University of Washington Emerging Technology

I have been tracking several sites that are changing the game in how companies are communicating with their customers. Companies are using these Web 2.0 sites to get ideas and feedback while customers are making their voice heard with companies that they do business with.

I can’t put it any better than Get Satisfaction who offers this type of feedback service as a generic free service for any company to use.

“Get Satisfaction is a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers.”

Get Satisfaction
Dell’s IdeaStorm
IdeaScope
Shoulddothis.com
Starbucks
SharepointPedia

Take a look at these various examples. I think the UW can find lots of value with this new model of openness for its community. An obvious example is giving our students a new voice so they can tell the UW what they think as a strong community.

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

table.sample { border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px; border-spacing: 2px; border-style: solid solid solid solid; border-color: black black black black; border-collapse: collapse; background-color: white; } table.sample th { border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px; padding: 1px 1px 1px 1px; border-style: inset inset inset inset; border-color: gray gray gray gray; background-color: white; -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; } table.sample td { border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px; padding: 3px 3px 3px 3px; border-style: inset inset inset inset; border-color: gray gray gray gray; background-color: white; -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; text-align: left; }

This is a very high level summary of our evaluation. Please go to our wiki page to review detailed data related to this evaluation and a design spec. Yes it is UWNetID protected meaning that vendors will have to contact me via email if they want to discuss further.

The evaluation is based on Emerging Technology’s prototype work with our new community website along with conversations with others on campus who have either used or evaluated the products themselves. For a quick summary of what we think a community platform is all about see my previous post.

Thanks to our UW Technology SMVTT team who first showed us their work with community platforms a few months ago.

Please comment directly on the wiki or on this blog post. You can always email me as well.

Per our 2008-eTech roadmap for social software, some of our team members have been heads down over the past few weeks working on the evaluation of a few community platforms. The evaluation is specifically targeted at a UW Technology project to revamp the design of our current web presence.

Our current web presence is at http://www.washington.edu/computing and I think we can all agree it’s time for a fresh look and design. Rick Ells and his team in the communications group have been hard at work on a richer interactive design for quite some time now.

The new site design specifically calls for community features. This led us to explore a handful of community platforms that help websites either revamp or augment their current site to be rich communities and allow for peer-produced content. The introduction of these community platform products suggest that social networking and online communities are not destinations, but features which can be integrated into any website.

So what do I mean by social networking vs. online communities on the web?

Social networking to me is building your online profile and your network, searching for people you know, sustaining relationships, and building new relationships. Online communities are ways individuals can participate on a website such as comments, wikis, blogs, and voting as a community.

The eTech technology evaluation of community platforms is specific to the latter, however we are seeing an evolution of these platforms to include more social networking features like “Friends” and “Social Graphs”. We also see focused sites like our new UW Technology web presence serving niche communities desiring a community voice outside of the huge and generic social networking destinations (e.g., Facebook and MySpace).

Platforms we are actively exploring include:
* Movable Type’s Community Solution;
* Telligent’s Community Server; and
* UW Sharepoint Community Kit.

Common features of these community platform involve blogs, forums, user voting/rating, comments, profiles, tag/tag clouds, user activity news feeds, etc.

These solutions take the best features from various social web 2.0 sites like Digg.com, Flickr, Facebook and Delicious.

So what’s the big deal here?

As we all know social software and web 2.0 is big part of our computing lives such as socializing on Facebook, writing and reading blogs, uploading files and videos, voting on ideas, and participating in rich conversations on forums. The benefit of having these rich interactions on any website is helping attract a larger audience and involve visitors with a set of very rich interactive features. A community platform is one way a website can evolve from one-way read-only pages to ensuring our community around us feels like we engage with them actively over the web. Of course, communities on the Web are not the only way we pursue community development but it is important that being a technology organization, we have a strong, rich, interactive web presence for our UW community.

Will these solutions really allow campus websites to become a rich interactive location for our UW community? Is there any value and hope in moving away from email for communication and unto blogs and forums?

I guess only time will tell but for the time being we are hosting some brainstorming and eTech talk sessions around campus and we will be talking to Kexp.org, OIM, Catalyst, UW Technology and others. Please email me ttchang@u.washington.edu if you are interested in learning more or have questions. Also please comment away on this post if you want to discuss further.

In my next post I will share with you what we have learned so far with the evaluation of these products.

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!