NCVO ICT Foresight

Yesterday we had a fantastic day at NCVO discussing social networking, ICT and the voluntary and community sector.

Many interesting ideas emerged from our roundtable discussion (fortunately I recorded it!) Before we started I also put some quotes up on flip chart paper and asked people to respond by scribbling on post-it notes. Here are some of the results:

‘There is a new notion of networking emerging which is based more around individuals (e.g. blogging-based communities rather than forum-based communities” (from a conversation with David Wilcox about Nancy White’s work)

Responses:

• There is a concern that this will push us further towards single issue politics
• Are communities defined by technology or by aims/actions?

“Does ICT support the development of social capital? Or does social capital need to be in place already?” (adapted from Ben Anderson’s contribution to an NCVO/ESRC seminar on ICT, social capital and voluntary action which was also held yesterday)

Responses:

• Yes and yes! Can it speed and broaden social capital development?
• Relations must either be there or evolve
• Transactions are the key to developing social capital. Trust

“Being able to successfully participate in online communities has nothing to do with technical skills and everything to do with people skills” (from Jayne Cravens’ contribution to the same seminar)

Responses:

• Sort of - some technical skills required (even more important is good governance)
• This suggests a technical elite will emerge
• These skills/attributes may be different for forum and blog-based communities (see Nancy White)
• There are already technical divides in society, not always representing power differentials

“It is now easier to find people and resources online, and to mix and match these assets into project teams, communities of practice and informal networks” (from this post by David Wilcox about membership associations)

Responses to my questions about what this means for membership organisations:

• Membership organisations and associations can give these networks focus and impart skills
• Has a parallel with the music industry. Membership schemes need to offer something more, something exclusive to justify cost/relevance
• Branding theory seems relevant. Consider ‘crossing the chasm’. The key ideas are about aims, objectives, ways to affect change

“There is a simmering tension between ego-centric thinking and network-centric thinking – the tension between the institutional power that emanates from an organization and the transactional power that inheres in its members’ myriad interactions” (from this article by Jed Miller and Rob Stuart)

Responses:

• How do organisations maintain accountability? How do individuals evaluate and choose to direct their attention?
• Organisations should embrace this. The tension is in competition - that’s keeping vitality in the sector
• Depends whose side they are on
• How is this different from the tension between activing in your own self-interest and acting altruistically?

“Content sharing and other learning, knowledge-finding and knowledge-sharing are arguably the domain of Knowledge Management rather than Social Networking” (I was interested in exploring this discussion, alluded to in this post by Dave Pollard)

Responses:

• Knowledge is the currency of social networking
• KM is social networking
• Everyone is an expert on something
• Personal knowledge management will be more important
• People are inherently bad at knowledge management and good at communication. Bad advice from a friend will alwyas carry more weight than info that has to be researched and validated.

We are going to be carring on our discussion here - please come and join in!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Society, Practices, Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.