Twitter for organisations

I follow some organisations and some individuals on Twitter (I follow northern NGOs like @oxfamnovib, and some southern NGOs like @alamad_NGO). Generally, I find organisations' slightly boring, slower and less engaging on Twitter than individuals, but keep on following them because they do have some useful new information at times (or out of politeness?). I'm always curious who is behind the account, especially if I know the organisation!

Several people have asked me how they should organize their Twitter account for their organisation, how to name the account and who should Tweet? I respond that it's best to combine organisational with personal. Recently, I have asked this question in the Facebook group with non-profit consultants and also found this blogpost by Steve Bridger talking about the same issues.

How to use twitter as an organisation?

• Naming the account after the organisation or the person? - There are three different options: an organisation account (eg. UNICEF @unicef), a personal employee account (like Arjen Mulder @arjencito), or an account combining a name and organisation (eg. Colin Butfield @Colin_WWF). Ofcourse you may both, have an organisational account and encourage your employees to be active on Twitter with their personal account, talking about their professional lives. It is nice to know who is tweeting from organisational accounts. You may add that information in the profile, or as in the example of @handsonnetwork use the image on the homepage (see picture). One person mentioned that the twitter account on behalf of the organisation didn't work till she added her own name. Also, if you are sending a Direct Message, you might add your name at the end to make it more personal. For other organisations, like UNHCR it seems to work well (with more than a million followers!). Slightly more creative is setting up a Twitter account with a specific purpose, like one of my favourites, the African Proverbs.
  

• What to tweet? Try to develop an idea of your followers and why they would like to follow your organisation, are they volunteers, clients, partner organisations? Is it to offer webcare (a booming new approach to customer care) or something different? Christian Kreutz analyzed accounts of 10 development organizations and found they performed poorly on interaction with their followers. On the other hand, you may set up an twitter account like an information service, and as long as you are clear about it, for instance with tips or quotes (see again African Proverbs). Be creative! And you may organize an occassional poll amongst your followers using twtpoll or another polling tool.

• How to leverage employee accounts? More and more new employees may already be active as professionals on Twitter and may like to keep their own accounts. What you can do as an organisation is to offer a phrase to add to their profile information. You may make a list of the twitter accounts of the persons in your organisation and put in on your website for instance (check whether they are into this or whether is more of a private twitter account!). You may offer some guidelines to employees. Steve Bridger offers a nice list with example guidelines on his blog:
  

  * Include a disclaimer in your profile;
  * Common sense should always prevail;
  * Don’t tweet what you wouldn’t want to see in print – or your mother to read;
  * Keep it clean (a few people advised against swearing);
  * Try to stay clear of controversial topics – or at the very least refrain from using inflammatory language.
  * While your views are your own, bear in mind what you say could reflect negatively on the charity’s reputation
  * Take care not to announce a new initiative before the ‘official’ word is out, and if in doubt leave it out, or seek advice (even though embargoes are so last century);
  * Do not say anything that may damage relationships with corporate partners, suppliers, and other charities
  * Be transparent – if responding to any work-related social media activities always make a disclosure.

• How to avoid fragmentation? If many employees are Twittering in your organisation, it might be a good idea to stimulate employees to follow each other. Create for instance a company list. This already helps to create some uniformity and inspiration. And may help for internal knowledge sharing purposes too!. Make twitter part of the internal agenda: ask who is inspiring, ask people to collect tweets they liked. Make sure there is an ongoing conversation.
  

Do you follow organisations doing a great job on Twitter? Please share it through the comments!

Learning by coincidence on Twitter

(cartoon via Rob Speekenbrink)
I get involved in lots of discussions whether Twitter- is learning (or nonsense). People are sceptical on what you can learn through 140 characters. Often I answer that you definitely learn through twittering because you can link through to blogposts, articles etc. Basically defending the 140 characters.

Probably the main difference is in the theory about learning that people hold. Is learning what you do in school or in a training or is it something we do continuously? From a social learning point of view, Twitter is an important medium in which people converse, and build relationships. For people who are not active on Twitter this may be quite invisible. If you look at an individual twitter message, it makes no sense. But if you follow people over a longer period of time, you notice the influence it has, on the way you think and act. Like the day I decided to put up the christman tree because many people were twittering about it :).

Last week a conversation made me think about a different angle. (Nb: following is a rather longish story, if it is boring to you you may skip the rest of this paragraph). We have been very busy searching for a good secondary school for our daughter and it took up quite a bit of our time. We visited open days, evenings for parents, classes. There are many things to consider in your decision-making. In the Hague there are also too many pupils per school, so you have a chance to be rejected. In our case, many friends started to apply for a school, and we were about to apply too. Then I talked to a friend in another part of the country and found out there most people wait for the test results (CITO), so that you know the exact school type. This suddenly made a lot of sense to me. So you see how you get influenced by your environment and may overlook the obvious. So we decided to wait for the test results first.

Back to Twitter. I see a twitter network having the same function. Seeing new perspectives, widening your choices. Seeing new solutions to problems you didn't even know you had. Simply by reading a lot of stories. Ofcourse you need to be able to link it back to your own situation, and that depends on the quality of your network. Another example: through my twitter network I learned about prezi as an alternatve for Powerpoint, even though I wasn't looking for it. You may call it serendipity too.

Do you want to do more with twitter? Here's a great handbook: free download!

Social media: a new type of hammers for change facilitators in organisations

This is a column Sibrenne Wagenaar and I have written for the management site. I thought it might be worthwhile to translate it. The translation is mine (with a start by Google translate). We wrote this for the change facilitators working in and with organisations on change.

Many change processes fail because there is too little attention for the sub-public discourse. Social media can play a role in connecting the public discourse and the sub-public discours in organisations. Change management has to improve and we see social media play a key role.

The need for change as an organization is hardly disputed, but we observe that many organizational change projects that are not successful. Homan mentions in his book, Organization Dynamics (2005) that 70% of the change processes do not yield the desired result. The culture of interaction which you can create using social media has powerful features that are supportive to change processes. Through social media you can easily overcome silos and organisational boundaries and focus on the issues that people feel passionate about. Online silence is also an indication that people lack interest.. whereas in a meeting people may feel they have to respond politely.

Many change programs put the main emphasis on the formal side of change but without a new meaning in local communities there will not be any organisational change of substance. Homan refers to this as a 'sub-public' discourse. Employees may agree at conferences, but hold their own informal opinions which may not be expressed. Back at work they continue in the old way. There is little real movement and change as a result. A good facilitator is aware of both types of discourses and works to connect both. We believe social media can play a role because of the possibility it offers employees to contribute their own opinion as to interact with others.

Examples of creative use of social media in change trajectories

Here are some examples of creative use of social media to encourage you as change facilitator to experiment with different media:

* Prepare for the change trajectory using an online discussion to hear how people perceive the need for change and use this to form a core team. Invite people who care for the cause, or just people with different ideas and give them a role in the organizational core team that will closely follow and be engaged during the trajectory. This way you focus on creating a core group based on involvement and intrinsic motivation, rather than by function. Where a good representation of all departments in the core are important remains.

* Focus on online interaction rather distribution of (electronic) newsletters during a change process. Often an online or paper newsletter published to keep everyone informed. With social media you can make this much more interactive. You have the media to run more quickly into contact with the true opinions of people: linking the sub-public and public discourse. A manager decided to be available every Friday on an internal channel called Yammer (a Twitter-like a service on which you can send short messages). Everyone in the organization could ask him questions which were answered immediately. Thus a completely different dialogue than the employees were used to.

* Encourage an "outward-looking" view by using social media dashboards. Many organizations suffer from an "inward-looking culture. Employees keep each other so busy with internal politics and procedures that there is little room for looking outward. In a strategic change project a social media dashboard setup can be a powerful intervention, which can be followed by number of employees. Let them periodically summarize what they notice and what this means for the organization. Or stimulate number of different departments to be actively following certain trends on Twitter. What do they learn from this?

* Make the individual network of people in the company visible and ensure that these networks can be used more effectively. This can be either via an online platform or use of each other contacts on LinkedIn. Many employees have a profile on LinkedIn, but do not use the opportunity to contact new people in their 'second ring'. Winkwaves describes an interesting example of a company that wanted to invest in Portugal, and through an online knowledge cafe found out that the wife of a employee was Portuguese, with good connections. A valuable link for the company.

* Neutralize power relations that communication about the changes influenced by the use of social media. In every organization there are formal and informal 'communities'. Such a community is formed by so-called 'carriers' of a particular vision of reality. This accounts for differences in power influencing face-to-face group dynamics. By using an online medium (eg, a private group on Facebook or a private Posterous group) communication gets leveled a little more and you can try to break certain power relations. There is ample room for everyone to express themselves online, unlike in a meeting where the boss speaks first or shows his body language. Interesting example: an organization where several employees on Facebook complain about the quality of personnel. The organization has taken these signals serious and started to talk to these workers.

* Let people see the problem from other angles by using youtube-like movies. Ask outsiders or departments for their opinion film it and put it online; whether in a password protected environment or openly on youtube. The advantage of a protected area is that people will talk more freely about problems. Because everyone in the organization will have access to the movies, the impact is much greater. Allow space for comments.

Is working with social media than the panacea to all change processes? Certainly not! The design of a good, flexible process and the quality of process management are still important success factors. In some cases it may be that the trust among employees is so low that they do not wish to express themselves through social media either. But there is a world of new approaches open to facilitators of change processes. We have little insights in the level of experimentation with social media in change processes. What are your experiences? Let us know by posting a comment!

Stimulating informal learning in organisations

It is estimated that professionals learning informally for 80% or even 94%. Personally I'm convinced of this principle though semi-formal events or workshops can play a crucial role in directing learning. As Harry Vos states in his dutch blog "more formal or workshop learning supports informal learning and not the other way around". At the one hand, it is surprising how we focus on formal events, on the other hand it is tempting, also for myself, because they are so much more visible. Informal learning on the other hand seems invisible and a natural process that doesn't need a helping hand, after all people group around the coffee machine automatically. However, you can stimulate informal learning, bringing you as a facilitator in the grey area in between formal and informal learning.


So far I've focused on learning in communities of practice and networks, but there is more to it and I would like to explore the other forms more (including social media ofcourse!!). Together with Sibrenne I've facilitated a learning network for two years. After the two years nobody wanted to continue facilitating it. Interestingly, I have the feeling the informal netwerking and exchange is still going strong. Many of the people I'm still meeting and exchanging with, though not as structured and there are no meeting any longer. It is 'underground learning' and not as accessible to everyone. So facilitating a community of practice or learning network is a great example of the way you can stimulate individual learning to become collective learning- and at the same time, it catalyzes individual learning by the participants (in a dynamic network ofcourse).

But what else can you do to stimulate informal learning processes in organisations? The European PILIP project has created a website about informal learning. It has a quickscan to map informal learning processes which allows you to zoom in on factors that stimulate or hinder informal learning. You might work on those, to catalyze more rapid and effective informal learning processes. You can find a toolbox with tools like intervision, best practice storytelling, etc. I haven't used it yet, but I'm planning to go through it for an upcoming session with a development organisation.

A nice example: I experienced one that a worker was very active in formulating her learing questions, mobilizing relevant colleagues and inviting them for a lunch about the topic. A stimulating factor and positive example! What you can do is name this (literally, give it a name like peer-assist-lunch and stimulate others to copy this practice, for instance by creating a budget to cover for the lunch costs.

Some lessons about capacity building in social media for development organisations in the South

Over the past half year I facilitated a social media capacity building trajectory for a group of 14 development organisations (and 2 networks) in countries like Vietnam, Mali, Bolivia etc., together with Josien Kapma and Sibrenne Wagenaar. I've already blogged about our online start. It was great to work in a group of three facilitators, because you create an enormous flexibility. Someone gets sick and the others take over. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to be engaged with a group of development organisations over a longer period of time and see the process beyond an introduction session during a rainy afternoon.

Some examples of how organisations have started working with social media:

• An organisation is recruiting a communications officer and will try to recruit one with knowledge about (and experiences with) social media. Or at least affinity.
• Another organisation started using Facebook and video for youth education instead of the traditional hard copy materials. Internally 10 persons are sharing their project progress through Facebook too.
  
• Two organisations are now using skype for calls and group meetings.
  
• An organisation has opened a twitter account and blog to inform African and International partner of what the organisation is doing. They further want to host a wiki on climate change, one of their areas of work.
  
• Another organisation is looking into open source and set up a group experimenting with a list of 17 preferential tools
• One organisation wants to get more attention from donors and introduced the idea of a corporate blog and use of RSS and google alert for 'online listening'.
  

I'd also like to look back at the whole trajectory. What can we learn from it as facilitators of such a trajectory? What would I do differently if I had to do it again? We started with an intake, trying to figure out where social media could make a contribution to the organisation or to a network. This was followed by 3 weeks online training with the core participants from the organisations, who invited quite a lot of colleagues. Then we had a week face-to-face in the Netherlands, and a few months of distance coaching.

• Start online to discover a few social media tools together, yet work towards a face-to-face event to consolidate understanding. It worked very well to start online, introducing a variety of social media, getting to know eachother. It gave participants the space to experiment with a few tools in their own time. It helped us to find some real pioneers. It made me realize once again that online interaction works well as a ramp up working towards an event, or publication. After the face-to-face it was much harder to keep the online exchanges going. The momentum seemed lost. If I could design it again, I would do the face-to-face later (or ideally even twice if travel budgets allow!) Yet, in the end, face-to-face was most appreciated by the participants. A lot of social media 'landed' when they were able to see examples, to ask questions and to work on things together. Though they appreciated the online exchange a lot at the beginning of the trajectory, at the end the face-to-face had made much more impression, it was appreciated with 4,3 out of 5 and the online part by a mere 3,4 out of 5.. Maybe because it is what we're most familiar with? Or because of the human energy flows?
  

• Use a mailing list in combination with learning platform. We could have paid a little more attention to the fact that some participant had bad internet connections, one person in Uganda bought internet by the hour. In the middle of a posting, access would be cut off. Must be quite frustrating! Some had good connections, others on and off. Not everyone could join skype calls by internet, so it's good to have a phone alternative (we hadn't). A mailing list would have been more basic than the Ning learning platform we used. Working with low bandwidth, there is a trade off to make between complexity of conversations and ease of use in low bandwidth settings. On a mailing list we couldn't have created the groups which worked very well. Probably a combination of a mailing list and a learning platform could have worked too.
  

• Allow participants to integrate social media in their own jobs before thinking of uses at an organizational level. We asked participants to come up with an organisational strategy at the end of our face-to-face training, that they had to design a draft of a full-fledged strategy. They had a whole day for it, and needed it too. Some of the strategies seemed over-optimistic or not linked to pressing organisational goals. If a social media strategy is not well thought-through, it easily becomes a list of twitter account and blogs to be created. The key question to answer is: who are you going to engage and what is the type of exchange? Despite our network mapping, this was still a hard question to answer at the end of an intense week. If I would do it again, I would focus first on the use of social media for their own jobs, and only in a later stage for the team or organisations.
  In a graph, you could say that it starts with personal use, then moves on to professional use, and then move to collective uses. We demanded quite a lot of the participants, acting as a change agent back in their organisations, introducing a networked way of working. Next time, I would try to have a longer trajectory, let's say a year. I'd use this graph more explicitly and focus on the use of social media by individuals before moving to collective uses.
  

• Recognize when it's too early to invest heavily in social media. I noticed networking and working in a networked way comes quite naturally for a lot of the development organisations. And the use of Facebook and Skype is really booming. So those are good entry points to leverage social media for your own purposes as a development NGO. However, some of the topics (like gender and energy) were not found on social media monitors, probably an indicator that few people are talking about them. when a lot of the network members are not used to social media, you might be arriving early on the scene. You then have the choice to wait or to educate. While keeping an eye on developments and learning about social media- so that you are one of the first lateron! Deciding not to invest in social media is also a strategy.
  

Seven more online icebreakers

I've noticed my post about 10 online icebreakers is very popular. It gets often linked from online courses too. Therefore I thought it would be nice to add some more icebreakers. All those heavy reflections.. Let's get very practical. Here we go:

• The A, B, C of the group Though A, B, Cs at weddings are extremely boring, this worked very well as an icebreaker in a large international group. You ask people to share something about themselves choosing the next letter from the alphabet. Example: the first person chooses A from Appetite since you are a person who needs to eat regularly, the second chooses B from Brasil, the wonderful country he lives in and adds something about his country. You may leave it open for people to think of a personal or more profession-related word.

• Free Associations You may ask people to use free association and think of three words they associate with a core theme of the online workshop. You can then enter these words into the free tool Wordle to compose a nice visualisation. You may analyze that further as a bridge to the content of the session. What strikes you as important key words? What are positive and negative associations?

• Households or flatmates This is an icebreaker I learned through CPsquare's foundation workshop and I've used it a couple of times since. It always leads to a lot of social, informal talk. You may create households and divide names of the participants over the households (or flats, compounds, farms or tents, whatever the context). Give them some assignment, for instance to think of a name for their household or a description of their favorite living room.
  

• Image search Ask people to search through Google images or through a photo site like Flickr for an image that represents their expectations from the course. What will they gain through the workshop? It may lead to creative visualisation of the expectations. Ofcourse you may tweek this exercise to suit another question. For instance, you may ask people to share an image of their own specialism. It's more fun to use image search than to ask people to share their own pictures because it stimulates creativity.
  

• Voice icebreakers You may use a service like Voicethread to create a short video to which participants may comment. For instance, use your webcam and share a questions and ask participants to respond by adding their voice. A disadvantage of this icebreaker may be that not everybody may be comfortable enough using voicethread.
  

• Scavenger hunt I remember I did scavenger hunt in one of my first trainings in Mali. Small groups were asked to go out and come back with a certain number of items (eg. a cigarette of a certain brand, a tomato etc. People had to get very creative. The first group won. I've never done it online, but I'm sure you could do it as a synchronous activity. You could ask people to find internet resources on for instance, with tips for managing information overload through social media (either individually or in small groups). The persons with the fastest replies or the best resources could be rewarded. In this way you end up with a nice resource list too. A type of scavenger hunt I've tried is selecting an image (in this case from Flickr) and asking people to find that image. Interestingly, people start to search for the words in the image, whereas the tags are actually important. It was harder than I had thought.
  

• Youtubing In a Dutch program on television they have a Youtube compilation on a certain key word. In similar way, you could ask people to share the funniest videos about social media culture for instance. Or videos which illustrate their point of view. We once asked people to blog about their impressions about the Netherlands. The group found a wonderful video of bicyles in Utrecht.

Do you have your favorite online icebreakers? Please share them in the comments!

My take-aways from cognitive surplus and some questions

I was very impressed by Here come's everybody by Clay Shirky and happy to read his second book Cognitive Surplus during the Christmas holidays. I definitely enjoyed reading it, because Shirky is very good in understanding social change as a result of technological changes and explaining it with brilliant examples. On the other hand, I missed some answers that I had unconsciously hoped to find. Let me use my blog to summarize my take-aways and try and formulate what questions I have that are unanswered...

First some highlights from the book (some already hightlighted in his first book):

• People enjoy making and sharing and social media makes that possible on a global scale- an enormous cognitive surplus we have collectively. Shirky gives an historical analysis of gin as lubrication for the industrializing society- chaotic and urbanized. It helped people in London to cope with life. Not laws, but a restructuring of society with mutual aid societies amongst others reduced gin consumption. The gin our time has been the television with people watching thousands of hours. This is our cognitive surplus imagine how many hours we watch collectively! Social media taps that surplus and uses that free time differently. We like making and sharing things, being creative. This can be lead to fun things (sharing a video of your cat) or serious things (like wikipedia- an online encyclopedia).
  

• With the ease of publishing through social media average quality of writing drops, but experimentation and diversity increases and the best works becomes better than before. The other example is the introduction of movable type letters by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. This lead to an abundance of book, which before then had to be carved out. The first thing that happened was that more Bibles were printed. It took some time before also new books were published, and later novels, newspapers, scientific journals. Edgar Allan Poe commented that the multiplication of books is an evil because it lead to a pile of books with lots of useless ones. True that the freedom to publish lowered the average quality. But it increases experimentation and dissemination. A striking similarity with social media which make it easy for anyone to publish online. With lower average quality too! Yet it can be disorienting for people who've grown up with the previous situation of scarcity.
  

• People's intrinsic motivations gravitate towards experiences that reward them in feeling autonomous, competent or connected and publishing, Collaborating through social media gives them that experience. Every successful example of social media harnesses this intrinsic motivation. People working together on causes, examples like the open source software or wikipedia has been a surprise to many asking: "why are people doing this?" because our theories were based on the idea that people work for personal and financial motives, not for free.
  

• The things people do with social media have different types of value; personal, communal, public or civic value can be created. Personal value drives the hobbyists, communal value is created by a group of collaborators working on some common interest or goal. Communal value becomes public when it is open to non-members (eg. the apache software is quoted as an example). Finally, civic value is created by groups trying to transform society. Pink chaddis is mentioned, or the two examples of my previous blogpost about digital natives with a cause come to mind.
  

Now let me think about my questions that are not answered by this book:

1. How does this link to our evolution as human mankind? Are people developing higher IQs and EQs? Becoming more imaginative, more creative? Are we better able to think globally and to connect because we can empathize and link to a wider range of lives and emotions? How will the brains of future generations be wired differently?
   
2. How are these developments linked to global issues like poverty, crises, climate change? Will it improve our collective ability to deal with them or will the people with access to social media be at an advantage to appropriate resources? In other words, how will it affect issues of equity?
3. How does social media connectivity affect science and multi-disciplinarity?
4. What is our intrinsic motivation, how is it shaped? So what direction will the value created by the cognitive surplus take? What is the role of leadership in this?
5. What does civic sharing through social media mean as a power to transformation of society? And to the speed of transformation?
   

If you have the answer to these questions, please leave a comment :).

Happy new year!

How can social media support learning alliances/multistakeholder processses?

Some time ago I was asked to facilitate a session on this topic. I didn't have time to blog it, but since I received a nice report (by CDI in Wageningen) so I thought it would be a nice opportunity to blog it and share the prezi I used.

Social media for learning alliances on Prezi

The intro session made me reflect on the difference in learning in a community of like-minded professionals and multistakeholder processes (By CDI also referred to as learning alliances). In definition: "Learning alliances are characterized by diversity. The stakeholders have different backgrounds, different perspectives, values, interests and knowledge with regard to the issue at hand." Prof. Arjen Wals said all learning is social, but social learning emphasizes learning through different perspectives- from the differences in heterogenous groups. Social connections make it possible to learn from each other, because that is not obvious. I guess the difference with learning in communities of practice and learning alliances is that in communities you have a process of recognition of similar issues and domains, and in learning alliances you have a common concern, but the process of learning is not as 'endogenous' as in communities. Though I realize people also use the term communities for multistakeholder groups.. I can imagine it is clearer to talk about the degree of homogeneity/heterogeneity in the group.

The term 'emancipatory learning' was introduced, as opposed to instrumental learning. Emancipatory learning combats social exclusion and discrimination, and challenge economic and political inequalities - with a view to securing their own emancipation and promoting progressive social change. I liked the question raised: how can local practices become global without becoming prescriptive? A good practice is honest about what is happening. And here I believe it is easier for communities of like-minded practitioners caring about the same domain to be honest, with different perspective, you are not triggered to be very honest.... How honest can we be on Twitter for instance?

But I'm drifting too far away from the topic of social media maybe. My session was about social media for learning alliances, assuming that you are a facilitator of a learning alliance and that your alliance already exists. I'm convinced social media can help to make conversations more continuous and hence situate learning closer to practice. You don't have to wait till the next yearly gathering to hear about new initiatives. Furthermore, boundaries tend to be more open, unless you use only private tools, password protected environments with which you can control membership.

Some interesting examples of using social media in a learning alliance:

• Rapid exchanges through a twitter hashtag (definitely opens up boundaries for people to jump in!)
  
• Setting up an online space to exchange and inviting people to join (ning, facebook group, other)
• Working together on an expanding knowledge base through a wiki
• Blogging together to harvest stories and trigger explicitation of experiences
• Webinars or teleconferences where you can easily invite someone with an opposing view or different perspective

The illusion people sometimes have is that online conversations are as spontaneous as during a party and sometimes they are, but you can do things to facilitate/influence the amount and type of conversation to avoid it leads nowhere. Here's a graph of what you can do:




But always start with assessing where people are.. have an eye and ear for what people are using and doing. It will save you the hassle of introducing new tools. We did some discussion and worked on three real cases by the participants. What we discussed:

How to avoid exclusion? To include groups without access to the internet or to the tools, additional means are needed, for instance through meetings, local radio, cell phones and brochures. “In Ghana we have a collaborative forest management forum. We aim to share information ‘from the ground’ to show how policies are working, as to generate information for evidence based policy advocacy. At the community level there is no internet available, but we use rural radio, videos or cell phones.” Concluding, face-to-face interaction
remains of central importance in learning processes, for instance to build trust among the
participants or to include groups without internet access. A participant "We also found it is useful to use just a few tools from social media. So, we don’t go for everything that’s available, but we choose the ones that suit the organisation best”.

Leaves me with thinking that you could also think through how social media stimulate or obstruct learning through diversity and different views... What do you think? On the one hand, you tend to flock with like-minded people, on the other hand I follow a lot of marketing people on Twitter and changed my prejudiced perspective on marketing as a result..

Two inspiring stories by digital natives with a cause

I attended the HIVOS 'thinkaton' about digital natives with a cause and activism2.0. Everybody in the room already believed in the power of a click! But we need the stories.

There were two very inspiring stories. The first by Juliana Rotich, the Program Director of Ushahidi (Kenya). Ushahidi is a well-known success and well-known example, nice to hear the story behind it. Ushahidi is an open source platform that allows people to share information in times of crises or elections (and sometimes elections are also a crisis!). The information is then shown on a map (the online version which can be used without having to install anything: crowdmap.com was reportedly deployed 3500 times already!). Juliana Rotich explained how it became a success because of the link between the people of globalvoicesonline and a voluntary group of coders and translators. They were able to use their already built online networks to spread the news about ushahidi in Kenya where it was first used during the election turmoil. Interesting to hear about the crucial success factors. In the discussion it was several times mentioned that social media have played the role of amplifier. The speed with which news, information or stories get amplified depends on the resonance and relevance of the issues.

Jasmin Patheja, was the other digital native. She is the initiator of the
Blank Noise project (in India), a collective movement that addresses the problem of sexual
harassment in public spaces. I learned a new word which is eve- teasing. It is the intimidation of women in public space before it is called sexual harassment (my interpretation). On their blog you find a long list of what they understand by eve-teasing. Jasmin started photographing men that were eve-teasing in her opinion and put that on her blog. She felt very empowered by having her blog to post these pictures. She got a lot of comments and started blogathons. It articulated the issues around eve-teasing. It made men and women aware and think about their behaviours. All kind of actions were started like the invitation to send (a picture) of the cloth you were wearing when you were 'eve-teased' (don't know whether it is a verb too) or the action-heros. Her challenge is to think through whether they want to constitute a non-profit organisation based upon this spontaneous movement.

Some things struck me:

• They look like real digital natives. Nobody complained about access to the internet and low band-width
• The issue/problem is central, but social media make amplification possible. Scaling and amplification depends on the relevance/urgency of the problem. If you touch upon a latent discomfort (like Jasmin with eve-teasing) social media can lead to a movement because you can reach many people quickly. But it has to strike a cord with them.
  

Flexibility, fluidity and chaos in organisations

I have a relaxed week- wonderful for catching up with articles and blogs. I read "organizing for fluidity" which had been on my pile for sometime. And I'm reading 'organisational dynamics' by Thijs Homan- in dutch. Both talk about change dynamics in organisations.

Let me start by a story from Kenya when I was studying a smallholder irrigation system. The engineers were surprised that farmers took so long to plough the fields. As soon as the water was on the fields, they would want the farmers to plough within a week or two, but what they would notice is that ploughing activities would continue for 6-8 weeks. When I lived there as researcher I discovered within no time that the polygamous households had a system whereby the husband or the sons plough all the fields. They would plough the husband's fields first, followed by the first, second, third wives' fields. With the same pair of oxen. So that makes it very logical. What surprised me is that the engineer were so caught up in their own way of thinking that they couldn't see the logic of the farmers. Which would have improved their work: the design of irrigation systems. See the need for feedback.

The article by Georg Shreyögg and Jörg Sydow brings across a few important points:

• With rapidly changing environments organisational flexibility is a key pressing issue for organisations, in order to create new combinations of resources fitting the new context. This is often stated and recognised.
  
• One common answer is towards fluidity in organisations and networked organisations, organisations in constant flux or 'chronically unfrozen', but this is ignoring the basics or organisational routines which allow for efficiency. This underestimates what is means to be organised.
  
• Organisations can never fully understand their complex environment and therefore have to model uncertainty and complexity on a template on which members can act. Complexity reducing maps and routines. Organisations cannot escape their history (Schein explains this process very well in organisational cultures and leadership).
• Organisational patterns are reproduced by agents who can and do introduce changes. However, the fluid, flexible organisation, always in flux, would have a high opportunity cost in terms of lost experience, low specialization, low economies of scale. Capabilities become fixed to those constellations that have proven to be succesful. And that allows for efficiency and specialization.
  

It is hence a dilemma for all organisations to balance fluidity and stability. Two solutions are described: organisational ambidexterity (designing subunits to be either efficient or innovative) and balancing countervailing processes. The latter consists of monitoring its stabilization mechanisms. If you want to know more about that, you may read the article, though it doesn't become very practical. I'm translating it by organising sufficient relevant feedback on how you are doing (like the engineers asking the farmers).

Thijs Homan describes change in organisations and distinguished 'planned change' from organic changes. In planned change situations management are often the eyes and ears for the organisation. But the questions is whether in a rapidly changing environment you don't need the eyes and ears of all people in the organisation? He describes different change patterns and local communities. Play is the situation whereby new sense-making is taking place, Game is when this is stabilized. A flexible organisation is in continuous state of Play and chaotic, it moves with every change in the environment. An organisation always in Game is stable.

Very interesting if we look at this from the perspective of a learning organisation. The chaotic organisation might be called a learning organisation because it is continously changing. However, you may not desire this as it is in-efficient.

So in a way both are saying that an organisation should be changing and responding to its environment but not all the time and not in all direction. Find the right balance. So that makes me think the concept of learning organisation is not very useful (and I don't hear it that often anymore anyhow)... Not sure what the practical implications are of this view, but I like it a lot.

Our book "en nu online" is born

My first book ever is out, written with Sibrenne Wagenaar (see picture). I even had a dream last night of a smooth delivery (of a baby). Probably because the publisher told us the book was born on November 29th at 15.00 pm. and we continued using this analogy. If you speak Dutch and you are interested you may order it here or here or buy the e-book Or follow En_nu_online on Twitter for your daily tip about learning through social media. For all others, it is a good reason to learn Dutch! You see how easy it is, you can probably guess what 'en nu online' means... The book is about using social media for learning as a professional (part 1), in an organisation (part 2) and as facilitator of learning processes (part 3).

I just received my additional 8 copies and read a sentence that I like myself (sometimes I am totally embarrassed too). "The way and speed with which social media will be embraced depends on the organisational culture and the common ideas about learning" Then somehow it is logical that the social-constructivists and people focussed on informal learning processes are the first to embrace it. Others probably don't as easily see the value of social media.

It is funny to go back to our original set up in 2008. We were aiming for 50 pages (has become 290!) and sharing our own enthousiasme about web2.0 tools with people we met and who would say things like:

“If I Google something and find a blog I skip the result" “Does everything have to go even faster than it already does?”

It took us 2 years to write, and several versions (3-4) of each chapter. It took me 280 hours in total. It was fun to write it together. As I heard Nancy White say somewhere: if you write a book together you either become friends or hate eachother in the end. (can't find where!). In our case, we really got to know each other and value the expertise and view of the other person. Hence we celebrated well...

In which ways do you use social media for your own learning?

I met Niel van Meeuwen some time ago when we talked about using social media in learning trajectories. He already mentioned his talk in Lissabon during the Eapril conference. His presentation was last Friday and he experimented with a Twitter backchannel. Unfortunately because people there might not have been on Twitter, it worked mainly to get input from outside the conference into the conference. Very curious to hear his reflection on how it went. I'm going to summarize the outsiders input.

Question Niel put on Twitter is: in which way do you use social media in your own learning or the learning of others?

Answers on twitter:

• It mostly helps me to link to new, unexpected thoughts, people, websites.
• Personally I use social media all the time for personal learning- blog, twitter, social bookmarking key
• Learning takes place at the edges social media help me to stretch these
• I'm using twitter to learn practical things for the company I started this yr (zzp). E.g. I ask: do I have to 1/2
• Learning sometimes happens at moments I least expect it
• Those unexpected learning moments appears to be the most valuable ones.
• I use socialmedia to find relevant info and knowledge on my profession and to brand myself in my network
• Insure my business. And if yes: how? Or: how do I do taxes? I have à lot of followers and I ask them to RT
• Social media keep my son away from learning math and grammar. But he learns a lot there (although I'm not allowed to witness that!
• I also use twitter and linkedin to collect and store insights and ideas I have. It is a way of collecting thoughts and ideas
• Usually get good answers. The more practical the question is, the more answers you get frm people. Twitter=HandsOn
• Social media is a way of sharing what my passion and interest is. I get invited for cool projects based on what I share on linkedin
• I learn a lot in groups; not only real life groups but virtual groups as well
• Wonderful things happen on #LinkedIn and #Twitter; people send me wonderful, interesting and valuable info, ideas and so on
• SocialMedia make me learn about things I didn't even know I could learn about
• Social media make learning really fast and individual
• I share knowledge and get a lot of serieus response. Makes we wiser!
• A tweet a day keeps the email away?
• Use social media to find all kinds of blog posts, articles, video's to inspire my learning via friends and colleagues
• We use social media to connect with and get inspired by people who are also into #Talent in #Education

When reading through the list it strikes me that people are very enthousiastic and recognise participation in social media as a learning path, not as a side-something. I also meet people who don't see it as learning but as distracting. This definitely informs whether you want to devote time to it. If you see it as something distracting you from your work, it is costing time. If you see it as part of your own learning trajectory and you value it, it comes naturally to invest time.

Another thing that strikes me is the unexpected learning, the inspiration, the learning about things I didn't know I could learn about. Serendipity?

Looking forward to reading Niel's blogpost about the discussion there!

Update: here's a blogpost about a session on exactly the same topic!

Some things never change

Old readers of this blog know that by the end of November/beginning of December I have to post something about Sinterklaas... since I'm a huge fan of Sinterklaas (see here, here and here for instance). Unfortunately both daughters are now too old to 'believe in Sinterklaas' (Dutch expression: 'in Sinterklaas geloven') and that changes the way we celebrate. They even don't allow me to watch the Sinterklaas news on television!

Watch these two movies. The first is Sinterklaas arriving in Amsterdam in 1952, the second one is Sinterklaas arriving in Harderwijk in 2010.




Search for the 10 differences. What struck me is that besides the fact that the first is black and white and the second colour film, the celebration is still so much alike! After 58 YEARs. In the meantime church visits have completely deflated and St Maarten has been replaced by Halloween. It reminds me of when I visited my old organisation and despite all the new staff, the issues and ways of working were still so similar.

What makes Sinterklaas survive?

Make your own slidecast; it is easy enough

I've made my own slidecast (my third actually!). What is a slidecast? It is a powerpoint presentation with a voice explaining the slides. On the one hand it may take more take to listen to it, on the other hand, it gives so much more context to the slides. It is really not difficult to make one but it may look difficult for outsiders. That's why I thought of blogging the process. But first of all: here's my second slidecast baby with Herman Brouwer of CDI talking about the facilitation of multi-stakeholder processes which he presented during a teleconference of the Forest Landscape Restoration network. The questions by the participants of the teleconference were also very interesting but I decided to leave them out because it make the slidecast really long. It is a little embarrassing that you hear me type very loudly towards the end. Next time I'll mute myself too!

Multistakeholder processes in forest landscape restoration

View more webinars from GPFLR .

How to do it?

1. First of all you have to make sure you record the presentation. We used the hidefconferencing. phonebridge which allows you to record. If you use Skype, I'm not sure you can record directly with skype, but you may use a recorder like hotrecorder. It will produce an mp3 file.
2. Use an audio editing program to edit. Or even better, make sure you have a good beginning and ending so that you don't have to edit. I edited the end, by cutting out the questions and answers. I used Audacity, a free program that works great and is user-friendly.
3. Upload your presentation to slideshare. When you are done, in audacity you have to export rather than save your project because exporting allows you to choose the mp3 format which is required for slidecasts.
   
4. Click on 'edit presentation and 'create slidecast. Then on 'upload mp3'.
5. You will then get to the tool that allows your to synchronize the slides with the talking, very appropriately called the 'synchronization workspace'. You may choose for an equal slicing of the voice over the slides, but then you are freakingly structured. Most of the time some slides will have a long explanation, others a short one. This is how you can use the synchronization workspace (see picture)
   There are 3 parts; from top to bottom, the slides, the audio divider and the overview part. So what you do is simply play the whole audio thing. Listen to it carefully and drag the appropriate slide changes using the middle part. When you hear that the presentor is moving to the next slide, you position your ending of the first slide. You will find your way after a bit of testing. Some tips from mistakes I made in the beginning: You can only move the beginning and end of the selected slide (which is grey-ish). So you have to select a next slide by clicking on it if you want to change the beginning or ending of another slide. And you have to move the venster at the bottom in the overview space when you continue further. The line is long, therefore the audio divider shows only part of the audio. Which part is shown can be seen by looking at the venster in the overview. You can drag it to change it. So it helps not to get lost.
   

Ofcourse there is also the slidecasting demo from slideshare if you get stuck with my explanations.... And don't forget the frequently asked questions.

Book review: Social media for trainers

I'm developing a 3 months course for trainers and coaches to become bilangual in the sense that they may facilitate online and face-to-face; we call it 'E-vaardig trainen and coachen'. Hence I was thrilled to find Jane Bozarth's book: Social media for Trainers. I'm following a lot of social media buzz, a lot is by marketeers. And I can't really find my way in some of the e-learning content, when it is discussing LMS/CMS issues for instance. Hence I'm really happy that there is a book specifically written for trainers- and about use of social media, a very clear focus (our upcoming Dutch book about social media for professionals, organisations and facilitators might have benefitted from a clearer focus in hindsight?).

Anyhow, the book is very practical and has lots of good tips. It explains the tools like Facebook and Twitter to the level where trainers with little social media experience may be able to apply the suggestions and may start experimenting. Unfortunately, Jane Bozarth has chosen to discuss the options tool by tool (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Wikis and other tools) which leads to some repetition in how it can be used in an online course or in addition to a traditional face-to-face course (hate the word traditional because it makes you feel like it is something outdated!). The techniques are very inspiring like setting up a twitter debate or role play, or assigning each learner a different model to research, discuss and share via twitter. I learned picked up some new interesting tools like SocialOomph, Twaitter and Brizzly that allow you to create tweets ahead of time. This may be counter to the idea of real time conversation but may come in handy for the context of a more structured course.

The most interesting chapter for me was chapter 7 on 'the bigger picture'. Here, she defines learning and social learning and links social learning to personal learning networks and communities of practice. The opportunities to expand community conversations and personal learning networks are huge with social media.

So it is definitely a great book for trainers new to using social media!

Mix and Match: integration of social media

When you use social media, it may seem very chaotic and dispersed. You have a blog and a website. But you also have a twitter account and you have set up a facebook page. Maybe you have thematic wikis too. How do all these different media link together and complement each other? How do you prevent that it becomes chaotic for your partners, stakeholders and network members? And that you post the same information on various media? Social media may seem chaotic, but the advantage of this chaos is that it allows people to have their own personalized experiences. A person may read all your tweets, another person may add your website to their RSS reader. Using various media makes it easier for people to connect in their preferred ways. Therefore you cannot do away with email and personal, face-to-face contacts.

1. Choose a starting page

Make sure that you have a clear starting page, where you may guide new people to, who are interested to know more about the work of your organisation. This may be your website, but it may also be your weblog. If you have made this choice, you can make sure all the other spaces are clearly linked to this starting page. .

2. Show people on your starting page the other media where you have a presence

You may use the icons as shown above. This means there is an RSS feed, Creative Commons license, and you can be found on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube. In this way people can choose to follow you on the media of their preference. You can find the icons by searching on Google for “free social media icon set”.

3. Learn what to communicate where

Try to keep in mind and find out the strengths and weaknesses of various channels. Facebook may be better for playful content and quizzes, Twitter for short messages and pulling people to your blog, your weblog may be best to post a long interview. Make sure you don’t copy paste the same information in all places. People may follow you through various media and don’t want to receive the same information 5 times. Try to find out what works. If you announce new blogposts via Twitter but never get any click throughs (this is visible in most used site statistics) you may stop posting your blog links. Tip: If you shorten your links with Bit.ly you can analyse the number of clicks through their website.

4. Display information from one media in the other through feeds

You can use RSS feeds to display information from one medium directly in another. For instance, you can show your tweets in the sidebar of your blog (like I'm doing at this page). Or you can show your blog on your Facebook page. You can integrate your Wikipage as a page in your social network (this is possible in the example of Ning). A Youtube video can be shown directly in a blogpost. The way to do it is different in various media. In most cases, you will copy a certain code and paste in the ‘html’ section of your weblog or website.

Three examples:

• To display your tweets on your Wordpress blog go to Appearance and choose Widgets. You can then add RSS to your Sidebar (click and drag). Then copy the RSS feed on the lower end of your right Sidebar on your own Twitter page and Save.
• To display Twitter on your website you can grab the code here after making some choices on what to display.
  
• To display a Youtube video on your blog or website you click on Embed under the video you want to display. You copy the code and paste it in the HTML section of your weblog. (the code looks like this:

5. Help users to find their way

When a lot of partners may not know what an RSS feed is, you may offer an explanation of what it is. Here you will find an example of the BBC. They offer RSS feeds, but also explain what a news feed is and how people may use it.

Want to read more?
Check out:
• Knitting together your Website, Email and Social Media Content. (by Beth Kanter)
• Social media integration: examples and tips.

Mister Strubbe and his ipad

Here's a Dutch movie about Mister Strubbe. He is an elder person and is still using his computer with wordperfect 5.1. He is very happy with it, and says 'this computer probably leaves this house after my death'. At the same time he is very happy with his ipad, to read the news. Whenever there is a 'www' on the news he can check is out with his ipad.



There is an on-going discussion about digital natives, do they exist and will digital immigrants always stay behind? Mister Strubbe is a nice illustration of the fact that people look carefully at what there is to win. He is not interested in all the new Word versions- why change all the time? But an ipad is a great new tool for him.

A good working or training method is invisible

Yesterday Sibrenne Wagenaar and I finished an evaluation process of a knowledge sharing/linking and learning programme. One of the questions was what methods worked best for knowledge sharing.

We had only one hour and didn't want to do a presentation (we had presented our rough findings earlier on). We thought carefully what we wanted to achieve in this one hour: that people started playing with the recommendations and think what the most important improvements to work on are. So we decided to print and cut the recommendations and asked them to make three piles:

1. You agree and you understand how to do it
2. You may agree but you have questions how to do it
3. You have serious doubts

In groups of two people made their piles, discussing the recommendations. And fortunately pile number one was the largest in all groups. This is not spectacular in terms of method, but we got a lot of compliments. The regular way of doing such a session is presenting the conclusions and recommendations in the form of a powerpoint. People enjoyed engaging in this way with the ideas behind the recommendation and felt it helps to learn collectively.

It made me think even more about what a good method is. It has always puzzled me that there are so many toolkits and toolguides in the development sector. As we wrote in our report: "There is no universal answer to the question what the best methods are for a training or working session. The key question is what method works best in a certain setting and matches the needs and purpose." As a participant I always get annoyed when the method is very 'visible' and you are clearly part of a trainers or facilitator's plan rather then participating in a natural exchange. And I've definitely been guilty of it myself in some organisational assessments where I had thought of so many tools and we had to go through all of them.. It became an exercise that you have to finish rather than a meaningfull exchange. So I guess it is also a matter of a method seamlessly supporting the conversations and the purpose of being and working together. Such a method is almost invisible, suits the situation and the facilitator.

Switch for social media

I read the book Switch some time ago. Change management is definitely one of my favorite fields! Even though I am now not using the field as consciously as when I was guiding organisational change trajectories, I feel when I work on introducing social media I may apply it too and could improve. But maybe I already do it unconsciously based on my experiences.... Anyhow I also bought 'organisatiedynamica' by Thijs Homan and it's competing with social media for trainers by Jane Bozarth for my attention...

I want to use my blog to see if I can apply the lessons from Switch to the introduction of social media, whether for groups, organisations or networks. First a short intro of the ideas put forward in Switch. The book starts with a short story about moviegoers. Moviegoers were given wretched popcorn (I actually didn't know the word wretched but I assume it means that it is not nice to eat!). Some of them got a medium sized bucket popcorn, others a large one. The question was: will people with a large bucket eat more? And Yes! The people with a large bucket ate 53% more popcorn (21 extra hand-dips). Now suppose you want to stimulate people to eat healthier and less popcorn. Rather than changing the mindset, you could also give them smaller bowls. That's an easy solution to a difficult behaviour change. This was quite a revelation for me, doing a lot of work in the international development sector. Everything always end up complex, and I often think it could be more fun with a lighter approach. And here it is! The authors call it: shape the path, tweek the situation so that change is easier. But that's not the only thing to do.

The full three-part framework to follow is:

1. Direct the rider. Provide crystal-clear direction about where to go (and where not to go)
2. Motivate the elephant. Engage the emotional side
3. Shape the path. Shape the situation to make change easy.

(The metaphor of the elephant, rider and path is explained in the book but very shortly our emotional side is an elephant and our rational side is the rider).

So what happens if we apply these ideas about change to introducing social media in organisations?

1. Direct the rider. Make it clear that you want (some) people to use social media and why.. What is your vision about using social media? Is it to increase internal communication and how will that help the organisation to achieve its mission? It is to connect to customers/stakeholders? Ofcourse it takes some time to know this yourself. So don't introduce it widely unless you have a vision yourself. Don't introduce a technology and insist on people using it without giving a clear rationale. And make sure you have some ways of measuring that your rationale is true. For instance, if you are hoping to get more donors through social media presence, keep track of the number of donors referred to you via social media.

2. Motivate the elephant. Try and find out what makes people interested. You may allow them to use the new technology for private purposes first. I have seen people learn about social networks and putting up a social network space for their family reunions and sports clubs. That's a great way to learn and become enthusiastic. So allow people to learn new technologies in connection to things that excite them. Invite people to experiment and allow them space to experiment. Experimenting is fun, having to use new tool because you have to is boring. Furthermore the fun of social media is in the social, so work with groups who can link up together.

3. Shape the path. Make it easy for people to use the media. Offer them a set of tools and shortcuts, work on their own computers. It is discouraging if you are starting a wiki not knowing what type of wiki to use. Make sure there is an accessible helpdesk. Help them for instance to set up an RSS dashboard. But also work on integrating social media in their routines (says the person who is now struggling with finding time to blog and to read blogs :). We are doing a 40-days coaching experiment whereby you have daily contact with one coach. That seems to work well! The idea behind the 40 days is that people can build up new routines in 40 days if they practice every day.

So you have other tips? Does this make sense?