business – Beyond Physical Spaces

Civil Society & the Aggregation of Information

I thought for this week’s post on aggregation, I would think about how it affects civil society. The first thing I was actually thinking about is the type of civil society – from NGOs to community interest groups, the kind of impact aggregation would have on them would vary. The second thing was whether they would use it internally to collect and share information or whether they would use 2.0 tools to make increase their virtual presence.

On a very basic level, aggregation can benefit a group the same way it can benefit an individual, having a centralised place to collect and share information is great for exchanging ideas and tapping on each other’s knowledge. I thought Michelle’s recommendation Scoop.It. is great for interest-based organisations. The downside, however, is the assumption that everyone would be need to be technologically savvy enough to curate information or at least follow the person who does. Additionally, many charitable organisations do a lot of work on the ground and rely more on physical networks for information. In theory it seems like a great idea but it takes time to curate and many may simply not invest in that time.

Aggregation tools can impact an organisation positively, especially if someone has the required expertise and skills as well as a vision of how they are going to use such tools to reach out to the online public. A nature advocacy group can collect all their videos and articles so that people can easily find and follow them, a charitable organisation can share photos and information about their work and present them as a collective whole to get funding. With the world wide web, many groups can get international support where it would have once been impossible to do so. A petition against a controversial policy, international pressure, all of these have given much of civil society the bargaining power they need against governments or more visibility for a cause.

The flip side is this, bigger organisations often get more visible at the expense of smaller ones who do not have the resources or time to manage their online pressence. Let’s say I see a campaign for women’s rights online handled by an international NGO with all the resources to make themselves visible online and I find myself interested in the cause because they put up information, photos and of course a convenient link for donations. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I know there must be other similar organisations, maybe smaller and less media savvy but also doing good work. However, information about the work those smaller organisations do are either limited or not visible to me. I also do not know how I can help. As a result, I will end up supporting what I know. While it is true that these NGOs may be getting new supporters through the social web and these may be people who may otherwise never be involved in a cause, it is also true that they may overshadow others.

Information is both power and money and while these two things can be used to do good, it may also result in complacency. On the whole I think being able to manage a wide range of information online with tools for aggregation is a good thing but for every organisation we see online compiling their resources, there are many more out there who don’t and maybe as information professionals, a service we can provide for the community in our free time is to help some of these organizations, who are clearly doing good work, manage their information.

The Social Everything

(Note: If you don’t have a sense of humour, please don’t read this post and do your readings instead – it will probably be better time spent)

I’m on a roll, third blog post for the week… I’m not on the ball, I’m just inspired to be irreverent, which happens when you take two online classes and ask yourself why you are spending so much time indoors when there is so much sun OUTdoors. On days like these, I also reflect only the disjunct between school and what happens in the working world. So much of school work is hypothetical which is good for thinking about things but there is always this thin line where you know you have crossed when you start obsessing over how many blog posts you have made for the week, how many tweets you have tweeted and of course how many wiki edits you have made.

Thankfully, my ability to be irreverent shows that I am not there yet.

Let’s talk about “the social everything” – a term Anita and I coined today over a delicious dim sum meal (great moments of epiphany happens over food) where we were engaging in social food bonding. Social is big business, the social web, social media and if we go towards the internet of things, you might even have social household appliances! Many companies are realising the power of social media and are leveraging on it to reach out to more people either through direct advertising on social media platforms or creating a social media presence for themselves to engage people beyond the transactional. Social is the new business buzz word.

However, social is nothing new, it has just been given a new face. In China, businessmen secure deals over dinner and drinks, mutual partnerships have their roots in good business relationships, good customer service is about building good relationships with your clients; building relationships is intricately linked to building good social networks and not necessarily online. One of the dangers of social media is the assumption that if you are on it, you are building relationships. That is only partially true. Social media cannot replace real world interactions – the irony is that the convenience of it sometimes devalues the effort. It’s as simple as wishing a friend Happy Birthday over Facebook as opposed to sending a physical birthday card. Social media can be a start, a gateway but if you want meaningful relationships, you have to put in more effort than typing words over the internet.

Likewise physical classes as opposed to online classes. While there are benefits to online classes, they cannot replace physical classes in the area of relationship building. At the end of the day, content will only take you so far and if you have all the content in your head without the social skills to make it relevant to the people around you, you will only achieve limited success. It is better to have less content and more social skills than more content and less social skills (unless you want to become an academic). Getting the best grades, rushing to be first, proving yourself academically is only going to get you a piece of paper at the end of the day. Everything else after is social.