Beth Kanter who I met at last year's Circuit Rider conference in Birmingham is a must read and posted an excellent article recently about Social Network and non-profits.
She referenced this excellent presentation by Jeremiah Owyang
Her quote is "My absolute favorite phrase is "technologies come and go, but strategy sustains." I might modify it to include outcomes, strategy, and metrics sustain - for nonprofits. "
Slide 45 about the POST methodology jumped out at me which I'll paraphrase here:
The four step approach to the groundswell
P - People: Assess your customers' Social Technology profile
O - Objectives: Decide what you want to accomplish
S - Strategy: Plan for how relationships with customers change
T - Technology: Decide which social technologies to use.
and several other slides rang true. We're in the P and O stages here, and given our existing user base and potential users we're doing this online (here) and offline at our focus group. We feel pretty strongly that 'the future' is 'out there' using the internet as our workspace, not stuck in restrictive silos, but we are aware that this requires a shift in thinking. The technology has changed dramatically in the last few years making almost anything possible which makes it even more important to be really clear about what we want to do and with whom, before getting carried away with the tools.
Anyway back to the point of this post! Given that one of the purposes of ruralnet|online is to bring together people from rural organisations and communities to exchange knowledge experience - it would appear to share many characteristics of a social network - but should ruralnet|online aim to be the 'Facebook for the sector' (such a horrible phrase) like English Heritage's Our place network (still a closed site with all content behind a login) or a much more open model like the NCVO's Third Sector Foresight where posts and comments are open and can be monitored by RSS. (NB full disclosure I'm a member of the ICT Foresight Panel).
Should ruralnet|online instead use social networks like Facebook to link people up by being an aggregation of other activity in the sector. Is it a service (like Experts Online)or just a talking shop? If the latter, will people pay for it and how? By end users, or through umbrella organisations and does our subscription model have to change.
Phew lots of questions there, but I hope it shows some of the thinking behind why we are doing it this way. We can sit in our (hexagonal) tower in Stoneleigh
and build a system that we (fairly techy and forward thinking we hope) think is what's needed or we can find out what ruralnet|online should really be about - which is what we're trying to do here.
ruralnet|online feed
What is a 'silo'?
What is a 'silo'?
An information silo is a way
An information silo is a way of describing 'stuff' (knowledge, ideas, data) that is stuck within a department or organisation that cannot easily be exchanged with other departments or organisations. It can go down to a personal level where someone in an organisation might have all the relevant information on a project at their fingertips...on their computer, but it is not shared across the desk, room, office or network. This can lead to a huge amount of duplication as common processes run in parallelbut each stuck intheir own silo, unable to escape!
More here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_silo
In this case what I was trying to get at is each individual organisation is acting as a silo when they go off and have their own private area behind their own website which does not encourage or indeed enable any sort of collaboration which is what something like ruralnet|online could turn out to be...