Do you factcheck news stories that confirm your beliefs?

Environmental Graffiti posted an interesting story about a hoax written by Mark Twain in 1862 about the discovery of a petrified man. The story was widely copied and reprinted even though basic facts were evidently wrong.

Why am I sharing this? Besides being amusing, I think it teaches a valuable lesson about our predisposition to accept stories and theories that confirm our own preconceived ideas and biases. An example in development policy is the tragedy of the commons that still today is used to justify the dismantling of local (often collective) property rights systems in favor of individual, exclusive property rights.

Let’s question our assumptions before we take important decisions especially when they have an impact on others.

Three lessons from a year of teaching 2.0 to researchers

The purpose of this post is to share with you three lessons we wish someone had told us a year ago. But then again, what’s the point of teaching if you don’t learn something for yourself?

Last summer, some colleagues at IFPRI and I decided to begin offering a series of weekly trainings aimed at teaching researchers about new web-based tools and services. During the first several months, this is exactly what we showed- tool, service, tool, and so on. Staff who participated in these early trainings would later report that they had hardly heard of, let alone used, many of the tools and services we were showcasing- wikis, del.icio.us, iGoogle, etc. They also would reveal that few continued using them in the months that followed their first taste of the new tools and technologies.

So we did what people normally do when they get really busy for awhile- we continued teaching the same lessons in the same style until we had some time to calm down and reflect a little. Finally, we began to ask why more staff wasn’t using these tools on a regular basis. And why we weren’t able to attract more research staff to the trainings. We knew these were directly linked, and began to explore new approaches for reaching our target audience. Below is a summary of some of the more important lessons we’ve learned so far, along with the stories behind them.

1. Focus on the job, not the tool. The first couple of times we talked about social bookmarking services with researchers, we showed them del.icio.us. In fact, we showed them how to create an account, how to import their browser’s bookmarked pages, and briefly explained about tagging and how to share resources with friends and colleagues. At the end of the session, we basically just told the researchers to go to it. A handful of researchers later asked us for help setting up their accounts. Few, however, reported that they were still using the service months after the training.
   What went wrong? Well for starters, we were focusing on the tool rather than the application. Turns out, researchers wanted to see how this tool could be applied in their daily lives. Otherwise, their interest in the tool quickly passed. The leadup to a major international conference on “Taking Action for the World’s Poor and Hungry People” turned out to offer a perfect opportunity to showcase one strength of social bookmarking services- the ability to create collaborative lists in real time. In years past, organizers of such events spent months and months contacting leading researchers asking them to submit lists of important works related to the conference as well as publishers to request permissions to make these texts freely available to audiences in the developing world. Prior to this event, targeted individuals received an email invitation to submit their lists electronically and were given three options for doing so- emailing in their entries, filling out an online form from a website or using their own del.icio.us account and a tagging their recommended papers with a common keyword (food4all). Though the majority of submissions were collected via email or online form, our del.icio.us page became the central repository for these resources and was used to publish the bibliographic list onto the conference website. When we showed this application to researchers in subsequent trainings, it provided a concrete example of what the service could be used for in supporting their own work. And, not surprisingly, more researchers got on board and have begun using social bookmarking in their daily lives since then.
2. Researchers like hearing from other researchers, not us. Our first couple of sessions about blogging were well attended by research staff, but few expressed interest in setting up their own blogs. Once again, this had us scratching our heads as we tried to figure out why blogging wasn’t catching on among staff. Our approach was to present blogs as a website-in-a-box that anyone could set up in a matter of minutes and showed how many millions of blogs were started by “regular people” every month. So it seemed to be another case of focusing too much on the tool rather than on how it can be used.
   Yet in subsequent presentations, we began showcasing organizational blogs from IFPRI and other research organizations and still few seemed interested. Fortunately for us, though, we were able to capture the attention of a couple of younger researchers during these early trainings who would later take blogging at IFPRI to new lengths. Eva Schiffer, a post-doc who developed a social networking analysis tool, thought a blog would be ideal for sharing ideas and applications for her tool with the wider research community as well as on-the-ground development workers. Soon, the number of entries and amount of traffic from Eva’s Net-Map Toolbox blog had surpassed that of IFPRI’s other blogs, and we invited Eva to present her experiences with her colleagues at IFPRI. During her presentation, Eva explained how the blog connected her to new audiences of readers and that her research actually benefited from the online exchanges with these readers, many of whom included other researchers and development workers engaged in similar issues. Truth is, Eva’s story wasn’t all that different from our own adapted sales pitch- that researchers were using blogs to reach new audiences that didn’t visit our organizational website and that these new audiences often were looking to actively engage in creating knowledge rather than passively receiving information- but the fact that the message was passing from one researcher’s lips into the ears of her peers seemed to make the difference. Several staff approached us following the presentation requesting that we help set up their own research blogs. Go figure.
3. Don’t assume you know what researchers need- go out and ask them! I saved this one for last because, truth be told, we’re only now just starting to move in this direction. Or rather, we’ve been asking them what they want to learn for some time now and we typically hear them recite back to us the list of tools we’re already presenting. For a while, we took this as a sign that we were doing everything right, but then we started to wonder whether or not we were asking the right question. Or, put another way, were they saying they wanted to know more about blogs and wikis mainly because they knew that’s what we could teach them or because they suspected that these tools would help them in their work? Based on how few were actually starting their own blogs and wikis, we had to assume that the former was true.
   We began asking ourselves how we could find out what researchers needed in a different fashion. So we decided to rephrase the question - What are some common communication bottlenecks you face in your work? Many complained of email overload. Others expressed the need for collaborative work spaces for posting data, figures and working versions of research papers for sharing among colleagues and project teams. All this has led us to the point where we are now testing out several content management systems that support the type of functionality researchers have requested. And it seems unlikely that we would have arrived here so quickly had the researchers not shared with us information on what they needed.

All told, we’ve learned quite a bit from our experiences over the past year (and maybe even more than we’ve taught). And I’d like to be able to tell those of you interested in implementing similar trainings to simply follow the tips I’ve shared above and your organization will be Web 2.0 savy in no time. But with all change, these things take time. Having another year under our belts of not just training but also implementing these tools and services in our daily jobs as well as in our personal lives probably has just barely laid the foundation really getting our hands dirty and supporting researchers eager to swallow up knowledge and information on working with new web tools and services (see Stephan’s last post on project management 2.0). In the meantime, keep us posted if you have any tips or “best practices” for teaching 2.0 in your organization and we’ll do the same as new ones pop up.

Project Management 2.0: It’s not about the tools

Looks like flooding our colleagues with information about new ways of working together is showing effect. More and more of them are asking for help to improve the way they share information and to take down the email and network drive silos we have been building up over the years.

Several projects are trying to deal with this at the institute level (Pete has written about the intranet project), but there are also a few research teams that are trying to find new approaches and tools to best match their needs. One of these teams is on a good way of changing how they work and communicate with one another. This group identified three factors that have been crucial for their success so far: (1) early on in the process the group reached an agreement about the need for change, (2) everyone was asked to be involved in identifying the new way of communicating, and (3) they have a team leader who is committed to this new way and who forces everyone to come along.

In other words, creating the demand for our support put us right in the middle of a number of change processes. What an opportunity, but now what?

For one, I had to learn that it is counterproductive to start talking about tools right away, even though it is easy (and thus very tempting). Focusing on tools gives the impression that there are easy fixes without ever addressing the underlying communication problems of the group. Rather, we have learned to try and encourage conversations with and within these teams to help them find out what they need to change to communicate more effectively with each other by asking how they typically share information, if they feel that they get all the information they need, and what bottlenecks they have encountered when communicating within their team.

With more and more groups not working at the same place at the same time, part of the answer to improve team collaboration and communication will lie in adopting new (web 2.0) tools, but for some groups the answer might simply be to meet regularly.

As you can imagine these are not easy processes to go through, in particular if the team leaders do not fully buy into them, and it is quite a challenge to try and support these processes. We are learning as we are going but would love to hear about others’ experiences. Have you been there and want to share the experience? Any specific advice on how to guide these processes? What are good ways to help teams to identify their communication bottlenecks?

Taking del.icio.us for granted

Thanks to Chris Addison’s teachings and some serious futzing on my own, I’ve been able to learn over the past year and a half about many of the things del.icio.us can do. Namely, it can help you create an online database of your favorite resources, generate collaborative lists, share links with other del.icio.us users, and embed link rolls and tag clouds in your blog or webpage, among other cool tricks.

But the more I think I know about such tricks, the more dismissive I became. “I’ve seen all that before,” I would say to myself.” But all in a single tool?! Well, that’s where the title of the post comes in…

The other week, I was showing a colleague from the CGIAR what del.icio.us could do in a very hands on way. We started by uploading a list of bookmarks from her browser into del.icio.us. This was something I’d done for myself when I first started playing around with del.icio.us, but upon my arrival to Ethiopia and subsequent “misplacing” of my recently bookmarked pages in my work computer I suddenly realized that I needed to update my del.icio.us account more regularly. “I can’t find some of my bookmarked pages,” I explained to her. “I should be updating these bookmarks in del.icio.us more regularly.” (Let’s call this “aha moment number 1″…)

Next, we started playing with some different tags. She’d already done this before and got the basic gist of RSS, but wasn’t aware that each tag in del.icio.us had its own RSS feed. “You can think of tags like folders,” I explained. “Each time you tag a resource, it saves it to a folder by that tag’s name, along with every other tag you assign to that resource. And every page that you can view in del.icio.us- whether it’s by account name, your tags or even a common tag used by others, it has its own RSS feed.” Once again, I was struck by how special this feature was. Not many other services I could think of have this type of tagging, page view and RSS interoperability as part of the standard, free service. (And this was “aha moment number 2″)

Next, we visited her blog at WordPress. I explained that this del.icio.us widget she had in WP could be configured to display all her links from del.icio.us or just those belonging to certain tags. We configured the widget and voilà!- her del.icio.us items showed in her blog. Needless to say, we both were highly impressed.

Next, I showed her an webpage whose entire content was driven through del.icio.us. Euforic members bookmark in del.icio.us and they are pulled into the website (note: this is now done using feedburner as an intermediary step). “Amazing,” she said. By clicking through the links, you are taken to their del.icio.us account. And by clicking on the ’save this’ link to the right of an item’s title, you can easily save it to your own bookmarks- “Amazing!” You can even see their tags for that item, or popular tags from more than 2 million other del.icio.us users and add your own already used tags with just one click.

“If i find someone who has a lot of interesting bookmarks,” I explained, “I can simply add them to my network.”
“What- no friend request?,” my colleague asked.
“Nope. In del.icio.us, these are all public and sharing is the default.” There is a way to hide individual items, if you like though…”

“What else?” I asked myself. “Maybe you’re all excited because you fnd great link and want to share it with a friend. All you do is tag it as as for:yourfriendsname and voilà! it shows up the next time she logs into her account. Moreover, if you and your friends create a unique tag, you could take the feed from that and add it straight into a webpage so that whenever one of you tags a new item, it gets automatically pulled into your website or blog…”

It’s my own damn fault for not remembering how cool and dynamic del.icio.us was. As I mentioned before, Chris Addison helped turn it into the content management system for the Euforic website and Peter Ballantyne uses it to tag all his posts in the IAALD blog (thereby driving up incoming links, overall traffic and even their Google ranking). In many ways, I came to realize that del.icio.us had become the poster child for Web 2.0 functionality (whatever that means). Thanks for reminding me of this, Alexandra.

Any other tips or tricks I forgot to mention?

Crafting an Intranet 2.0: If you build it, will they come?

First, a disclaimer: we haven’t built anything yet. Unlike other posts, I can’t share any examples of what we’ve done so far toward building a collaborative intranet since we still are very much in the planning phase. That being said, however, I think it’s still an opportune moment to reflect on some lessons learned and solicit advice on what others think about our proposed ideas. After all, if knowledge sharing has taught us anything thus far, it’s that we all have something to learn from one another…

Recently, I was checking out a Knowledge Sharing Wiki, which mentioned four different applications for institutional intranets. They included:

1. Document sharing across an organization;
2. Organizational staff directories;
3. Online conversation space; and
4. Centrally organized company policies, human resources information, etc.

Of the four, I would label 2 and 4 as the more conventional intranet functions while an increasing number of organizations (IFPRI included) now are clambering for 1 and 3- though not always through the intranet platform. For us, the question quickly became: Why not combine all four to create an all-in-one intranet?

When we first brought up the idea of having features such as customizable staff bio pages and RSS feeds on the new intranet platform, it was met with much skepticism from our IT department. “No one will use it” was their short answer to our proposed ideas. After conceding that it would take time for most staff to become actively engaged, we pointed out that many staff already have such profiles in Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking software and some are using newsreader software such as Google Reader to stay up-to-date on current journal articles and websites of interest. Rather than building a new Facebook-like platform, we are proposing allowing staff to simply be able to update their bio information on the fly (they currently do so via web-based forms in Access), parts of which would also be automatically published to their public profile on the web. This, we argued, would reduce the time and effort of updating these pages in multiple locations while also giving staff more ownership and greater incentive for keeping the content current. Default content for these pages would simply be imported from the current staff directory, thereby avoiding the duplication of data entry and leaving it up to individual staff members to decide when to adopt the new way of updating their bio pages. Moreover, the addition of RSS feeds and the ability to follow their colleagues’ updated information would create a social networking type environment that would facilitate internal communication.

For online communication purposes, an internal blog using WordPress was launched last year (along with several public blogs), which is now featured on the intranet home page and used by staff for staying up-to-date on both work and non-work related news. Our goal is to fully integrate the blog into whichever intranet platform is decided upon (IT currently favoring Sharepoint due to its ability to be integrated with the Active Directory) and to make the posting of announcements and events as easy as posting a blog entry. Moreover, this type of information also would be shareable via RSS, calendars, etc.

As for document sharing and the online storage of company policies, HR info, etc., some of this already is being uploaded into Sharepoint, which seems to be able to handle document and form libraries rather well, includes RSS feeds, and supports full-text searching. Our concern here (and it’s a big one) is that Sharepoint does not perform well in low bandwidth environments, such as those faced by most of our outposted staff (see KM4dev online discussion of Sharepoint). Other document sharing platforms currently being used by IFPRI staff include Teamspace, wikis and Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Rather than limiting all staff to using a single platform, our idea is to be able to link to all of these services via the intranet portal. In the case of Teamspace, integration with Sharepoint would be quite straightforward while the different wiki platforms could either be integrated directly into whichever platform is used or simply by having their content displayed on a given page either via an iFrame or embedded RSS feed.

In sum, although no single tool or platform fits all the needs expressed by staff and management, Web 2.0 applications allow for outside services to be pulled in, remixed and displayed in various ways within a dynamic intranet platform. These new developments have caused some to predict that the lines between intranet and internet will become blurred and that the “classical intranet” will become history in a few years. At IFPRI, we are banking on such predictions coming true, taking stock in the idea that if information is easier to find, update and share, user behavior will adapt accordingly.

Blogging Good Practices

After promoting blogs and blogging in IFPRI for a while now there seems to be growing interest by staff to try it out. To guide them in planning their blogging endeavors our colleagues asked us about dos and donts of blogging. I started digging in my bookmarks and reader posts to see if I could find a post that sums it all up. I did find a lot of information, but nothing I could just forward to people, so I put together below list of tips. I shared this internally, and I thought it would be worthwhile posting here too.

Do you agree? Did I forget anything? Are there other posts and resources I should point my colleagues to?

One can create blogs for different purposes, and the following tips might not make sense for all possible applications (e.g. closed blog for personal reflection, or archiving for mailing lists), but those blog authors, who want to reach old and new audiences and engage with their readers might want consider them. At the end of this post you can find a list of all the posts I took the ideas from and a couple of blogs that are good starting points to read more.

Writing in the blogosphere is definitely more casual than writing scholarly papers, but also here the number one rule is to give credit to the ideas, quotes and pointers you got from other people. The main way to do that is to link to the original, but you can also name people and thank them in your post. Other tips include:

• Link to relevant content: It not only gives credit to other’s work but also helps your readers to delve deeper if they want to.
• Make it easy for people to find what they are interested in: Tag your posts, use categories and add a search box to your blog
• Be open and embrace critique: If you are not sure about something, say so. Readers are much more likely to engage if they feel that you are interested in real conversation and in learning from and with them and do not just want to broadcast your ideas. That includes dealing with critical comments in the same way you deal with praise. Never delete comments unless they are clearly spam.
• Ask questions: Questions in your post engage your readers. It helps them to respond with comments or on their own blogs.
• Watch your language: What you are writing is on the internet for anyone to see, and the internet is a web of connections. So talking badly about colleagues, the own organization or even competitors will come back to haunt you.
• Only post material when you have the proper permissions: Publications, photos, videos and other materials may be copyrighted. Sharing them on a public website is in those cases not allowed without permission from the person or organization holding the copyright.
• Search for related blogs in your area and comment: Commenting on others work shows them that you care about their ideas and work and makes them aware that you exist. There is so much going on on the web, that you have to go where your potential readers are to show them you exist.

The posts that I drew on are Tips from a New Blogger, 9 Lessons for Would-be Bloggers, My Blogging Advice to Connect with your Readers, and Weblog Ethics. Good starting points for further reading are ProBlogger, and Beth’s Blog.

Does the social web enable me to find more unique information or just more of the same?

The video Information R/Evolution and the post From The Information Age To The Connected Age are describing two trends of the social web.

The social web can enable users to more easily find the exact information they were searching. But if the scarce resource of the connected age is attention, then we are likely to see a surge of new ways of and tools for marketing and PR in the battle for audiences.

As producers of information and products learn how to use the social web to reach people, these same tools will be weakened in their function to facilitate access to the best information in favor of the loudest voice. How do we know that the loudest voice is the one we want to listen to? and if it tells us what we want to hear, why would we not listen or even go look for an alternative one?

Research debates have very similar problems: Big names are favored and have a lot of influence, newcomers and dissidents have to accept the supremacy of the established voices. But, do the big names always produce the best information? or did were they just lucky to have one great idea that made their reputation?

The mobile revolution starts now?

In spite of the recent hype surrounding the iPhone and Gphone, I have serious doubts that mobile phones will become the primary access point to the web anytime soon. According to a recent study by the Pew & American Life Project, 58% of adult Americans have used a mobile phone or PDA for what they call “non-voice data activities” such as texting, emailing, taking a picture, looking up map directions or recording a video. Other than clumsily orchestrating the occasional text message, I fall squarely on the short end of such technophilia when it comes to using mobile phones. In short: I use it to stay in touch with family and friends and won’t bat an eyelash about ever leaving my cell at home when I go out. I never have used my mobile to access the web, and here’s the kicker- I wouldn’t even know how to…

But this post is intended to be less of a confessional than an exploration of the question: When and how will the so-called “mobile revolution” take shape, particularly in the context of the developing world? Christian Kreutz recently addressed this question in his blog, focusing on mobile use in the collaborative web of wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, etc., citing the argument that the mobile phone already is more useful in developing countries than the personal computer for accessing the web. This argument seems well justified by the fact that there are now more than 3 billion mobile phones in use worldwide and the fastest growing markets for mobile subscribers are found in the developing world. But Kreutz also wonders “why so little has been developed in order to interact and collaborate via the mobile phone in the social web.”

Kreutz’s concerns are well justified. At development conferences, one commonly hears about the impending mobile revolution for sharing web-based information and how such technologies will allow poor people in developing countries to “leapfrog” many of the communication barriers experienced in the North. Yet aside from the occasional story of people in rural Africa receiving RSS feeds or reporting on election results from their mobile phones, I suspect that the vast majority of citizens of the developing world will suffer from the same lack of knowledge about how to get the information they’re looking for delivered to their mobile phones (the “pull”) as many here in the developing world still do. And getting them to “push” information from their mobile phones to the collaborative web may lie even further off on the horizon.

In sum: having the proper tool is no guarantee that information will be widely exchanged among citizens of the developed and developing world. Now that new tools offer the possibility of more and more citizens of the developing world to receive timely information that they can use toward bettering their life conditions (e.g., market prices, drought and flood warnings, educational content, etc.), it is up to the development communities to work with these partners to make sure that they know where to find it and how to take ownership of it themselves.

Are we already practicing web 3.0?

I just finished reading an article about web 3.0 on ReadWrite Web where web 3.0 is defined as being “about feeding you the information that you want, when you want it (in the proper context).”

Web 2.0 made it much easier to share and search information, but it also led to information overload for many users. Following the above definition, web 3.0 will be about personalization and recommendation. While it would be great if this really became possible technically soon, I am wondering if many of us are not already practicing web 3.0 as knowledge brokers in our respective niches.

I, for example, play the role of a filter and aggregator of information within CAPRi: After searching, receiving and digesting all the information that might be relevant to our network (i.e. a lot of futzing) I filter it down to the bits and pieces I feel are important to share. It seems that people are appreciating my work, but for this system to work, I have to have credibility and people need to trust my judgment.

Will semantic tools and their algorithms ever be trusted in the same way we trust our friends, colleagues or a blog we love to read? Will there be the continuing need for a person’s involvement? What does this mean for outreach of research and others who create new information?

Measuring impact on the web

Like many development research organizations, IFPRI staff often debate the question of how to best measure the impact of our work. As opposed to some of our partner CG Centers, IFPRI’s work focuses on policy-level interventions, which are rather different from producing new crop varieties for the purpose of increasing agricultural yields, household incomes, etc. Thus, it could be claimed (and in fact has been claimed by some) that IFPRI primarily is in the business of producing “intellectual varieties.” Defining what we produce, however, is quite different from knowing how to measure impact, which effectively underscores the importance of choosing which indicators it’s worth paying attention to. Below I list a few potential indicators for measuring impact on the web while trying to provide my own impressions on their overall value and utility for measuring impact.

• Page views/visitors: It seems like many webmasters and other mangers of web statistics reports have been questioning the value of these for years, but they continue to be reported year after year. Criticisms include the lack of proper contextualization (from what constitutes a ‘hit,’ ‘visitor session,’ etc. to how do we compare our statistics with others) as well as the lack of any kind of clear correlation between these easily-measurable indicators and others designed to measure impact.
• Downloads: It seems to follow that the more a particular publication is downloaded, the more people are reading it, thereby expanding its sphere of influence. In practice, however, the same person might be downloading a particular publication multiple times and even more important than the how many question is the by whom question. As with page views/visitor sessions, Google Analytics‘ mapping features can be highly useful in obtaining this type of data to make sure that research outputs are reaching audiences in the countries they’re intended to benefit.
• Citations: Once again, context is everything. Many research organizations only report on their peer-review publications, and it follows that they are only interested in citations in PR journals, books, etc. Several online databases offer citation tracking information, including Google Scholar, ISI Web of Science, CrossRef’s Forward Linking Program, and CiteSeer, among others. One might be tempted to add these citation figures up in order to obtain a clearer picture of overall impact, but this would not yield such a picture since several of these services count the same citations. Thus, benchmarking your organization’s citations vis-a-vis your counterparts would probably prove more effective in monitoring the impact of your research publications.
• Mentions in the media/blogs: It also seems like many research organizations have been monitoring this for years, but the addition of services like RSS feeds and automated alerts from Google News has made it much easier than in the past. The same also applies to monitoring the blogs via advanced search operators for Google and Google Blog searches as well as Technorati.
• RSS feeds: Once again, many are questioning the value of measuring ‘hits’ as an indicator for impact. Instead, they argue, we’d be much better served in paying attention to the number of feed subscribers out there, though this can also fluctuate heavily over time. For our purposes, Feedburner fits the bill rather nicely, even while sticking only to their free, basic service.
• Search engine rankings: Obviously, there’s one search engine that need not be named (at least, not for the umpteenth time in this post!) that most organizations pay attention to above all others, but few fail to take into account differences across different country platforms. My own advice is to pay attention to your ranking among search results for several keywords your organization may be targeting and look into purchasing ad words for your institution via the Google Grants program (free for non-profits).