Vimi's Views on Productivity Issues in Mauritius: Information Management Resource Kit

Unit 1. Social Media for Development
Lessons
1.1 Introduction to Web 2.0 and Social Media
1.2 Social Networking Sites and Communities
1.3 Privacy, Intellectual Property and access to Social Media
1.4 Current Issues and New Ideas

Unit 2. Social Media Tools and Services
Lessons
2.1 Group Productivity and Collaboration Tools
2.2 Hosted Services
2.3 Subscriptions, Feeds and Syndication
2.4 Tagging and Social Bookmarking
2.5 Blogging and Microblogging
2.6 Online Video and Image Sharing
2.7 Podcasting and Online Radio

Lessons
1.1 Introduction to Web 2.0 and Social Media

What is Web2.0?

Web 2.0 refers to free or low-cost interactive web-based services that help people share information and collaborate online more easily than with earlier tools.
More specifically,
Web 2.0 is a term that people loosely apply to these new, easier to use web-based tools for content creation (also known as user generated content), connecting with people (also known as social networking), collaboration and many other forms of people to people interaction.

What is Social Media?
Web2.0 tools are often called "social media" because they go beyond content, to our connection to that content and to each other.

Why Social Media?
Social media can lead to development as shown by the two hands symbol used for WebforDev

What is Social Networking?
Social networking is the practice of individuals connecting and communicating around a common interest using online tools and social networking sites.

What is connecting via Social Network?
Social media allows you to connect and interact with other people, collaborate and do things with others even at great distances, create and share content, and find, use and organize content that is relevant in your work.

Social networking sites use complex databases to establish relationships between people, using descriptive keywords, geographic information, email addresses and other data, provided by individual users.

Why connect via Social Networks?
Social Networks allow us:
1. to create profiles that tell others about us; and
Some popular examples are Facebook, Hi5Networks, Myspace and LinkedIn.
2. to find people with common interests or characteristics.
Social networking for a cause is also growing, with sites like:

Patientslikeme.com;

Idealist.org;

Change.org;

Networkforgood.org

TakingITGlobal.org

Social networking sites are engaging for many people because they incorporate more than text. People can share photos, videos, audio files, links to websites of interest.

COLLABORATING VIA GROUPWARE

With the use of some of these tools you can coordinate a remote work group or create a channel of communication with other organizations.

There tools are sometimes called "groupware" because they are designed to help groups with specific features to:

plan;
do tasks together;
share resources;
communicate; and
create the possibility of joint action or collaboration.

The focus of these tools is getting things done.

However, working with groupware requires more than technology. Teams and groups must establish working agreements and processes, as well as have clear goals and roles.

Without these, groupware is often ignored and work doesn’t get done.

Groupware tools - freely available open source or paid tools - allow groups to start collaborating after a few clicks.

Examples include:

collaboration portal software (Drupal, Joomla);
email lists (DGroups, Yahoogroups);
project management tools (DotProject, Basecamp);
wikis (MediaWiki, PBworks) and other tools.

What is user generated content?

Social media allows people to publish out to the world via the Internet.

Many individuals produce content from their own experience, in order to reach their peers and for self-expression purposes. When they make their knowledge available to others, they can gain status as experts, even outside of formal institutions. They can contribute.

The aggregated knowledge across a network of users provides a significant value to the collective. Organizations do this as well, both contributing their knowledge and raising awareness of their

Why user generated content?

Strategies for working with content

Collaborative Searching, Finding and Filtering Content

Search engines generates more than 1million content for a simple search,
Collaborative searching = asking others how they search or for leads to good materials they have already found.
Finding and Filtering Content = use of filters on search engines and social media sites

Tagging Content

A tag is a labeling system, collaboratively generated and open-ended, that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs and Web links.

Rating or Commenting on Content

Rating and commenting tools allow us to indicate if web content was useful or accurate for us. In communities, many people have very good knowledge for example. Before they did not have a voice to offer their opinion. Now they do.
Example of tools: stand alone polls, rating tools eg Digg, annotation tools eg Fleck and Diigo
Embedded in social media - comment, start ratings on blogs, thumbs up or down on content,
Delicious or Google news - Promoting interesting websites

Re-using or Re-mixing Content

Free contens available online can be changed made available for improving one own's work.
1.2 Social Networking Sites and Communities

Social networking tools is a sub-group of social media allowing people to:

create profiles

find other people with similar

interact

The focus of social networking tools is on the social connection and sharing of individual information or "identity."

Social networking sites

Friendship and personal relationships are most popular networking sites eg MySpace, Facebook

Professional networks are business oriented sites that allow members to list their professional credentials, places of work and education. Professional network can be constrained to discipline or field of work. LinkedIn helps to connect professionals working in the same area.