Fantastic talk on blogs, wikis, social network, forums and tagging
I’ve created a transcript of a fantastic talk on using social software, such as wikis, blogs, online forums and RSS to help people connect with each other learn from each other. Particular emphasis is given to managing information overload.
The talk was given by Euan Semple (formerly of the BBC) who was responsible for (successfully) encouraging the institution to use social software such as wikis and blogs. The link below includes a link to an audio recording of his talk.
Here’s the transcript:
Euan Semple on Social Software & Social Networks (forums, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and RSS)
Euan Semple was 21 years in senior position at BBC. He gave a presentation on how BBC grew to include 16,000 staff using online forums, 2,500 wikis, RSS, social networking and hundreds of weblogs.
This is a summary of recent talk at the EU eLearning Conference 2006 (Helsinki). I’ve adapted added some comments of my own.
It is NOT about the technology but about the fundamental change in the way people expect to work with each other. It is about enabling globally distributed near instant person to person conversations. The internet has allowed people to find each other, connect with each other and have very direct personal conversations about all sorts of topics. Euan reflects that he had more staff sharing knowledge with each other and others on bulletin boards than they were with staff in the same organisation. Staff fail to connect to each other because there are physical and bureaucratic barriers, (and ignorant barriers) which prevent staff from connecting with each other. So it is very possible that staff have more connections with the outside world, sharing knowledge with outsiders, then they do within their own institution because of the bureaucratic and physical barriers.
Online forums
16,500 out of 23000 staff at the BBC use the internal online forum system. They didn’t push the technology, just word of mouth. Basically it was a place to ask questions and get answers. The premise is that out of the 23,000 people the chances are that anything you are trying to do, someone has tried to do it before, someone is currently trying to do it or will know someone who is trying/tired. So it is about accessing the ‘meatware’ of the organisation you DON’T normally get access to.
3 levels of questions or conversations can be found in the forum.
Level 1: A lot of the questions are simple, how do I do this, find this, get hold of etc. But even if these questions get answered QUICKLY it is a great benefit to the organisation. For example a person asked how to transfer a call on the internal phone system, only 2 people answered (there’s really no debate involved), BUT 3500 people read that thread. In other words 3500 people learned to do something otherwise they would have wasted time searching and bothering other people.
Another question type: someone asked how much can you claim for using your own car for business purposes. Half dozen answers came back – mainly wrong. So from one perspective you can complain about them misinforming one another. However in fact what is happening is that they were offering what they thought were the right answers. But the tool didn’t create the misinformation but showed the fact that it existed and brought it to the surface. Then someone posted the official document which is a big benefit to the lurkers aka the majority who don’t contribute but are happy to read. They ALL learned the official solution. And even if we knew of the documents existence we wouldn’t able to find it because of the usual corporate barriers to research. More happened: others now come forward as they had different interpretations of the official document and gave their reasons.
So using forums, a pan organisational tool, people start to debate stuff, messy stuff and you (i.e. all staff) cannot hide from it.
Level 2 conversation was about BBC activity. The screening of Jerry Springer the Opera kicked off a huge debate with 340 posts some with 4-5 paragraphs essays. This was good as the forum allowed us to get our collective heads around what we were doing.
Level 3 conversation is the one that challenges the status quo in that management decisions got challenged, debated or questioned. An example is the change in the weather graphics. This was questioned on the forum. The head of the department this time joined in and engaged in the conversation instead of hiding and pretending they were not upset. The way he did it was good, he didn’t assert authority but asked questions such as why didn’t you like it, what would you have rather we had done etc. He was NOT giving up his right to make decisions or throwing it open to committee, but was prepared to talk to others about the issues.
Social Networking
Another tool was Connect which is a social networking tool which enables people of like minds and interests to link up. Similar to Friendster (www.friendster.com ) but for internal corporate use. It allows you to state your interests, responsibilities and fields of research but also has a taxonomy of activities BBC are engaged in. The idea is that if someone wanted to talk to an expert in ‘online discussions’ and that person was not available it still allowed them to find others engaged in the same activity. Social networking allows you to get through to the informal and new that is not part of the corporate org yet. REMEMBER we have nothing like this at the moment.
This is a great alternative to forming online communities. Usually people form communities for fragile links and the last thing they want to do is manage them.
Interests groups also form on the back of social networking. The advantage is that if you want to run a specific event you normally either email everyone or use a network of named contacts. Forming an online interest group using Connect brought 160 people out of the woodwork. Who then turned up at the event and networked/contact with each other and the organisers. Tools like these bring out interests groups of like minds which previously are hidden.
Blogs
For the first time it is now really easy to publish information on the web and the intranet. Previously we either had to write the code or bought the application in. Remember Tim Berniers-Lee invented the net to get round the frustration of not being able to access documents made by others which were hidden away on document storage systems, (where they go to ‘die gracefully’ – no one would read them or connect with them). He wanted to stop this and let people connect with and read the documents. With blogs this is now possible.
The other thing about blogs is that they are permanent. With each post someone can permanently point to that idea in perpetuity as long as that blog remains. In normal websites if the institution or webmaster re-designs it, the link may end up dead.
On top of this blogs make for a highly linky environment. Which enables the conversational tone of it, enables you to develop ideas, allows you to point to different elements of the story that you were writing yourself, (i.e. link to other entries on other individuals blogs while writing your own blog entry).
Another element is the ability for readers to comments to teach entry. With a normal website they are passive. Unless you email the webmaster you cannot come back at it, or say anything to it. With a comments thread on a blog, everyone who sees that blog can also read your comments. So although its predominantly a one person space, comments give a voice to those who are reading it.
As an example Richard Sambrook Director of BBC Global News http://sambrook.typepad.com/ set up a blog for a new division of 1200 staff and wanted a direct and authentic way of communicating with them. In the end 8000 staff per month read his blog and this gave him a platform within the organisation, a power base and more important he became a real person with which people could relate to in contrast to the old staff emails which were filled with policy and deleted before they were read. So there is a shift from the personal, to the authentic, to the network.
Wikis
A wiki is a blank page that anyone can edit, update and add content to. Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is the best example, in particular as it enables anyone to access AND add information. It is bizarrely effective. Bizarrely because since anyone can add anything it should be falling apart, it should be rubbish and it shouldn’t be working. But for many articles, especially mainstream articles it’s amazingly reliable. It works on the basis of the wisdom of crowds. On the principle that if you have a large enough group of diverse enough and independent enough individuals and a means of seeing their collective decision making, (such as the wiki), you get more reliable decisions than you would with a SMALL group experts 95% of the time.
Wikis provide the readers with the ability to generate documents collaboratively, quickly and in a distributive fashion. It is much more elegant than a traditional shared document management system. At the BBC it took off with 3000 users for a variety of uses. It was totally written and structured by the participants engaged in the process. For example they used a wiki to develop the policy on personal weblogs, to decide what were the limits in terms of content. They contacted all who held blogs at the BBC and sent them a link to area on the wiki. The blog owners then populated the wiki with content. After 2 weeks the posts stopped, because the posters were in agreement with what was said. The result was taken back to management where it then became policy. So very powerful.
A third example was come from a complaint form someone over the fact that BBC staff were not allowed to take part in BBC competitions. At the time there was a digital photo competition and so a single page was set up on the wiki on the subject. The users piled in and arranged a space to share the photos, appointed judges, developed criteria and added tags to each photo for category searching (more on tagging later). 45 staff took part with 300 photos submitted and not a single meeting to organise the thing. At one point someone offered to some funds to support the activity and the first thing they asked for was for a meeting - the answer was no. Why? It (the meeting and support) was not required. These examples are and became common place. BBC staff are now using wikis to write scripts (including Radio 3 drive time). Somebody also created a meta-directory of all the databases in the BBC that have been populated by their owners. This then developed its own nomenclature and own structure to handle something complex and innovative and new that the BBC had not done before.
The above shows one of the amazing things about the wiki in that people will develop different characteristics within the system. Some people are good at writing, some at editing, some at ‘gardening’, i.e. tidying up. The latter is important as wikis can become very complex through growing very quickly and some people like to tidy things up and re-structure it into a sensible visible structure.
Information overload
However there is a sense of overload, more and more information. In other words you receive enough information why should you read more?
But the effect is that it begins to cut down some of the noise. It certainly increases the quality of what you get. Through the blogs and the blog network you get to read the content that has been deemed interesting by very interesting people. It filters the web for me. It means the persons perceptions of quality goes up exponentially. So in time the overload goes down while the quality increases.
RSS – technology for managing workload.
Each blog carries an RSS feed which allows you to subscribe to it to the blog. RSS is a subscription process which allows you to aggregate or collect new blog (and other website) content into one viewable area. You can do this for literally hundred of blogs where as previously you would have to go to each blog website, look at it and try and work out what had changed. Aggregators show you new entries together with a brief summary of the entry.
Folksonomy
In the past institutions and corporations have tried to come up with their own classifications systems for use in knowledge management but they rarely work. One persons sensible taxonomy is another persons complete nonsense. And the speed at which things change these days means that it is almost impossible to keep up with that process. What is now emerging through tools such as Flickr (www.flickr.com) and del.icio.us (del.icio.us) is that users are tagging the content they have created or uploaded.
Why tag pictures? Well for instance you could have 5,500 pictures on the laptop and say if someone wanted to find the photos of the children at the beach in Wales last year, you’ll have a hard time finding them. So the photos are tagged with ‘beach’, ‘kids’, ‘holiday’, ‘Wales’, and can then be combined them in different ways to get the right pictures. Flickr is also an example. Flickr allows you to do the same when you upload a photo, i.e. you can tag the image with multiple tags. In this case tagged with ‘EU’, ‘elearning’, ‘Helsinki’ and ‘Finland’. This allows the uploader to find the photo again. However what Flickr also does is make those tags available to all users of Flickr. So if someone searches for images using the terms ‘EU’ or ‘elearning’ they will see these photos and make contact with the author. Very powerful, collaborative, distributed sense making. The consensus is that the tags within Flickr are very reliable.
del.icio.us does the same for bookmarks. Previously when you saved a bookmark you ended up with a very long list of bookmarks for which you could not remember why you saved them and so never end up using them. When you save a bookmark in del.icio.us you tag it with words that makes sense to yourself. These tags then became available to all users of del.icio.us. So for example if I find something, say an article or website, and associate it with the tag ‘podcast’ everybody gets to know that something interesting, (interesting enough to warrant saving). has appeared under ‘podcasts’.
RSS feeds again. You can have RSS feeds of these searches. In other words RSS feeds of searches using particular tags such as ‘podcast’ and ‘education’ Euan presents an example of after speaking at a conference he checked his RSS aggregator to find that someone had written about him during his actual presentation (he has RSS feeds for searches using his own name as a tag). He was able to meet with this person shortly. This power to have messy, unstructured, unvalidated ‘stuff’ and to connect with someone who is clever and influential in the same ‘stuff’ is novel and very new.
Summary
Euan goes on to say that, with regards to all these social based technologies, he doesn’t think it is anything we have a choice about in terms of engaging with it. Children are currently in the playgrounds texting each other and instant messaging each other during the evenings and so are never off this technology. There are 100 million of them in MySpace and they may be working for organisations soon. Or not! Some might not work for an organisation that wouldn’t allow them to keep doing this. And even if they do work for you and you don’t allow them to engage with this technology, they will just go beyond the firewall anyway and the there could be all sorts of repercussions.
The key aspect is social networking and the resultant community. The network allows people to make sense of, to make contact and take action on all sorts of subjects and this is totally new. Some compare to the Renaissance. Comparisons between the press and the web have been made for years and now we seeing a similar step change in the way we communicate with each other that will effect almost every institution that we know.
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November 10th, 2006 at 8:35 am
[...] A good transcript of Euan Semple’s talk is here. [...]