Communicating Your Message Using Web 2.0: A guide for development communicators

Editor's Notes

• #2: Please note that each slide in this Powerpoint e-tutorial is supported by notes which are intended to be read in conjunction with the slides.
• #4: Web technology is shifting in a way that enables greater online communication, collaboration and community. With the transition to Web 2.0, the user creates and has more control over the content. Web 2.0 enables, among other things, the ‘harnessing [of] collective intelligence,’ the ‘architecture of participation,’ ‘rich user experiences’ and ‘remixable data source[s]’. (Tim O’Reilly, 2005) Some well known Web 2.0 tools include Wikipedia, an online encylopedia that has been created through online collaboration of thousands of users, and iTunes, a site where you can share music and other forms of audio recordings. Most Web 2.0 tools are free to use. Most are easy to use by those who are ‘non-technical’.
• #5: Development organisations are investing in web-based systems and tools to communicate and collaborate; to create, exchange, share, and disseminate development content; and to share knowledge and information.   People (who aren’t web experts) can more easily generate content from their own knowledge and experience; they can share it in different media; they can select and subscribe to knowledge of others, they can re-combine this knowledge into their own personal services. Different forms of communication and information sharing can be easily and openly instigated and integrated across the web. User-generated content and the economy of scale/ network multiplier effect can lead to valuable connections between related users and content. Potentially, they create the opportunity to develop networks sustainably with very little resources.
• #7: Domestic Workers Blog, Brazil Researchers from the IDS Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Consortium have used blogs to contribute to the advancement of the National Federation of Domestic Workers (FENATRAD) and to the empowering of domestic workers in other countries covered by the Consortium, by re-tracing the pathways covered in the organising of domestic workers in Brazil and their struggles. Notorious for its low wages, and lack of social benefits, domestic work remains as one of the major occupations for women in Latin America. However, as a result of the organization of domestic workers and their collective actions, legislation was passed to extend labor benefits such as paid vacations, maternity leave and retirement benefits to these workers, with significant improvements in their work conditions. In addition, FENATRAD, the National Federation of Domestic Workers, is engaged in the development of different programs to value domestic employment, as a means of promoting the enlargement of union ranks throughout the country. The blog was primarily set up to share information about the outcomes of the research and the details of domestic workers legislation. It is fed by the interns of the project, Sintia Araujo and Rogério Barros and their co-ordinator Terezinha Goncalves, with news and discussion about relevant events that come up in the domestic workers' arena. The aim is to pass the blog on to FENATRAD (The National Federation of Domestic Workers) at the end of the research period, so that it can be used as a resource and a method of communication with a broader audience and they can have their own space online. The Empowering Domestic Work project is led by Terezinha Gonçalvez, at the Latin American Hub, Brazil at NEIM (Nucleus of Interdisciplinary Studies on Women), in partnership with the IDS Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium.
• #8: Communications Staff in the Steps Centre use a mixture of Web 2.0 applications in thier communications work – video (YouTube and Blip.tv); audio; RSS feeds; blog (Blogger and Wordpress); Twitter; Slideshare; Flickr – with some of these taking precedence according to the aims of the activity.   Videos on our YouTube channel have been viewed 1,000 times. They use the channel to promote clips of seminars, and Vox Pop interviews, helping to bring their messages to life and to wider audiences. The chair of their Advisory Board made a video in Kenya that was shown at the London Steps Centre launch and posted online. It has subsequently been watched by 100s of people. http://www.youtube.com/user/STEPSCentre   There have been 15,000 views of the Steps Centre Flickr photos – organisations with related interests often ask to use their photos The most popular of the presentations on the Slideshare site has been viewed 1,200 times. All have 100’s of viewers – much wider audiences than if they were hidden away on the Steps Centre website.   Some communications activity they did around a new Avian Flu paper, based on blogging, resulted in a 63 per cent increase in visitors and 13 per cent increase in hits to their website during the week of activity. The paper was cited by more than 100 different media outlets, networks and bloggers in the week of activity and had immediate impact with their target audience of policymakers. UNSIC (UN System Influenza Coordination) team all had news of our paper on their Blackberries as they stepped off the plane in Egypt en route to a major avian flu conference.
• #9: RSS feeds IDS has for some time been supplying RSS feeds, which allow parts of a website to be made available to other websites or individual subscribers. Content from the source site appears on your own website or in your newsreader (software that allows you to pick up and organise RSS content). When the content on the source site is updated, it is also automatically updated on your website or in your newsreader. The latest Outlook can also allow RSS feeds to be sent direct to your email inbox. Benefits of RSS feeds For the user: subscribers can be updated automatically with the latest content from the websites you have chosen to monitor. This means you should spend less time surfing the internet as the content comes to you rather than you having to go to find it yourself. Unlike subscribing to e-mail newsletters, there is no need to provide your email address, which means RSS is more private and secure and cannot be used as a spam channel. For the provider: Web feeds enable publishers to syndicate content automatically, thus saving time and improving service efficiency.
• #10: Authoring Systems Wikis and blogs are authoring systems. In wikis, the content is iterative in the sense that the people undo and redo each other's work (See for example, Wikipedia). In blogs, content is cumulative in that posts and comments of individuals are accumulated over time (See for example, Blogger). Tags Tagging is used prevalently on social bookmarking sites. Users bookmark their favourite webpages using tags. Other online users can then search an share bookmarks. (See for example, Delicious.) Mashups Flickr is an image storage site that allows users to organize their collection of images and share them. Through the use of its Application Programming Interface (API), the content can be used by other sites to create a mashup. Flickrvision is an example of a mashup made using Flickr's API. These features can provide opportunities for working in new ways For example: Producing a newsletter using RSS Feeds Working on a document online collaboratively using a wiki Storing your links using tags Seeing what is new by signing up to receive RSS Feeds
• #11: Some Web 2.0 applications now allow you to share your messages via mobile phone. For example Twitter (a micro-blogging website) can be updated via SMS messages and can send you updates via SMS. This is a growing trend in Web 2.0 and it may, in the future, be possible to connect via Web 2.0 and mobile phone technology to more people in the South who have to traditional forms of internet access.
• #12: The advantages of using a social bookmarking system are: You can save and view bookmarks from any computer with internet access anywhere in the world. Information is tagged by humans as opposed to other automated methods and is thus more meaningful. People can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders. A social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, which may be a more useful metric for end users than systems that rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it. This also means that a research paper that is bookmarked in a social bookmarking website will generally have a higher search engine ranking. It can be useful as a way to access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organise large numbers of bookmarks, and share bookmarks with contacts.
• #13: You can use any number or combination of web 2.0 tools to communicate your message depending on who you are targeting. RSS feeding the buzz For IDS outputs, an RSS feed automatically updates social network sites such as Facebook and the Eldis Community website (news items only). Netvibes and Google Reader are two RSS reader site examples where IDS feeds can be seen. News websites may have subscribed to our RSS service therefore transmitting our communications. We use RSS in addition to traditional methods of e-communications such as email newsletters. Multimedia Channels To support communications, multimedia allows us to communicate in more than words. Mulitmedia websites that IDS engages with include: Blip.tv and YouTube for videos, Flickr for photos, iTunes for podcasts, and SlideShare for PowerPoint presentations. In addition we post short audio recordings on our own website. Feedback and Discussions Eldis Community offers a service whereby you can leave comments about IDS news items. Dgroups also offer social spaces to share ideas and discuss development issues. Blogs Blogs are often used as a personal platform to publish your own thoughts. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Instead of, or as well as having your own blog, you can find other blogs and converse with the bloggers writing them, leave comments or share your own work. Twitter Twitter acts as social network, a mini-blog and web mood monitor. Shout out a message of what you’re doing etc, share an opinion or insight, invite anyone to a site – followers will listen and may even ‘retweet’ the message. Twitter now has a search facility so you can check what’s being discussed. Wikis Wikipedia is the most well known wiki but other exist for more specialist subjects. They can be useful for collaboration and sharing knowledge. Social Bookmarking IDS uses Delicious to bookmark our favourite websites and webpages. M & E the buzz IDS uses Google Alerts, a free notification service for keywords you would normally use to search the internet. You can set up a daily email feed and monitor who’s talking about what, for example ‘agriculture’. Delicious can be used to monitor the popularity of web pages.
• #14: These are examples of Web 2.0 tools that may be of interest to researchers. The next slide shows a more comprehensive list of web 2.0 tools that may be of interest to other development professionals such as practitioners, NGO staff, activists and network facilitators.
• #15: Books Google Book is a search engine tool just for publications. Projects AIDA and CARIS – show who’s funding what projects within development AiDA proclaims to be the largest online directory of development activities and can sort through projects by country, continent or donor/agency. ·         http://aida.developmentgateway.org/ ·         http://www.carisprojects.org/ Multimedia Video media and FlickR photos rank higher in Search Engines. Just adding a short video to your campaign or creating regular videos will transform the campaign.   Dialogue Some blogging sites (e.g. Blogger) allows users to email their blog entries as well as by mobile phone. DGroups.com is a development themed discussion group website http://www.dgroups.org/ . It targets those in Southern countries with low bandwidth connection.   Statistics Gapminder.org and worldmapper.org are both map based statistic tools useful for research on development. For instance you can track the life expectancy over the years by country and watch the graphs change over time. File sharing Some sites facilitate the sharing of large files which is useful for collaborative working.
• #16: References Tim O’Rielly, 2005, O’Reilly, T., 2005. What is Web 2.0. Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, 30, p.2005. Chris Addison, 2008, ‘Research Web Tools’, Powerpoint Presentation to IDS Wikipedia, 2009 Web2share website, 2009
• #17: IDS has a web 2.0 strategy and has been experimenting with Web 2.0 for some time. The IDS Communication Team can provide support on request.