volunteers over time, and indeed are still in the process of evolution. Software that is built (often by volunteers) in order to be shared freely is called Open Source. This is a simplification of the wealth of different "flavors" that open source can take; I might as well be saying "ice cream is great" -- but is chocolate better that moose tracks? Blue Bell brand or Ben and Jerry's? As with ice cream, there are different concepts and theories leading to different styles and licensing of open source software. In general, however, the open source licenses grant you as a user increased rights, as opposed to traditional licenses which act to restrict your freedom. If you want to know more about open source flavors, I recommend starting by reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which compares the development techniques of open source to the more commonly encountered closed source, and then checking out OpenSource.org for an overview.

It's initially hard to wrap your head around, but with thousands upon thousands of dedicated geeks, combined with the long-term evolutionary power of sharing, some amazing open source products are available. Not one but two fully functional office suites, providing word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software and more (custom diagrams, clip art, ....) have been produced, one, OpenOffice which runs on Windows and Mac as well as Linux. Linux is an entire operating system, as capable as (really, moreso than) Windows or Linux, which is open source. It's popular as a server software, running strongly on less powerful machines with higher stability and security, but is also available customized for the desktop.

Even if you're not yet ready to jump into the deep end, there are many open source tools which work on the unfortunately all-to-commonly encountered Windows desktop. You can escape the trap of Internet Explorer (IE), whose latest version has cribbed all its improvements from the Mozilla line of browsers (Firefox being the most well known) -- tabbed browsing, good pop up blocking and more have been available to Firefox users since the late 90s, and only now in 2007 has IE gotten around to implementing it. Firefox and it's cousin, Flock, deserve their own full post to explore their incredible potential at marrying web 2.0 technologies and improving their functionality.

Have friends on multiple Internet Messenger programs? Have to run MSN, Yahoo, gChat, and AIM all at the same time? There's a program called pidgin which can combine all of those memory-intensive and computer-hogging programs into one simple and functional IM client.

Upgrading to the latest Microsoft Office too expensive for too little benefit? OpenOffice lets you read and write Microsoft Office files, as well as the Open Document Format, a format that's gaining steam as a standard for many government agencies tired of being locked into Microsoft's proprietary format.

You can fly through the universe with Celestia, edit photos with the gnu Image Manipulation Program, or create 3D images and movies with Blender3D.

This is quite literally only the tip of the iceberg. I highly recommend checking out the OpenDisc for a greater sampling of open source projects. While you're at it, breeze by PortableApps.com to download an entire desktop suite to your USB thumbdrive so you can always carry around your new favorite Firefox browser to random seedy international cybercafes and never worry about having some insecure IE toolbar stealing your private information!

The next big entry will move from your desktop to your web server, and talk about how you can use OSS software to install blogs, wikis, photo galleries, entire soup-to-nuts content management systems and more for your organization.

Posted by Jon at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So far we've really been pushing the underlying concepts, with a few tips to actual websites, examples, and tools. Without further ado, I'd now like to jump in to a snapshot of the current cloudscape of tools. As I mentioned in my first post in this series, I want to be an almanac giving general advice on weather patterns more than a tour guide pointing out landscape features. The landscape changes so rapidly in the world of web 2.0 technologies that describing the landscape might as well be seeing shapes in clouds, the fickle winds of funding and popularity changes the scenery just too rapidly.

That caveat being beaten to a pulp, here's a quick list of popular websites providing web 2.0 features and tools. This is as close to a "dummies' guide" as you'll get.

Wikipedia

Does your cause have a page on Wikipedia? If not, create one (check out the editing guidelines and play in the "sandbox" if you're new to Wikipedia). If it does, who's maintaining it? Is there anything you can contribute? Remember that Wikipedia is an informational resource, not an advertising media.

Blogger / blogspot...

These (and other) sites provide an easy on-ramp to creating a blog. They can be hosted at these sites or embedded into your own website with a little elbow-grease. They're a great starting place to see if your organization has the bandwidth to write blog entries at a reasonable rate.

Flickr / Picasa Web

Flickr is a hugely popular tool to upload and share photos. It integrates with popular blog software, provides RSS streams of your latest photos, and much more. Picasa is a Google-supported site which is connected to their photo management tool by the same name. You can encourage your contacts to upload their photos of your events to create a community around the event, which creates a living advertisement for the quality and interesting aspects for future events.

YouTube

Youtube is like Flickr for videos, with many of the same features and promises. You can even send videos from your mobile phone straight to YouTube, which you could use to report human rights abuses, protest events, or share your service project in almost real time with viewers from around the world without setting up fancy video-conferencing and high-speed Internet access. YouTube gives you a free and easy way to have streamnig videos of up to 10 minutes appear in your blog on on your website -- no need to pay for expensive media streaming servers, even if you're expecting thousands of users viewing your video simultaneously.

Social Networking sites - Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn...

The popularity of social networking sites is in constant flux. A few years ago, Friendster and Orkut were all the rage. Today, MySpace has the largest active following, with Facebook in a rapidly rising trajectory now that they've opened up their membership beyond the education crowds. LinkedIn is a business networking site that focuses more on resumes and job recommendations. Having a presence on these sites is important to be connected with their users, and can be a key part of your strategy. Facebook has a Causes app which allows you to create a donation funnel to any 501c3 organization in minutes, as well as providing great group communication tools focused around causes and issues.

Twitter

Twitter is "micro blogging" -- messages you can get down to 160 letters, spaces, and punctuation or less. It's integrated with mobile phones and Facebook's status updates, and has the ability to be a great communications tool, as I discussed in a previous post

Google Maps / Documents / Calendar / iCalShare

Google provides an amazing toolkit available to you a la carte or as a complete suite of web-hosted programs available to non-profits and similar small organizations free of charge, called "Google Apps". Google Apps as a suite can be a virtual office for small or geographically disconnected groups, providing real-time collaborative word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email and calendaring, all connected with Google's amazing search and information management tools. You can also pick and choose, using just their online word processing program (which automatically and smoothly tracks changes, allows reversion to earlier copies, and lets multiple users edit the same document at the same time (you can even chat on the side about the document using Google Chat). Google Calendar offers a great way to create a central calendar where you can permit users to view free/busy times, event details, and even create and edit events on a shared calendar. These calendars can then be embedded in web pages, streamed through RSS, imported into Outlook, or syncronized with other more flexible calendar programs such as Mozilla's Sunbird project or Apple's iCal software. Just as a footnote, iCalShare is a website where you can upload a calendar of popular events, such as a collection of US Holidays or a list of service and volunteer events throughout the year. You can naturally import and export calendars between all these systems using the iCal and vCal standards, and in some cases even synchronize them such that updates to one calendar automatically spreads to the synchronized ones.

del.icio.us / mag.nolia, and digg / reddit

These are "social bookmarking" systems. Instead of having a list of favorites at home, one at work, one on your travel laptop, and so on; you store all your bookmarks (and protect some as private) at these websites and organize them using tags, so you can search your favorites on any browser, anywhere. Further, you can see what other users are bookmarking and reading, and easily forward links to friends with accounts. In terms of its use in non-profit organizations, again you can focus on using a tag (servicelearning, fairtrade, socialjustice, and so on) to create a network of sites your organization recommends and focuses on to help promote these causes. As with all web 2.0, you can receive a constant feed of new links tagged with your favorite keywords, see a "tag cloud" of popular terms, and so on. Digg and reddit are more focused sites that track more active events; blog entries and news stories more than static websites. It can be really hard to break in to digg, reddit, and similar sites, so watch them and save up your efforts to use those for when you have a huge, widely-appealing news story. Also, be prepared for the consequences of getting popular - a huge surge of website hits can drag your website down to a standstill with the so-called "slashdot effect" (named for a popular geek news site with a history of bogging down and crashing sites)

This is naturally an incomplete list. Even if I included every single web 2.0-ish site available today, there'd be a new one tomorrow. Worse, the tidal changes from day to day in web 2.0 websites can be vast, and it's really difficult to guess what'll be big tomorrow. One great way to keep up with technology is to create (if you don't already have one) and work with, listen to, and give ownership to a youth council for your organization, no matter how big or small you are.

The next post will take this to the next step, looking at what tools are driving these websites, and how you can place them on your own website and/or your personal computer, and a discussion of something exciting called Open Source.

Posted by Jon at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The last entry was the theoretical underpinnings of how this whole web 2.0 thing can work, so today let's get into some of the more common terms you've heard thrown around, what they mean and how they work. We'll start talking about blogs (like this), wikis, social networks, and other crazy web 2.0 tools themselves.

We'll start with crowd-sourcing/peer production/user generated content -- all aspects of, if not straight up copies of the same thing. Peer production is what you generally think of when you think web 2.0; wikipedia is an encyclopedia produced not by an editorial board and professional writers, but by you and me, and thousands of others like us, each shepherding their own causes and topics, with enough critics to keep us honest. Again, a lot of this is just summarizing what Benkler has gone over in greater detail in The Wealth of Networks; I highly recommend flipping/page-downing through that if you're at all going to move into web 2.0 projects. He has a wealth of case studies and good hard data on the power of random website users coming by your site and contributing time and effort to improve your content. Even NASA, a bureaucratic and overworked government agency, has tapped into the power of website users to help identify and label craters on Mars with higher accuracy -- and a whole lot cheaper -- than programs have been able to manage. Properly empowered through low transaction costs and the promise of adding to something larger and greater than they are, users can power your entire website -- just look at craigslist -- a huge, profitable site where people post classified ads. It's nothing pretty, which in turn is part of its popularity; it's quick and down to business, empowering users to add information, flag abuse, and export their specific search requests as RSS streams to their own systems (more, lots more, on RSS later).

Beyond mere content, empowered users can also help create structure; they'll tag (a form of categorization) blogs/articles, photos and videos while they're browsing through them, rate content as good (or bad!), organize bookmarks using del.icio.us or mag.nolia... the possibilities are endless if you can provide the right basic set of tools, and the users have the expectation that they are contributing to something that will continue to grow and flourish.

A good counter-example is the story of cddb. cddb was a public database that let people copying their music CDs to their computers to automatically get the artist name and track titles -- something that iTunes now does automatically, but this hasn't always been such a painless process. cddb got sold and turned into gracenote, which then changed the license to increasingly strict standards, changed the way cddb worked, and eventually blocked out any program that wasn't licensed with the new company using their new format. The users fled and recreated a new free cd database, called freedb, which is still very active and built into many cd ripping softwares, such as CDex. Gracenote is still around, but without any volunteer support now. This extended side-note serves to remind us that if we're going to jump in to using web 2.0 systems, it's best to do it strategically and emphatically. Strategically because not all of your materials, brochures, and news releases should be interactive and peer-produced, (ok, so sure, you can go there, but you should be comfortable with your users and the technologies before opening yourself up so completely). Emphatically because the quickest way to disengage your potential contributors is to only go halfway with a web 2.0 system -- micro-managing, moderating too closely, limiting their access, and so on. If you have a blog, have a full blog, engage in communicating with your readers, let them comment -- and reply to their comments. If you provide some of your content as a wiki, encourage and enable your users to add their own viewpoints, tips, and full articles.

This leads into the next point -- not only do you want to look at web 2.0 projects strategically and emphatically, you want to keep it freely available (unlike the cddb story above) so all your consituents can benefit from the work you and your active users are doing. Keep archives of blogs to create a long-term, ongoing discussion -- don't be afraid to change over time and have "out of date" and "off-message" blog entries, it shows your history and growth. Maintain your web 2.0 projects by responding to comments, tidying up wikis, and making sure your facebook pages, twitter "tweets", and flickr photos are getting constantly updates.

Going beyond maintaining your web 2.0 projects is pro-actively sharing your work with others. This almost always come as a freebie if you're using any of the popular website management tools to create your site, but regardless it's good to look into it and think about where and how you're using and promoting it. RSS provides the current standard of streaming news in and out. RSS can be a quick and easy way to add headline content to your site from your partners. More importantly, RSS can send your headlines out to subscribers, partner sites, Twitter, Facebook, and more. Even better, it's not just news or blog entries; RSS can be a stream of your most recent Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitter updates -- any chunk of data that gets generated linearly. Going deeper than RSS feeds, many tools have APIs, which provide a tightly integrated way to embed and interact with complex websites. Google Maps is a great example of this; anyone with a website can embed the full power of Google Maps in their site and link it with their own data. People have combined this with the concept of web 2.0 user-generated content to allow people to add data to the map -- coffeeshops with free wireless Internet, good spots to wind-surf, or even a visual display of craigslist apartment listings. This combination of different web 2.0 technologies is what's often called a mashup, and an increasing number of tools exist to help people combine tools from across the web with your own data and website, such as Yahoo Pipes

A lot of these sharing tools can be thought of a way to replace "copy and paste" -- instead of having visitors to your website who see some fantastic piece of information copy it and paste it somewhere else, you can enable them to pull that resource as an RSS stream from your website, which in turn will bring their readers back to your site. Through this magic of non-rival, non-excludable open sharing, the more you share and give away, the more you get back,; in website hits, spread of your message, engaged users coming back to your site to make comments.

After the end of all of this tech discussion, it's important to remember that it’s about people and communities. Enabling and engaging your website visitors, staff, volunteer, and random-website-visitor content creators, beneficiaries, friends, coworkers, and all of their own networks of contacts. Creation of a community of users who support and encourage each other should be the ultimate goal of any web 2.0 project, as this community creates a sustainable, constantly evolving system. The community by merit of communications technology can and should be globally distributed, organized not by geographic luck but by interest and dedication to a cause or topic. Web 2.0 projects engage users and create a space for communication and communal building and creation, it is not (at least primarily) a platform for traditional, one-way communication -- talking with, not talking to.

Posted by Jon at 08:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This should come later in the F/LOSS and Web 2.0 101 series, but Twitter is a fun and simple tool with huge potential. I've begun using Twitter, and have it updating my Facebook account as well. MIT's Technology Review has a great article on Twitter and where it came from (Use bugmenot.com's database of login username/passwords to free sites to read the article without registering). Twitter is a simple, one-trick site - you update your status and everyone who's "following" you sees that status update pop up - on the web, on Facebook, and even, most importantly, on your cell phone. Naturally, you can also update your Twitter "microblog" from your phone, facebook, or the web - you can even direct an RSS feed from it. At Youth Service America, we send our grants RSS feed into Twitter, so anyone following that feed gets a buzz on their cell phone anytime we post a new grant.

As a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica, I created an intranet for our volunteers. It was free for our cell phones to receive SMS text messages, but costly to send them. The intranet organized volunteers by city, sector and Peace Corps group number, and interacted with SMS messaging. Any volunteer could send a text to kingston-cell@our intranet.org and it would redirect to all the volunteers in Kingston, Jamaica. Or, HIV-cell@, or group73@... You get the idea. Volunteers on the intranet could also subscribe to specific news updates lists, weather/hurricane alerts, and were somewhat forcibly subscribed to a security situation update list.

What does this have to do with Twitter? Well, it means I did a lot of work that I didn't really need to do. Had Twitter been around then, we could have simply created a few Twitter accounts for the various important lists and gone from there.

A Mobile Strategy already built for you

What does this mean? Well, in a global world where phones with SMS text messaging are more prominent communications devices than wifi internet access, or simply going to the communications medium that your constituents are using, Twitter is a fast and free way to have a mobile strategy overnight, and even better, to have it automagically integrated with your website's RSS feed, a blog, your facebook page... the integration options are limitless!

Posted by Jon at 04:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I presented and later ran a roundtable discussion on using web 2.0 and open source software for service/volunteer organizations. I kept getting requests for a "dummies guide" introduction to what's out there, and I'm going to just start here in my blog and see where that goes. Two caveats -- I don't believe in "dummies" guides, as I don't really believe in dummies (current White House residents excepted). Second, the landscape is more like a weather system, not a static landscape that can be described; so I'm going to be more like an almanac, trying to give you some general guidance rather than specific directions.

Let's start out with some basic underlying terms and theory from economics:

Network Effects describe situations where the number of people involved exponentially increases the value of getting involved - for example, if you're the only person with a phone, it's pretty useless, but each additional person who joins the phone network has a multiplicative effect on the number of connections available. By the same token, if you're the last chump still using a social network that's fallen out of favor (Friendster, Orkut, looking your way), it's equally useless. You can read lots more about the power of network effects by reading Watt's Six Degrees, and more on all of the stuff I'm about to talk about by checking out Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, which is available for free online as well as on Amazon, and you can of course contribute to the ongoing discussion at Benkler's wiki, linked above.

Rival goods are goods whose consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers -- If I'm sitting in a chair, you can't sit in it, but if I'm reading a website, you can also read it at the same time.

Excludability is whether or not it is possible to exclude people who have not paid for a good or service from consuming it. Lighthouses are the traditional example of a non-excludable good; everyone can benefit from a lighthouse's warning. Excludable goods include anything you can protect or fence off.

Finally, Transaction Costs measure how hard it is to do something else; time, research, transport, etc. -- the costs of doing something beyond the cost of that thing itself.

By mixing these together, you can move from the tragedy of the commons to an evolving and increasing self-sustaining ecosystem.

Tux, the Linux Mascot

So go and ponder the balancing act between rivalrous non-rivalrous, and anti-rivalrous goods, the impact of excludability and its limiting factors on the spread of information (your cause, your vision, and so on). A complicating factor here is how open and free can your organization be - are you willing to let people comment on your blog entries? Edit a wiki resource you're providing (lesson plans, resource guides...)? Write blogs, uncensored, on your website? You don't have to go all-in, but the quickest way to kill a web 2.0 strategy is to strangle it by increasing the transaction costs of it; moderating comments, slowing and impeding the natural tendencies of your constituents to work with you to improve your products to the benefit of your organization, and their fellow constituents.

Posted by Jon at 05:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)