University of Washington Emerging Technology

First of all I would like to thank Elise Daniel for giving us a great presentation in order to help us understand UW Marketing’s Facebook strategy.

Presentation: Marketing-UW-on-Facebook

Attendees:

Ryan Otsis (iSchool)
Jeff Hendrickson (UW Marketing)
Melinda Van Wingen (Simpson Center for Humanities)
Ryan Becker (Office of Research)
Elise Daniel (UW Marketing)
Tony Chang (UW Technology)
Gina Hills (UW Marketing)
Melody Winkle (UW Technology)
Patrick Chidsey (UW Career Center)
Matt Wojciakowski (Carlson Leadership & Public Service Center)
Heather Larson (Hall Health)
Todd Mildon (Office of the Registrar)
David Cox (UW Technology)
Andre Tan (Streaming Video and TV Technologies)
Lauren Ray (Educational Outreach)
Dylan Wilbanks (School of Public Health and Community Medicine)
Mick Westrick (Foster School of Business)
Jason Cijvan (UW Technology - Catalyst)
Kirsten Atik (Undergraduate Academic Affairs)
Christine Tawatao (UW Libraries)
Scott Macklin (UW School of Education)
L.A. Smith (Foster School of Business)
Andrew Krueger (Foster School of Business)
Jocelyn Milici (Foster School of Business)
Derek Winslow (United Way)
Emma O’Neill (Center for Career Services)

Our apologizes, if any names were left-off, misspelled, or incomplete. There were alot of people at the meeting and we tried our best to get names noted. Please send me membership corrections if you find them.

Things we talked about after Elise gave her presentation:

Facebook stats from the School of Public Health (shared by Dylan Wilbanks) - Thanks Dylan

———-
Q:The School is considering creating a web presence on Facebook, including the creation of a group just for SPHCM students and alumni. Would you join this group if the School created it?

85 (36.80%) — Yes
56 (24.24%) — I do not have a Facebook account and do not want to create one
42 (18.18%) — I don’t know
29 (12.55%) — No
19 (8.23%) — I don’t have a Facebook account, but I would sign up in order to participate in this group

n=231 currently enrolled graduate students in the School of Public Health (of ~725 total grad students)
———-

Dylan did get several comments pertaining to this question in the free-form section of the survey. There were a few saying that Facebook would be a good idea, others saying not to go with Facebook or MySpace as they are “unprofessional” or “too juvenile,” and a couple others expressing apprehension at alumni or future employers mingling with students and being able to see student profiles. There was also a suggestion for going with LinkedIn.

Lastly, we are always looking for agenda items so if you have them please send them my way (ttchang@u.washington.edu).

Attendees:

Melinda Van Wingen
Ryan Becker
Tony Chang
Ryan Ositis
David Cox
Zach Hale
Andre Tan
William Washington
Jason Civjan
Jason Pittman
Lauren Manes

We mainly talked about various social computing activities happening around campus. Truth be told Tony did much of the talking so we definitely got to do something about that next time

Facebook related:

Scott Macklin will be contacting folks shortly on kicking off the Facebook Courses App based on the Catalyst Survey sent out to find collaborators

UW Marketing has created an official UW Facebook page. Elise Daniel is working on the project and will be talking about her efforts at our next meeting.

UWTV has been thinking Facebook pages as well however they are still in the early stages of brainstorming and planning.

The science studies network (SSNET) is in the midst of creating a Facebook tagging app for researchers to find one another thru a tag cloud of research interests.

Community Platform:

There has been an increase in interest for investigating and using community platforms on campus. Here is a recent eTech blog post on what community platforms are. The folks in SMVTT first introduced the platform on campus and eTech has been actively evaluating various products with the hope to integrate it into our new UW Technology web presence. Folks at Kexp, OIM, SMVTT, Catalyst and UW Technology have shown lots of interest in this space so we will be working together on finding common interests and see where things go from there. If anyone else is interested please let me know.

A technology core for social computing on campus:

We shared thoughts on building out a technology core for social computing on campus that others depts could leverage.

We are not sure if there are strong use cases to support this since many of these services are already out there on the internet but we think some exploratory research could be done here.

Ryan Becker has offered to help look into the UW Social Profile need since its a key component to any social software strategy on campus. Awesome! Thanks Ryan.

Blogging:

Some folks around campus are asking if a central blogging service for the UW would be worthwhile? Based on our SIG discussions we think there is value in a UW hosted blogging service for security, marketing/branding reasons vs using free internet services like blogspot. Folks shared thoughts on preferring the use of a washington.edu url, a common branded blog look and feel, as well as some peace of mind that data is protected and stored at the UW.

SIG Group Updates:

We have opted to do the following to increase the collaboration with our SIG.

1. Start a new email distribution list: https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/socialsoftware

2. Create regular monthly meetings

3. Look into Facebook pages vs groups for our SIG

Tony will be participating on the UW Web Council steering committee on behalf of our Social Software SIG

University of Washington Social Software Special Interest Group
You can find us on Facebook and you can join our email list

Attendees:

John Burkhardt
Tony Chang
Ryan Becker
Scott Macklin
Melinda Van Wingen
Zach Hale
Rita Johnson
Jeremiah Jester

HuskyConnect.com

John Burkhardt, Manager of UWAA (UW Alumni Associations) Online Services, presented the UWAA’s HuskyConnect (www.huskyconnect.com) social networking site to the SIG. HuskyConnect is provided by UWAA thru Affinity Circles, a company that specializes in developing and hosting private social networking sites for universities.

UWAA introduced HuskyConnect in order to help keep alums engaged with the alumni association. Several years ago, UWAA started hearing about social networking sites and many universities and vendors started work on building this new online engagement model. A couple vendors showed up at the time to help provide solutions. One was zuniversity.com who started building portals for universities and then Affinity Circles showed up as a real social networking site that was started by Stanford University grads. What Affinity Circles developed was an exclusive social networking site for specific Universities vs the consumer oriented MySpace and Facebook. So it was more of a private, closed, and safe social networking environment.

The original vision of HuskyConnect was Huskies helping Huskies, and ensuring we continue to develop loyalty and connection back to the University. That HuskyConnect vision has now evolved to focus more on careers, networking and job searching among UW alums which seems to have helped increase HuskyConnect participation.

Affinity Circles is definitely placing less emphasis on social networking and more on career development for University alums.

Data on HuskyConnect.com:

Of the 4,000 people who have registered (10-20% are active)
Launched June of 2007 (it’s new)
Site is hosted at AffinityCircles and not at the UW

Some questions we discussed as a group:

How to measure success of social networks?
- tie it to the business need such as increased UWAA membership

Do social networks fit the culture of the university?
- only time will tell; however, if Facebook is any indication, where we have 60,000+ UW users, then it seems like we all do like social networks - it’s just how well does it work when there are no Sheep or Cows to throw at each other?

The Social Software SIG has been using Facebook groups for several months for collaboration, information storage, social networking, and event planning. Here is a report on how successful I think it has been for group collaboration and what we have learned as part of our SIG. I have had these same discussions face to face with other SIG members and so I think my comments here represent at least a few of us.

Things I like about Facebook Groups:

1. Central location for group information
2. All members have Facebook profiles for social networking purposes - I’ve met alot of new people on campus in a short amount of time
3. The Facebook event app with RSVP capabilities works well in our distributed UW calendaring environment. This works sort of like an evite.
4. The viral marketing nature of Facebook makes the group more visible to interested parties and the group grows quickly without forced advertisements such as email blasts
5. Security controls for moderating participation

Things I don’t like about Facebook Groups:

1. Lack of syndication, alerts, or notifications on the activities of the group, can make collaboration and activity sluggish. For example, if someone posts a link, uses the discussion board, or writes on the group wall, the members of the group do not get a newsfeed entry, a Facebook notification or an email. This makes it hard to keep up on the latest activities of the group. Members of the group have to remind themselves to go look at the group page which considering everyone’s busy schedule simply will not happen.

However notification does happen when someone replies back to your specific post or discussion item but it is limited to only the replier and the original poster.

2. No visual calendar to quickly assess upcoming events

3. Due to the lack of notification services the group itself has a difficult time developing meaningful group discussions where everyone is involved in the conversation. Only those who see a wall or link posting and are interested enough to reply will join in on a conversation but again that will not involve everyone in the group.

Bottom line is that I very much prefer Facebook groups over being on another big email list however, Facebook groups make it difficult to be truly collaborative with other people due to the lack of notification with whats going on with the group. Although notification could be improved, the truth is that I have used discussion boards like Catalyst GoPost and Yahoo Groups which do have notification systems however that did not guaranteed participation. It seems to be the behaviors of the group which makes online participation a rich environment for dialog or another URL that no one bothers to check. Email is definitely a central communication medium at the UW and it seems only time will tell if it remains that way or we find new ways of communicating that is outside the Inbox.

And yes we still have face to face meetings from time to time.

If you got some other thoughts on this then please lets hear them!

Yea I know this is an old post but wanted to make sure I had all the meeting notes on our etech blog for consistency. Originally, I had this content posted on my staff website so that it would not intrude with our eTech roadmap postings.

Attendees:

Corey Murata
Lauren Ray
Melinda Van Wingen
Dylan Wilbanks
Rick Ells
Brandon Olsen
Melissa Albin
Zach Hale
David Cox
Bill Corrigan
Scott Macklin
Jeremiah Jester
John Burkhardt

Agenda:
1. List Facebook application ideas for the UW
2. Group Hug

Group Hug:

1. What do we want to do going forward?
2. What would you like to see more of from this group?
3. How should we continue to roll?

- Use the SIG to learn and evangelize the information within our respective groups.
- Learn about what our community wants and bring it back to the SIG
- Network with one another
- The Facebook group application is not working - no notifications and feeds so new information and discussions go unnoticed
- We might consider moving to Facebook Pages instead

Facebook Application Ideas:

1. Oxfordian Debate
- Providing pro and con content/information
- Use the web to allow users to comment, compare, debate
- Use social voting

2. Courses app
- student profile tool
- here are the different courses that I have taken
- finding study buddies and groups
- tie this into actual UW courses using the new UW courses webservices (still in beta)
- Faculty would like to ensure courses are mapped to learning goals
- Thru clicks on “interested” or “I am taking this class” a list of people in a group class lists is created thru the voluntary (opted in) action of the student or user

Current Facebook Courses are not sufficient
- There are 4 Facebook courses apps which are NOT supported by any specific University
- Not endorsed by the university

3. Research interests
- common research topics
- research keywords
- tag cloud
- feed notification during tagging

4. Libraries
- penntags
- social bookmarking for resources that people choose which can share
- DawgTags

5. RSS feed gateway
- all these feeds
- make a grand unified RSS vacuum
- pull all the stuff in the university
- aware of your interests

6. DAWGMarks
- Mapping activities of the UW using Google Maps
- Creating metadata on those activities using maps
- geotracking

8. Develop a tool for shared development on facebook

-Coding
-Application Requirements
-Testing
-Communication
-Design

9. Life - database in health sciences
- desire to find out where public health faculty are around the world
- Answers the question, what are they doing there in that part of the world?

An idea is to create a Facebook poll and get some votes to get an idea of which idea we should undertake first.

The use of Web 2.0 and social networking tools have become a powerful force on the internet and on campus. The UW has an opportunity to discover this new technology landscape and find ways to leverage, adapt, and integrate it securely with our computing environment.

We need to take the time to research and study this new world as it relates to the UW and then strategize on how to harness its capabilities. An example would be leveraging the Facebook platform for greater reach to current, former, and prospective UW students to better understand our student population. Another example is taking Web 2.0 concepts and integrate them into our IT services and infrastructure, such as exploring a social profile, tagging and/or rating system, to build collective social intelligence into our systems.

eTech and interested participants from around the UW would be investigating Social Networking and Software technologies in order to establish a strategy around this space. There will be several projects below which will be supporting this effort. eTech’s involvement is distributed among consulting, research, meeting facilitation, technology evaluation and integration design work. They include:

Social Software Special Interest Group (SIG), which is now being led by UW Technology eTech and College of Education

• Developing a shared UW community of those who believe that social software has a stake in empowering the future for the UW
• Keeping a pulse of activities and knowledge around campus

UW Technology functional technology website
Developer Connection 2.0 website

• Using the opportunity of these already existing web design efforts to pilot UW use of community features such as blogging, ratings and feedback, news feeds, social bookmarks, quick polls, profiles and forums.
• Evaluating, integrating, and prototyping technology platforms to help support those new features.

Technology Exploration and Discovery

- In partnership with various UW teams including Catalyst and OIM

• OpenID
  • Researching its use to augment current UW authentication identities and system

• Social Profiles
  • Researching the possibility and integration design of a campus profile system for applications

• Social Graphs
  • Creating a better picture of your social and networking community

• Social Enterprise Feedback Management
  • Researching the many platform and tools which allow users to submit and rate feedback in a Web 2.0 way using social voting and idea submission.

Social Software and Networking White Paper & Strategy

• Providing a white paper to open up the dialogue on campus about decisions we will have to make about the utilization of social networking sites and web 2.0 tools on campus.

Attendees:

Zach Hale
Scott Macklin
David Cox
Melinda Van Wingen
Kathryn Sharpe
Tony Chang
Hanson R. Hosein
Amar Nehru
Lauren Ray

Main Agenda:

We received a visit from Hanson Hosein (UW Communications Digital Media Group) and Amar Nehru, a former Microsoftie, who gave us a presentation about an innovative idea they have around social software & networking sites for important social causes. We were able to give them the feedback they needed to help shape some of their ideas and also determine if there were any opportunities for partnerships.

I wont be able to post any specific material from the presentation as it is currently considered confidential however Hanson and Amar would welcome anyone interested in learning more and possibly partnering with them to contact them.

Some things that we can share about our time together:

We talked about various sites already existing and some of the pros and cons of each:

Facebook causes
Change.org
CharityNavigator
Idealistic
TakingITGlobal

We talked about better ways to make decisions on various charity organizations based on objective and user submitted data such as ranking and rating of organizations.

Amar sees a philanthropic trend with the current college and younger generation. The idea of being relevant in today’s society as it pertains to making global differences is powerful among that generation. They foresee a website where individuals who share common interests can do something socially to facilitate change and have a market place for socially relevant action.

Amar and Hanson sees alot of potential and opportunities to partner with the University of Washington in helping them develop and endorse a new website that can empower society using social web2.0 concepts. They see the new UW global mission as being in direct alignment with their goals and vision for their website. The question remains on how these types of engagements occur at the UW and how can TechTransfer get involved.

Other topics:

Updates on ongoing projects that are bring social web 2.0 features on campus.

If you are interested in our Social Software Special Interest Group please join our Facebook group http://washington.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19460730848

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of participating in a panel on Educational Technology in Higher Education at this conference. Gnomedex is hard to describe. You might say it is for bloggers, but that would be too limiting. This was my first one, and I must admit I only participated as a presenter, so I didn’t get the full feel for the event. I think it is a place for innovators to share emerging ideas amongst peers. First of all I was really impressed with the registration tool! This is the kind of application that makes sense for connecting folks of like minds. I was asked to add information about buzzwords, skills, interests and experience. Then the application from introNetworks produced a circle with me in the middle (represented by a blue push pin) and everyone else represented by red push pins around the circle in the four quadrants spaced in relation to my by how close our interests are. Interestingly, one of the closest to me was Kathy Gill, a Senior Lecture in the Communications Department here at University of Washington.

Kathy invited me to speak on iTunes U at UW, along with a graduate student and undergraduate. I really enjoyed hearing their experiences with blogging for credit and creating online open journals for research. I ended up talking about emerging technology strategies at UW, because I want to get the word out about all we are doing.

Right before our talk, Derek Miller shared with us his experiences recovering from cancer via web conferencing. Quite a compelling conversation and engagement! He really is courageous.

Also, in the front row was Jay Cross, who writes Informal Learning Blog, one of my daily reads, so that told me right that this group knew its salt!

So, check out jibjab.com and their new app, “Staring You”. Very cool.

The good folks over at the Simpson Center for the Humanities have creative ideas for reaching students in the near future using social networking tools or sites like Facebook or MySpace. They would love to see a UW-centric mechanism for like-minded students of different disciplines to discover each other and collaborate on research projects. Tony and I had a great conversation with them the other day seeking ways we could learn from them and help them grow their ideas.

One very interesting idea Peter Leonard broached was adding profile information channels to MyUW, where one could post interests, activities and descriptive data and perhaps the portal could assist the users in finding each other. That led Tony to ask what might be key for social networking at Universities? Discovering others? Linking with others? Searching for particulars? Collaboration on projects?

We would be interested to hear your ideas for social networking here. Please comment or drop us a line.

If you have a social community involving 2 or more people and want to socialize online, then go create a social networking site. Create a social networking site for anything you want. Even create one for your university!

Thanks to NING