Category: non profits/ngos

Social Media in Intl. Dev: Podcast with Bill Anderson on Twitter

My first conversation with Bill Anderson on scientific research in international development was so good we kept going to record a “part 2” on the specific application of microblogging and Twitter in science.  (Check the first post for Bill’s bio.)

The Podcast

podcast-logo Bill Anderson on Twitter for Science

Resources

Science Twitterers that Bill mentioned (first name is the Twitter name):

In addition, here are a few useful tips:

The Rough Transcript

What have you noticed about scientists and science organizations using microblogging tools like Twitter?
Two things. When I was first involved with Twitter I followed my friends. Then I started to notice that some of the organizations that I work with in my NGO work with science and data were twittering. So I migrated who I followed to individuals and organization in science that give good examples about how to use something like Twitter to get information out without overwhelming people. When the Mars rover was out on Mars and operational, the people in the project set up a Twitter account and had the rover twittering. “Today I’m going to dig in the dirt. I love this job.” One of the most wonderful uses of twitter to provide information about what is happening and putting an informal face on sophisticated engineering and scientific research.

Why is it important to make science accessible and available to the public?
It makes it available to almost anyone. You can be six years old or 86. You can still wow – I’m following a robot! That’s cool.

How does that change science?
It makes it available. That’s important because without science we aren’t going to be able to get ourselves through the 21st century as a species. That’s what I believe. So second we have to make it accessible and understandable to everyone for learning or even contributing. If the general public were much more aware about how science works, what it produces, what it does, they might have better interaction with their own elected officials. That is my own personal view. I also think it is kind of fun.

Which science Twitterers are you following that you have found valuable?
We talked about open access to scientific literature in the earlier podcast. The National Academies Press is Twittering — not very frequent. They say “here is our new report about H1N1 flu” and some things that pop up from their libraries. The Columbia University Center for Digital Research in Scholarship – posts things once in a while about their research. The American Scienctist Forum – which has been a very strong advocates for open access to all research literature Twitters when new organizations implements mandates about how their research results need to be made available.

A wonderful project, the Ethnos project, is all about ICT for D – Internet Communication Technology for Development. This is an Advocacy org. They post a lot of interesting results of projects in Africa. A recent posting about broadband work in Ghana. The Public Library of Science, The Encylopedia of Life, the Conservation Bilolgy Institute in the state of Washington, the CDC has CDCEmergency which puts out reports, most recently on H1N1 virus, NASA Ames Space Center is Twittering. (We’ll share these Twitter IDs in the blog post).

Any advice for new Twitter users interested in science/science in the public interest?
I really like Twitter because it is fast and easy. You can’t ignore the fact that it has a lot of visibility. People can get connected to it very easily. For example in Facebook the American Academy for the Advancement of Science –has been on Facebook for a couple of years. They have someone in their office who named themselves as their Facebook ambassador of AAAS. I thought was fascinating. Facebook has a little bit more overhead about getting involved. Some value there, but kind of heavy weight. Whereas Twitter is lightweight.

You need two things: a website where you can publish information about what you are doing, either in in a simple blog format or whatever, then get a twitter account with a title related to your org name or mission and then send out little notes about what you are doing.

The other piece is to talk to “Follow People.” Machines aren’t Twittering, it’s people. People know people. Your experience in twitter — you spend time, you find and follow people. Howard Rheingold once mentioned that the way to manage Twitter is to look at it like a stream. A stream of information going by. Look over there, spend a little time, flip over there, and then go back to my work. I don’t try and keep up with everything that is being Tweeted. That’s a faster way to do it. Find, start following and see where that leads you. On Twitter if you pick organizations or people interested in the work you do, you will pick up information you would not have gotten from other sources.

Social Media in International Development Podcast: Bill Anderson

Bill Anderson
As I noted earlier, I’m starting to record a set of podcasts about the role of social media in international development. (That’s a long title, so for the future, the title slug will be  Social Media in Intl. Dev: Podcast with NAME.)

Today’s podcast is with William (Bill) Anderson and  focuses on the science and research aspect of international development. This fascinates me because of the work I do for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD, and also a UN organization). Our conversation was so interesting to me that I did two. The second one is on Twitter and science. That will come out in a few days.

First, a little bit about Bill

I know Bill from a number of contexts, but most near and dear to my heart has been conversations about conflict online and things we have tagged “usthem.” But Bill is also an engineer and scientist with a keen eye on the role of technology. Here is his bio:

William L. (Bill) Anderson is a cofounder of Praxis101, a consultancy that focuses on participatory, user-centered information systems design, software engineering practice innovation, and organizational learning. Before founding Praxis101 Bill worked for Xerox Corporation in distributed system architecture, technology strategy, and advanced
product development. He pioneered co-development and customer collaboration on one of the first digital libraries, a joint project  between Cornell University and Xerox known as the CLASS project (http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/joint/). He has published papers on digital library product development, participatory design of product prototypes, and software development practices and tools. Prior to Xerox, he worked in the telecom, image management, and pharmaceutical industries. Most recently he has been working on policy issues on long-term access to scientific and technical data.

Bill is an Associate Editor for the CODATA Data Science Journal   (http://www.codata.org/dsj/index.html), and Co-chair of the InterAcademy Panel Task Group on Digital Knowledge Resources in Developing Countries (http://www.interacademies.net/CMS/Programmes/4704.aspx). He recently ended an eight year term as a member of the U.S. National Committee for the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA: http://www.codata.org) and as Co-chair of the CODATA Task Group on Preservation of and Access to Scientific and Technical Data in Developing Countries.

The Podcast:How are scientists using social media?

podcast-logo Bill Anderson on Social Media, Science and the Public Interest (11:37 minutes)

Resources and Links from Podcast

Text Summary of Podcast

You have been working with scientists around sharing scientific and technical data. What role do you see for social media in this work?
That’s kind of a big question. It is interesting. Today there is a part of the big social internet push for transparency that has moved to making data transparent — scientific and technical and government data.

There is a lot of talk, energy and action in the air and on the ground to make data available. The role for social media that I’ve seen is the new capabilities with the internet in the last 20 years –social media provides low cost easy way for 2 things:

1. get the word out about data you have ready to release, reports, experimental results
2. receive feedback, formal and informal about what has been put out

It doesnt matter if you are individual scientist, agency or government body.

Are people using it?
Ican only see a small part, but researchers have been blogging, using wikis, microblogging, using Friendfeed (an aggregator) to carry ourt a vast range of informal distributed conversations about research initiatives and policies. This year the second annual Science Online conference — going on sometime in 2010 (http://www.scienceonline2010.com/index.php/wiki/). There is one in 2009. (http://scienceonline09.com/index.php/wiki/ )

Any formal use?
There’s the public library of sciences, an open access scientific publisher around for 4-5 years who have become a premier publisher of scientific research. They just started a project with one of their Journals PLOS1 (http://www.plosone.org/home.action) where articles are submitted, given a light review and editing to make sure of reasonable content, readable and they are doing an experiment allowing an open crowd reviewing of these kinds of articles. To review you have to sign up with a valid email address. Experiment with what happens if we don’t gather experts to vet a paper and just put it out there. What kind of review and citation practices emerge.

You have been working with distributed groups of scientists. What are the biggest challenges and opportunities concerning the use of social media in this work?

The biggest challenge is the one we are all familiar with: changing established work practices and customs. I was thinking about this – many of us as individuals, not just scientists, are quite adventurous, but when we get together in organizations and institutions, as an organized body we are very resistant to getting anything to change. It is part of being human. An opportunity to figure out. Once an institution has a way of getting things done and way of interacting and making decisions, it is difficult to change that. The other specific issue with social media is the challenge of being open and public with work in progress and informal conversation

Say more about sharing publicly one’s work in progress.
More scientists are trying “open notebook science.” One of the key proponents, Jean-Claude Bradley (http://www.chemistry.drexel.edu/people/bradley/bradley.asp), chemist at Drexel. He has been carrying our research as it is happening on an open notebook wiki. Data, mistakes, what didn’t work. That is unusual. Most people don’t show that. You always keep your mistakes in your notebook as source of insight, but people don’t often do that in public.

What are the risks of doing it in public?
The professional risk of someone else taking your idea. People are worried about that. we need to take that worry seriously. The other part, speaking as someone who has lived in the US my entire life (educated, worked) it is very difficult, especially as an established professional, to admit you don’t know something. I do believe people in research understand that learning includes mistakes and doing that in a public way is a challenge. We don’t know what to do about this.

So that first challenge has to do with being familiar with new ways of working. The second has to do with being able to keep up with the proliferation of tools and how to use them effectively. New things keep happening, new things are generated every day. I’ve been blogging for a while and it took a while. It takes time, there is a bit of an overhead.

An example about working with new tools is wikis. It is a kind of technology that I call “people sorters.” People either like to use them or they don’t. While they provide many capabilities, they are quite cumbersome to use. The effort to change what you do and learn a new set of tools to do what you know how to do is a challenge is extra overhead.

Is it worth it?
I’m the kind of person who likes to do that (figure it out). It is a cost, but it has been worth it for me. Until the technology is built easier to use and learn, it is going to be difficult. Or until we have more experience and they aren’t so daunting.

What are the big challenges scientists working in the public interest face and how can social media help? Low hanging fruit?

Right now the biggest challenge for science today is its communication with the public. Scientists communicate with each other fairly well. What’s required is the general public to understand what the practice of science is, what scientists do and how they look at the world and make sense of things. And communicate how that works in solving the health, environment, crime social problems we have to deal with. Being more open is better. I don’t see why someone in the general public can’t be given access to research literature. You don’t necessarily need a PhD to read a paper. Being open and being able to interact with people when they have questions. Social media allows us to communicate quickly, at low cost and interactively with comments and replies. The opportunity is here to make a change in how the whole conversation happens. Social media ARE the lowest hanging fruit. A fast and easy way to communicate.

What have you noticed about scientists and science organizations using microblogging tools like Twitter?
Two things. When I was first involved with Twitter I followed my friends. Then I started to notice that some of the organizations that I work with in my NGO work with science and data were twittering. So I migrated who I followed to individuals and organization in science that give good examples about how to use something like Twitter to get information out without overwhelming people. When the Mars rover was out on Mars and operational, the people in the project set up a Twitter account and had the rover twittering. “Today I’m going to dig in the dirt. I love this job.” One of the most wonderful uses of twitter to provide information about what is happening and putting an informal face on sophisticated engineering and scientificresearch.

Why is it important to make science accessible and available to the public?
It makes it available to almost anyone. You can be six years old or 86. You can still wow – I’m following a robot! That’s cool. (Mars Rover on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MARSPHOENIX)

How does that change science?
It makes it available. That’s important because without science we aren’t going to be able to get ourselves through the 21st century as a species. That’s what I believe. So second we have to make it accessible and understandable to everyone for learning or even contributing. If the general public were much more aware about how science works, what it produces, what it does, they might have better interaction with their own elected officials. That is my own personal view. I also think it is kind of fun.

Social Media in International Development – 10 min interviews

Flickr cc image from I need your help and recommendations!

I’m about to facilitate another workshop on social media in international development for the ICT-KM program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This is the third time for this all-online workshop. In this iteration, we are trying to pay more attention to context of use, rather than focus on tools, tools, tools. The best way I know of doing this is to start the conversation with some stories of use.

To that end, I’m starting to do some 10 minute podcasts with practitioners who are  using social media in their work,  particularly those who work in international development and/or science research for global public  good (as in agricultural research.)

Who would you like to hear from? Who should I talk to?

First up, I’ll be interviewing William Anderson cofounder of Praxis101 . Bill has wrangled with the issues of sharing scientific data with his work with CODATA where he is an Associate Editor for the CODATA Data Science Journal (http://www.codata.org/dsj/index.html), and in his role as the Co-chair of the InterAcademy Panel Task Group on Digital Knowledge Resources in Developing Countries (http://www.interacademies.net/CMS/Programmes/4704.aspx ). He recently ended an eight year term as a member of the U.S. National Committee for the Committee on Data for Science and Technology and as Co-chair of the CODATA Task Group on  Preservation of and Access to Scientific and Technical Data in Developing Countries.

I already have a nice collection of longer podcasts including:

However, the value of a small library of short, engaging stories is priceless. So who should I interview? You? Someone you know of? Let me know! I’d like to harvest a few stories.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons picture, “Go Vote” on Flickr by M-C

Social Media Planning and Evaluation for NGOs

I’ve been co-designing and c0-facilitating a number of workshops for the CGIAR and FAO over the past few years about knowledge sharing, and more recently, this phenomenon people call “social media.” Part of this work has been to  comb through resources and create some launch pads that are relevant to NGOs and non profits. I thought I’d share a few of them on this blog.  I’ve edited this one a bit more since the first writing.

Over time, most of this material will also be added to the every growing “KS Toolkit,” another collaborative resource I’ve pointed to frequently.

Simone Staiger, my frequent collaborator in these efforts, pointed out this quote and URL from Margaret Wheatley that is a good kick off for the topic.

In nature, change never happens as a result of top-down, pre-conceived strategic plans, or from the mandate of any single individual or boss. Change begins as local actions spring up simultaneously in many different areas. If these changes remain disconnected, nothing happens beyond each locale. However, when they become connected, local actions can emerge as a powerful system with influence at a more global or comprehensive level. (Global here means a larger scale, not necessarily the entire planet.)

A wordle from Beth KanterSocial Media Strategy Planning & Measurement – What’s Working?

As people responsible for getting things done in your organization, you know the value of having a clear strategy and a way of evaluating if your strategy is working. With social media,  however, strategy is a compass, not a map, because it is a fast changing territory.

This topic is designed to give you some tools and ideas for including social media appropriately in your overall  organizational strategic plan and to measure its effectiveness.

Strategic Social Media Planning

You might want to look at the very useful “Social Media Strategic Planning Worksheet: from WE ARE MEDIA. Like any good communications strategic planning, social media strategy takes into consideration goals and target audiences AND the technology implications. This is the fundamental part that most of us are familiar with.

Bill Anderson (in a comment on this post, which was so good I’m editing it into the post) wrote:

I have three engineering like questions to add to the list that come directly from the late Neil Postman.

From an engineering perspective any technology, be it a tool, software, or processes and procedures, or new work practices, is a solution. Whenever considering adopting a solution consider asking the following three questions.

(1) What problem will it solve?
(2) Whose problem is it?
(3) What new problems are likely to arise by adopting it?

These three simple questions help me clarify my (sometimes hidden) assumptions about what I’m doing and why I think a particular technology is useful. I think they complement the set of questions you suggest in this post.

While it might be easy to say most of your constituents are not even online, some of your strategic audiences may be, such as funders, researchers and policy makers. So scan your audiences and look for possibilities.

Social media, however, is like a river you swim in. It is always flowing past, sometimes carrying us along, sometimes dumping us on the rocks of the shore. It is important to think iteratively of your strategy so you can adjust to changing conditions.   The advice  is to experiment often, fail quickly and learn, learn, learn to allow you to adapt your strategy. Think in 6 weeks or 6 months, not 3 year cycles. Keep an eye on the goal, but but ready to switch how you get to it.

Social Media Policies

Often people’s first questions are “how do we manage and control this stuff?” Organizations working with limited bandwidth want to block applications to prioritize internet use. Organizations working in more conservative parts of the world worry about what people will access if they start using web based tools.  The first thing to know here is that you can’t control all of this. So building on your core values and developing agreements is a sound strategy.

Some organizations find having a social media policy useful — as long as the policy doesn’t squash the initiatives right from the start! Always try and look at policies from two perspectives: control and emergence. Too much control and  you will miss the innovation and inventiveness that is a core benefit of social media.

Here are two articles that you might find helpful from IBM:

And a few more if you like to read…

What we have observed is that NGOs have been slower to consider their policies. This can be an advantage to the early innovators (few barriers) but may cause worry as leadership, not familiar with social media themselves,   want to overreact rather than thoughtfully consider policy.

Work Iteratively – Measure as You Go

The good thing about using social media is it is fairly simple to experiment, iterate or throw out an experiment that is not working for you. Think small, frequent experiments and low risk, rather than trying to build “the perfect system” and over investing in any one thing until you understand the value. For example, you may try a blog as an alternative to a traditional email newsletter. Track how many times a blog post has been viewed (using your blog software or a tool like Google Analytics). See how many comments you get when you post entries that specifically ask for feedback. (People are more likely to respond to open ended questions rather than traditional press releases!). Do a search to see who has linked to that post? (Do you know how to do this on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft search? What about the new Bing.com?)

These are examples of  using quantitative metrics. For a great list of more metrics you might consider, see Rachel Happe’s blog post on Social Media Metrics. See what blog posts are more read and then start adjusting your posting style. Some people call this “social listening.” In the early phases of using social media, you are trying things out and “listening” for the response as indicated by page views, links, responses or even action by your target audience. To read more about this, check out Beth Kanter’s blog post about evaluating first projects.

Qualitative Evaluation

There is more than quantitative metrics for evaluating your social media ROI. As you know, communications is as much a qualitative thing as a quantitative thing. Some things are intangible. Like a funder reading a blog post that told the STORY of some work and begins to engage more deeply to support the project. Or the people who start following the messages you send out on Twitter and gain a deeper appreciation for food and hunger in the world and start making small changes in their own lives. These things require a deeper listening – finding stories, doing interviews with people from your target audience. For more on this, here is another blog post from Beth Kanter.

As you get a sense of how social media is helping you achieve your communications strategy, you can begin to fold social media evaluation into your overall communications evaluation work. Keep what is working. Adjust the things that might be working. Stop doing the things that aren’t working. Just a note on this. Sometimes it takes both experimentation and time to find out if something is working. So don’t give up too quickly.

Examples of social media evaluation efforts:

Questions:

  • What communications objective do you want to try and support with social media?
  • Do you want or need to have a social media policy?
  • What are the benefits, both tangible and intangible, that a social media strategy might offer? What value does our social media strategy provide to our organization or stakeholders?
  • What type of quantitative and qualitative information do we need to track to measure our success or learn how to improve our social media strategy?

Additional Resources:

Productive Strategies for Using Information Streams in Development

nullJon Thompson pointed me to a very interesting social media project at the World Food Programme, CipCip. Here is a brief bit about it.

The Life of a Project Called “Deliver”: CipCip: It is not what you do, but who you do it with
Long gone are the times where you put a knowledgeable person somewhere and she or he could do the job. Our work has become so complex, time-critical and crucial to saving lives that “collaboration” with others has become a must. Not only with external parties like donors, government counterparts and other NGOs/UN agencies but also internally within the organisation.

“Information” is a key part of the collaboration. Accessing and sharing information a must.

And data is everywhere. From corporate servers, to Access databases in field offices, to Excel spreadsheets somewhere on individual computers. There is not one bit of information that exists, which is not in a digital form, apart from the feeling of the sand between your toes on a romantic summer evening.

The data exists. But is hardly made accessible let alone shared.

With the DELIVER project we aim to make the information, essential for moving 4.7 million tons of food annually, available to all those who need it. And more.

One of the key goals of DELIVER is the collection, analysis, storage and dispatch of time critical information, generated by systems, people or by public sources.

This is a cool project and reminds me of some other efforts that are swirling around as people in NGOs/NPOs seek to understand a strategic application of social media. Look at the cool work that Tracker is doing. There is this liberating idea that no one organization or person is the central source of information. They key is capturing useful information into a flow, then use the intelligence of the associated community to pull out key stuff and connections with people who can tell more or act on the ‘stuff.’

We talk about overwhelm. It is reality now. So schemes to swim productively in the overwhelm in a strategic matter should be our focus.

What is your scheme? (Or is that the wrong word?) 😉