Your voices needed to help a worthy project

Can the sharing of stories bring a community together?

It worked in the olden days, but has become a lost art in the age of television, internet, and videogames. Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone" described a society where isolation reigns and communities are frayed.

My friend and colleague Cynthia Kurtz has applied for a Knight News Challenge grant to develop web2.0 software precisely to facilitate the gathering, sharing and passing on of stories that used to go on around the campfire or village square. The Knight folks want the public (that means you) to review and comment on the applications. It would be doing a great service if you would visit the site here and weigh in on Cynthia's application.

Here's how she describes the project:

Long ago, story caretakers tended the diverse stories of the community: eliciting, understanding, maintaining. But those traditions have declined as commercial storytelling rose and community coherence fell. The physical-digital split means that today older people tell stories in community centers while younger people tell them on Facebook. People still tell stories, but no one is bringing all of the stories together into community-wide patterns, making sense of those patterns, and helping the stories get to where they need to be in times of need. We are building a free and open source software package called Rakontu ("tell a story" in Esperanto) that will help communities share and work with raw stories of personal experience for mutual understanding, conflict resolution and decision support. By supporting and bridging online and offline storytelling, Rakontu will help communities regenerate the sustaining functions of story caretakers so that they can take better care of their stories again.

An important part of the project is how this would bring benefit to communities. Cynthia explains it this way:

Rakontu will help communities tell, annotate and connect stories; discover insight-creating patterns in them; and use stories to resolve conflicts and make decisions together. This degree of support is only available today through the help of experienced narrative practitioners. Rakontu will embody understandings about narrative in communities so that people will not have to know anything about narrative to benefit from its use. Some possible outcomes are better understandings of opposing perspectives, a greater diversity of voices being heard, better consensus on tough choices, more problems dealt with before they get worse, safer streets, fewer footholds for extremism and paranoia, and greater common strength in times of crisis.

I've written in this blog, over and over, about the use of stories for knowledge sharing, learning, and creating insight. You're probably tired of reading about it. But think about this: we should be using every tool at our disposal to help bring our communities together, to combat the "bowling alone" syndrome, and make our neighborhoods a better place to live. That's what Rakontu can do, and I hope you'll visit the Knight News Challenge site and support Cynthia's application.

(Disclosure: I have worked with Cynthia on this grant and will be conducting community trials of the software if the grant is awarded. Therefore I have a vested interest in getting the grant approved.)

Tags:
community, narrative, virtual communities, sensemaking, storytelling

Is your marketing department confused about web2.0? Read this

The one nearly universal feeling of companies dealing with the changes that web2.0 has made to marketing is utter bewilderment. I participated in a project to assess corporate blogs last year and I wouldn’t give any company I looked at better than a “C.” In fact, most of them would get incompletes: they had no blogs at all.

Never mind wikis, Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, etc., etc.

So it’s very timely that Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research have written “Groundswell,” a book that illuminates what web2.0 means to everyday businesses. In straightforward language, and buttressed by primary research into how various groups participate in web2.0, Li and Bernoff define the most important web2.0 technologies, show how consumers use them, and lay out how companies can encourage and participate in the conversations about themselves and their products.

At the outset, Li and Bernoff define six overlapping types of web2.0 users & nonusers (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, inactives) and show their representation in various segments. For example, Democrats have more web2.0 users across the board than Republicans. Japanese Fujitsu PC owners are far more likely to be collectors (e.g., content taggers or subscribers to RSS feeds) than NEC’s PC customers.

Through these examples, the authors crisply demonstrate that companies need to understand the web2.0 profiles of their customers, so as to understand, ultimately, how to engage them in productive conversation.

Case studies appear throughout the book, both success stories (Blendtec’s “Will It Blend” videos) and failures (the short-lived blog of Unica’s Chief Marketing Officer). To satisfy old-line executives (especially CFOs), they include pro forma business cases for several web2.0 projects—including laying out the upfront and ongoing costs of these initiatives.

Over and over, Li and Bernoff emphasize the need, when using these technologies, to listen, and not to shout. To be transparent, and to be authentic. Whether this is possible with traditional companies, in which desiring to control the message is deeply ingrained, remains to be seen.

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Examples of web2.0 user types defined in “Groundswell”:
Creators – blog writers, amateur YouTube videographers
Critics – blog commenters, Amazon product reviewers
Collectors – del.icio.us taggers
Joiners – myspace and Facebook users
Spectators – blog readers, forum readers

Related:
Groundswell blog
Corporate IT maximum-security is damaging innovation
How enterprise 2.0 adds value to the connections between workers

social networking, information technology, web2.0, marketing, blogging, virtual communities, reading list