Career Development Lecture 4

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Career Development Lecture 4

• Coordinating Communities

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This lecture

• Last Week
• The importance of difference
• Technology as amplifier and attenuator
• This week
• Identifying the communities you wish to engage
  with
• Documenting the discussions
• Hot topics, technological skills and taking
  things forwards

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Technological Setup

• Aggregators very important!
• Flock, NetVibes, PageFlakes
• Put a link to these aggregations in your wiki
• Social Bookmarking and collaborative research
• Bookmark community sites which dont have feeds

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Identifying what youre interested in

• Youve really got to be interested in something
  (not just something that you feel you ought to be
  interested in!)
• Note down the topics that have recently occurred
  in that community
• How many of them do you understand?
• Do you understand the background to them?
• It may be that youre not interested, but this is
  about detecting difference!

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From topic lists to intervention strategies
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Each of these should make sense to you

• How do you know..?
• Before you click on a forum, you should have an
  idea about the sorts of discussions that will be
  going on.

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Things to do

• You should be making notes of these discussions,
  the technologies used, etc.
• What should you be noticing..?
• Language used
• Different backgrounds of correspondents (which
  are professional, hobbyist, students like you,
  etc)
• Do not dismiss them as irrelevant!
• Be interested in everything!

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Having identified your topic

• Compile a new list of topics which are related to
  your topic and which have been discussed recently
• How many of these do you know about?
• Could you predict the conversations that are had?
• Could you be the expert that helped the
  individual asking the question?
• If so, youre beginning to become professional
• Are you familiar with all the technologies
  referred to in the discussions if not, how can
  you become more familiar with them?

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Networking amongst yourselves

• There may well be other members of the group who
  are interested in the same things as you
• If so, organize yourselves to do collaborative
  research using delicious, common tags
• Explore new technologies together and share
  references

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Exploring discussions and people

• When coming across a topic youre not familiar
  with, the obvious thing is to google the topic
• Why not google the people.
• Discover what the people in the conversations are
  interested in
• Try and work out the sort of person they are

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Planning intervention

• You have a choice of the sorts of intervention
  strategies you might adopt (and you can adopt
  more than one)
• Using the community as amplifier
• Find an answer to a problem of your own
• Contributing your expertise on a topic
• This can include pointing out connections between
  topics in different locations

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Priorities

• Getting the language right
• If you dont get a response to an intervention,
  the chances are that the way you expressed it is
  not appropriate for the community
• The only way is to try it and see what happens!

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Where to from here?

• Assignment 2
• Produce an aggregation of community sites on
  pageflakes or netvibes (and put a link on your
  wiki)
• Document the communities of your choice, and
  detail your interventions with them
• Engage with new technologies and show how you can
  use communities to set your own personal
  technological targets
• Focus on action in online communities, and be
  able to talk about it

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Summary

• Producing an aggregation of community sites using
  Netvibes etc.
• Putting links to these aggregations on your wiki
• Focussing-in on technical areas identifying
  what you do and do not understand
• Taking action to learn about the things that you
  are not familiar with
• Planning intervention strategies with communities
• Focus on language