I have always maintained that there are more potential users of our services than existing users (all of whom we value very much). For example, if everyone knew what we did and how it works would there be a need for this role or this role?
We have found some interesting things since we took Experts Online from its silo.
It gets found by people.
Why? Not because people thought I know I need to find a legal expert to help me with a setting up a co-operative interest company. They put "set up a Cooperative share CIC" into Google. Lo and behold Experts Online appears
What does this have to do with ruralnet|online. Good question. We could create YAS (Yet Another Silo), but surely it is far more beneficial if we let it loose. Or partially let it loose. Making ruralnet|online search engine friendly is one thing and will raise its profile but Experts Online and ruralnet|online do not(sadly) run on fresh air. Someone has to pay for it, somewhere. And at some point we need to measure what is going on.
I just saw this at Beth Kanter's blog
The pic actually says it all but here is what it says
Don't rely on metrics to claim your community is successful. Use metrics to understand your community better
and some more:
I think what Alison is saying is that ROI may be calculated based on numbers, but numbers alone - no matter how compelling or disappointing won't speak for themselves. And, that there are different measures of success for different organizations. It's now up to us to explain what they mean and how they support the organization's visions and goals as well as what we may learn about the network's social interactions
Replace ROI (return on investment) for outcomes and perhaps we're getting close to a business model for ruralnet|online?
PS will the websites I've linked to from here check their Google Analytics to see who has linked to them?
ruralnet|online feed
Most interesting. Good work!
Most interesting. Good work!
I was a tiny tiny part of the Innovation Exchange bid and have carried many lessons away from it which I am trying out elsewhere and am happy to share.
I am working on a local (Southwest UK) innovation scheme called http://www.mediasandbox.co.uk. It is a 'de-centralised' community model to support six projects doing R&D in pervasive media. The middle bit is a Community of Practice (CoP) and the outer edges of the community we are modelling as a Community of Interest (CoI).
Technically, the core (CoP) is a group blog (research journals), supported with a private mailing list and physical events based around P2P knowledge sharing activities. The periphery is a set of third party apps (delicious tag='mediasandbox', flickr, youtube) and another mailing list (free to subscribe). We are using google analytics for the group blog and are considering some form of clickthrough tracking tool for our newsletters.
Socially, we will be 'facilitating' by supporting the projects behind the scenes, drumming up journal posts from the projects, linking around them, writing newsletters for the CoI list, running physical events etc. We will not be sending cheery emails to a forum and worrying about getting our comments figures high - we are going to try to intervene in this traditional way as little as possible.
Anyone can subscribe to the third party apps, Coi mailing list, read and comment on the blog posts. The projects will make fortnightly journal posts (text, pictures, video, mindmaps, whatever) and manage any conversations that spring up around them.
We are using only free apps that anyone can easily use, and producing a socio-technical design model to explain the social (and then technical) model behind it. This will be a CC licenced piece for further distribution and analysis.
One of my goals in the project is to better understand the metrics question - quantitative, qualitative, knowledge, community strengths, etc.
How can we measure the impact of the R&D journals and related discussion on the wider community? We can measure the hub site and third party apps with trad metrics (page views, number of posts, comments, pictures etc.), but beyond these easy to catch data, what can we do?
If you're interested, we are happy to share and converse - we're in the dark here, poking the elephant to assess its shape and this is best done together between people - first metrics meeting in Bristol quite soon...
In the meantime I'm subscribing to your blog :)
all the best,
Ed