Tag: Social Networking

Wanted: Social Reporters to cover the future of the Third Sector

Megan at the NCVO wants to recruit two people who:

Explore the trends shaping the future of civil society, managing projects which focus on a range of specific subsectors. You’ll communicate your findings through reports, short guides, events, and the Internet. You’ll also develop tools, including training sessions and capacity building workshops, to increase understanding of social change.

With superb research skills, and a keen interest in social change, you’re an excellent writer and communicator, and able to express complex information in an accessible way. You should also have excellent people skills, and have the confidence to manage others and speak in public.

I think it suggests how the basic skills required to do knowledge jobs may be merging, academic researchers and report writers who can also do pithy (presumably many media) stuff for the interweb. Better pay (starts at £32,000) than many journalism jobs.

For more information look here and also at David Wilcox’s evolving musing on social reporting.

Why should leaders blog?

That’s the question thrown my way by Simon Peters at Common Purpose as this international leadership charity sets out to start it’s own blogging experiment. So why?

follower or leader copyright pinkbettyLeaders need followers and followers need to know if they can trust you.

A blog helps establish how trustworthy you are. It is a patient process, but, over time, if you write about the things you care about, link to the people who make sense to you, share questions online it paints a picture people can trust. It reveals who you are and why your vision makes sense. Of course if you tell your PA to do that for you it won’t work.

Leaders not only need followers, they need help.

Problems are usually best solved collaboratively. Collaboration is at its best when there is a diversity of opinions available. Blog about a problem you need to solve and the network you can establish around your blog will help you solve it. This is leadership in a world where hierachy is often the block to progress. Blogger Tessy Britton (link) can help me explain this:

the amount of technical information is doubling every 2 years, there were 3000 books published today, 2.7 billion searches performed on google this month . . .

Which is why computers are no longer optional… and why social network sites have literally exploded. We need to manage all the connections and all the information. The truth is really quite profound. We cannot manage without people networks, where we have connections with lots and lots of other people. And with those connections can come a measure of confidence. Perhaps we don’t need to be trying desperately to absorb so much information, perhaps it is OK to let others know lots of other things we don’t . . . but are only a click or a call away? We need people, and we need to build trusting relationships with those people in order to collaborate.

I think that that this is a truly wonderful thing.

Why else? Followers are clear about what they expect from their leaders, and the openess it takes to blog well can encourage some of those qualities.

In 2005 the DTI commissioned leadership company Caret to carry out the biggest ever survey of followers. They asked 5,000 people what they looked for in their leaders. The results (link here) were interesting, although not surprising:

An inspirational leader ….
• Has an ability to manage and engage people: they listen, involve, trust, appreciate, have fun; they care and involve everyone.
• Is honest, open, respectful, committed, focused, determined, courageous, humble, patient, vulnerable, energised, reflective, passionate, non-jargony, curious.
• Has a novel outlook: looks laterally, bends rules, loves pressure, is highly accessible, strongly visionary, and customer-obsessed.
These are the things followers said would inspire them.

Qualities many of us show in everyday life, with our friends and family, but we can tend to put them aside when we have to function as part of an organisation.

Blogging helps you find your voice, it helps you understand what you naturally believe in, and then challenges those beliefs. It exposes you to a global set of ideas and examples riddled with novelty and invites you to join a conversation, sometimes leading, sometimes following; sometimes learning, sometimes teaching.

It makes you accessible, encourages you to communicate in plain language, it requires you to stick your kneck out, expose yourself and learn from doing so. It works best when you are patient about building a valued network, curious about others people’s ideas, generous with your own.

See any parallels?

Disclosure. I’m a Common Purpose “graduate” (I don’t like that term) from Birmingham in 2000 and 2003. I’m also an associate consultant with Caret – the DTI sponsored research was completed before I joined.

Image thanks to pinkbetty on Flickr.

Update: April 17th 2008. You might be interested in this new blog on leadership.

We-Think by Charles Leadbeater. A review

About the time I start writing this a bunch of people will be gathering in London to launch We-Think (Amazon link), the book written by Charles Leadbeater and 237 others. I was sent a review copy, partly because I left a single comment on the wiki, which was used to turn his solo first draft into a collaborative 2nd(!) draft. I also mentioned it in this blog. So send me a free book and I’ll read it:

For those new to the ideas of a world of collaborative and networked creation this is a very measured and well illustrated survey of where the world is taking you. For those already familiar, it’s a clearly written and well seasoned refresher course. For those who wonder why their business model is shot full of holes this might help explain.

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For all groups it comes with that most useful of commodities – caveats. Lots of them. Charles has sought to explore the pros and cons. You can read the first three chapters without buying the book (and for those new to the ideas chapter three on how it works is very helpful), but the most valuable is probably Chapter 6. “For Better or Worse” is the writers’ survey pros and cons of the changes coming. Of particular interest to me is the review of the effect on democracy, how the web is enabling We-Act(ors) rather than We-Think(ers). On balance though the book clearly approves of the long term benefits of the disruption of we-think.

Reading this helps me structure my understanding of the work I’m doing and some of the work I’m likely to do. If you fly to SXSW this week, buy a copy for the plane. If you work in government get your department to buy you a copy and then next year fly you to SXSW.
Meanwhile the launch has been twittered:

Dominic Campbell twittering the launch of we-think

A few other reviews/mentions:

Nesta – organisers
Ed Mitchell – “uplifting”
Charlie Mansell – “how collaboration operates”
David Wilcox – “quote”
Computer Weekly – “will not transform every business”
gnovis – “somewhat controversial”
Sicamp – encouraged by Charles
Andrew Keen – it’s individuals who innovate – stoopid.
The Spectator – “a riveting guide to a new world”
Freshnetworks community managers rock.
Shane Richmond at the RSA: Polariser

Also read:

The Long Tail Wikinomics The Starfish and the Spider.

Birmingham Wifi Names from Jon Bounds

Birmingham WiFi Jon Bounds

Jon Bounds has a curious and creative mind. He’s made this for these reasons.

Since I’ve had my iPhone I’ve become interested in the names people give their wifi networks, the way that the phone brings them up for you as you walk around made that inevitable. So I took to writing them down – I found that I was interested in what it said about the thoughts of who set them up. ‘Secure’, ‘Home’, or peoples names – or those who cared so little they left the default on. I collected these ones here on my normal travels around Birmingham (UK) in January and February of 2008 – the larger ones in the ‘cloud’ do represent multiple networks with the same name, but I haven’t done that scientifically.

I think it works quite well as a poster – I uploaded the graphic to a cafepress store so I can buy one when I get some royalities of some of my other shops.

Jon has also just begun writing for the Birmingham Post’s new blogs in the Lifestyle section.  I reckon the poster above is a perfect form of lifestyle journalism. So who is shakespeareshirley?