Month: July 2011

Collaboration: Contribution, Context, and Clay Shirky

Post author By Michele Ramos
Post date July 31, 2011
No Comments on Collaboration: Contribution, Context, and Clay Shirky

On Contribution

I’ll admit that I had a difficult time coming up with something to blog about with this week’s topic. In all honesty, my initial reaction was, “Of course collaboration is important and benefits information professionals!” but after reflecting a bit more I realized that my own experiences with collaboration have been variable, some were great and some were less than great.

Collaboration depends on involvement and contribution, and my best experiences with collaborative projects were when everyone was pitching in for a common goal, held themselves responsible for completing that goal, and held themselves responsible for their own contributions. I don’t wish to go into detail about my experiences when a collaborative project hadn’t gone well [and don’t worry group, I believe that our course Wiki completely rocked and was a great example of good collaboration!] but I would like to discuss what has been problematic for some of my collaborative projects in the past.

In my experience, collaboration hasn’t worked well when the goal of the project is not clear for everyone involved. Or, when the goal is understood, sometimes because of various factors (work, other classes, life, etc.) people aren’t able to contribute as much as others, and this is of course understandable and unavoidable. Other times, I’ve found collaborative projects to be complicated by distance or misunderstandings via online interactions, which might have been remedied by setting aside some face-to-face or voice-to-voice communications, which with distance collaborators can be difficult or near impossible. Lastly, the most frustrating complications with collaboration for me have been when I’ve found myself in the sole leadership/director position rather than in a position to share leadership responsibilities with everyone. This last aspect has only happened on a couple of occasions, but have been at times when others’ contributions were minimal.

Collaboration on projects works best when everyone is present, available, and ready, willing, and interested in contributing. Social media can support good collaboration and can help peers or colleagues in various locations and time zones to construct virtual or online objects. But I think that for collaboration to work well among people there needs to be trust, responsibility, concise communication, self-motivation, self-direction, empathy, a willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, a willingness to ask important or clarifying questions, and an ability to stay positive and keep the common goals, purpose, mission, values, etc. in mind.

It also helps when people are really happy to be there and happy to contribute. In a past life, I was a manager at a coffee house for 5 years and it was far easier to get people to help out with planning for a party or a fun event than it was to get them to complete a cleaning project or restock the inventory. If people care about the goal, mission, or values of a project they are far more likely to fully contribute or go beyond the minimal tasks.

On Context

I do think that collaboration depends on context to a certain extent, especially in online and virtual spaces. To give a personal example, back in 2009/2010 I contributed to a collaborative research development project. Basically, the idea of the project was to move the process of researching and gathering historical information to an online environment. The stages of the research process were initially formulated as: initial notes, cross listed files on persons, places, events, or organizations, and the final published product which was a collection of biographies, summaries, and detailed information entries in monograph form. The project got as far as an initial online prototype that was a cross between a wiki and a database.

What was most interesting about assisting with the design of this collaborative space was the levels of publicness or privacy that would be permitted. The historian I was working with stressed that everything must be kept in a private space, with only permitted members, and that the only content that might be viewable by the public would be the final, well researched and publishable entries. This comes to my point, that what is permissible and acceptable as collaboration depends on context. In this case, an open Wikipedia-like collaboration space was unacceptable, and publicly available social media was out of the question. Collaboration was only acceptable in a private online space among fellow colleagues, researchers, and research assistants, and not viewable or accessible to others.

On Clay Shirky

Lastly, I’d like to share some thoughts on Clay Shirky’s TED Talk video, Institutions versus Collaboration. In this 2005 video, Shirky compares and contrasts the institutional model of project management and the collaborative model that is possible with social media technologies. One of Shirky’s points is that, to a certain extent, collaborative spaces erode the traditional institutional model. Being that it is now 2011, I was wondering how relevant these points are today, and came across this article, Social Media versus Institutions discussing the same ideas in 2009. It seems then, that some organizations and institutions are still trying to make sense of networked collaboration and how to make it work in what was traditionally hierarchical and modular environments.

Tags Clay Shirky, collaboration, collaboration 2.0, contribution, meeting common goals

Social Media for Info Pros

Participation and 2.0

What does it mean for libraries to be a part of participatory culture?

In Henry Jenkins’ study titled “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” he defines participatory culture as:

a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
some type of informal mentorship, where experience is passed along to novices
members believe their contributions matter
members feel some degree of social connection with one another
members believe that they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued

He goes on to say that participatory cultures can provide new media skills that build on traditional skills of literacy, research, technological competences, and critical analysis, as well as provide collaboration, networking and community involvement.

Although, the version number “2.0” has come to be synonymous with social media, interactivity, participation, engagement, collaboration, and networking in the marketing and online worlds, ultimately I don’t think that the number matters unless the culture, philosophy, and participatory structures are there. For example, in the chapter titled “Participatory Services and the Long Tail” in Library 2.0, Casey & Savastinuk emphasize the need to build participatory tools and mechanisms into the structures of libraries for both users and nonusers, and in this way libraries can harness the power of users to enhance library services. However, it’s important to keep in mind that participatory cultures do not magically appear when libraries add blogs, tagging features, or a Facebook profile to their library website. As Sarah Houghton-Jan, the Librarian in Black, states in “Organization 2.0”:

“Many people treat technology like it’s free like beer but it is really free like kittens…they take maintenance, ongoing effort, and staff time. If you have one person alone who is managing technology for the library, then you’re in a bad space. If that person gets hit by a bus then no one else can take it over and the library is in big trouble. Just doing the hot new thing for the sake of it is not helpful and does not serve our users best … Why does social software fail? The use of social software is not seen as furthering the library’s mission. It’s treated as someone’s pet project. It’s not planned for strategically like other technologies. Once the newness wears off, people are less motivated to contribute.”

It takes work to facilitate and support a participatory culture, not simply social media and Web 2.0 technologies, and unfortunately some libraries seem to be pretty far behind the trend that is quickly becoming a commonplace expectation. As David Lankes strategically argues, libraries and information professionals need to be where the conversation is.

As a young up and coming information professional, I would even go so far as to argue that it isn’t simply a matter of going beyond the “brick and mortar” libraries to where the users are online, it’s about re-structuring libraries to meet a paradigmatic shift in social and cultural expectations. It’s not about catching up with technologies, it’s about training, strategizing, teaching/informing, (re)developing, (re)structuring, and being significant stakeholders in emerging and contemporary information ecologies. Libraries should not need to advertise or convince users that they are “2.0” and instead they should start seriously thinking about how to become fully integrated into the future of participatory cultures.

Tags David Lankes, Henry Jenkins, information ecologies, Laura Savastinuk, Library 2.0, Michael Casey, participatory cultures, Sarah Houghton-Jan, two.point.oh, Web 2.0

Social Media for Info Pros

On Blogging and Being A Wannabe Blogger

Post author By Michele Ramos
Post date July 15, 2011
8 Comments on On Blogging and Being A Wannabe Blogger

“Blogging requires an embrace of hazards, a willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap” ~ Andrew Sullivan

My first blogging experiences happened when I was a high school student back in the late 1990’s. This was before Facebook, MySpace, or LiveJournal, before cellphones became as commonplace as lunch pails, when AOL still ruled the web and high speed broadband was a luxury that most could not afford. I know that I’m making myself sound old and sage-like when it comes to social media, but todays online technologies are deeply steeped in generational rhetorics and, quite frankly, I believe that each of us has used and encountered social media technologies at different points in our lives, with different levels of importance, with different affects, different uses, different commitments, and different concerns.

Part of my short trek into nostalgia-land is to bring attention to some of the similarities and differences between, for example, the earlier days of blogging and blogging today. Early proto-blogging platforms like OpenDiary and LiveJournal paved the way for the commonplace blogging platforms, Blogger and WordPress. Back then blogging was much more personal and akin to maintaining a diary (as many of you may be familiar with from first hand experience). There was a greater degree of anonymity and there was less of a journalistic or magazine readership feel compared to the professional bloggers of today.

I have, as I’m sure you would imagine, grown a great deal from my early teenage years and usage of social media. I dropped the OpenDiary account by the time I graduated high school, and since then had made various half hearted attempts at blogging. I tried blogging/journaling about my personal thoughts and reflections, and quickly deleted the account. I tried blogging about food, literature, or pop culture but felt like I was trying to be too much like a journalist interested in gaining a particular niche readership. All of these attempts never really got past one or two posts.

To a certain extent, my trepidations around blogging also had to do with concerns about my own personal style and tone. I tend to write and speak in a somewhat analytic and academic tone. This might be because I spent the majority of my early twenties in philosophy and rhetoric courses, or it might be because I idolized, worshiped, and modelled myself after Janeane Garofalo in my formative years, either way I’ve worried from time-to-time that my tone can be a bit initially intimidating. In actuality, and this might come as a surprise to acquaintances, I’m a bit of an introvert and am not always as sure of my thoughts, opinions, and writing as I seem.

As a formative information professional, I feel that there is another call for blogging: to maintain professional interests, contacts with colleagues, and provide a central medium or archive of your opinions and well informed critical reflections on issues, topics, and events that are pertinent to your field. I’ve become much more interested in blogging and managing my social media networks toward these professional goals. However, balancing the management of these information productions and flows can be time consuming and difficult along side a full-time course load.

All my wannabe blogger ambitions aside, I do think that the medium of blogging has had a rather interesting relationship to both print media and other forms of social media. Andrew Sullivan‘s 2008 article, Why I Blog, offers some interesting insights on the positionality of bloggers and blogging (not to mention very quotable prose). At one point he discusses the personal origins and nature of blogging:

“What endures is a human brand…It stems, I think, from the conversational style that blogging rewards. What you want in a conversationalist is as much character as authority. And if you think of blogging as more like talk radio or cable news than opinion magazines or daily newspapers, then this personalized emphasis is less surprising. People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging, they have a sensibility.”

I find it intriguing that he relates bloggers more to radio or television personalities rather than op ed writers or journalists. I agree that there is much more of a conversational tone and expectation to blogging, that is somewhat present in radio, but I feel that it is far less present in the more broadcast based medium of television. What I find most intriguing about his description of blogging, is how he relates the tone and style of writing to the medium:

“Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.”

Each medium has it’s place, and the message dictates the medium. Having been repeatedly reintroduced to Marshall Mcluhan‘s ideas, primarily with The Medium is the Massage, I found this section to be particularly thought provoking. I believe that Sullivan is saying, that even though the medium affects the reader, the nature of the message dictates the appropriate medium. Blogging works best for up-to-date immediate reactions, interpretations, and opinions on an event or article, that can satiate an immediate desire for information. However, you would not look for this sort of content in a novel or academic journal.

However, despite the immediacy with which he describes blogging, I do think that blogging’s sensibility has become remolded or repositioned since the widespread use of Twitter. This blog post by Joe Manna places Twitter among terms such as instant gratification, accountability, and conversation, whereas blogging is described as verbose, fulfilling, longer, and more detailed. I’ve come across this sort of comparison before, and I think it’s important to keep in mind the relationships between various social media, as well as between print and “new media.”

I’d like to end (this rather long post) with a few more quotes on blogging by Sullivan:

“[A blogger] is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.”

“To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others…pivot you toward relative truth.”

“[A blogger] can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but [she] also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.”

Tags Blogging, Blogs, Medium is the Massage, Module 1, new media, old school tech, Social Media