Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

Social networks: findings with Amnesty

Over June/July 2007, Steve Bridger and I worked with The Amnesty International UK (AIUK) web team, helping them build community around, and promote the Make Some Noise Movement in the run up to the launch of The Instant Karma CD.

Download the findings document from here

Our aim was to build and support communities around the campaign in a selection of different social networks around the campaign hub. Each social network has a different social and technical architecture: language, behaviours, technical affordances etc., and therefore each one offered different opportunities and required different approaches.

The trick is to work out how to reach out to all these networks effectively and relate all these different activities to the organisation.

The enormous growth figures of social networks like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace clearly indicate a general move on the internet towards distributed communities based on people’s preferences and personal networks where once the space was dominated by big portal style communities.

I am presenting on this subject at The NCVO information conference very soon, and will post about it afterwards, but suffice to say you could split ‘communities’ into three types:

1. Centralised: one login, one location
   A walled garden
2. De-centralised: one login, one location for core discussions, but aggregating members’ stuff from elsewhere too - blogs, bookmarks, photos, videos etc.
   A one way porously walled garden
3. Distributed: possibly a very small private hub, but the core turned inside out with outposts in a variety of different locations (as above), offering members a chance to interact purposefully in each one.
   A community bound by brand and keyword rather than any wall

In this context, organisations cannot simply build walled gardens and expect members/volunteers/supporters to come; those days are over.

Organisations will have to go to people where they choose to hang out and interact with them in the way people have chosen; this is going to be a very interesting time.

We have tried to record the facilitation issues arising from reaching out to people in different ways in different social networks: attached to this post is a MS word document outlining our findings from our facilitation work in Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Flickr and Youtube. We also followed some research questions around measuring distributed communities and the organisation to individual interface; these will come in due course.

Since then, AIUK have launched a campaign called ‘Unsubscribe‘ about the war on terror. You can see more of this distributed style of outreach in action.

Download the findings document from here

Thank you to Seb Cumberbirch, Berry Cochrane, and all we met at AIUK for being good sports in an experimental environment, and agreeing with us to share these findings. We keenly encourage you to look into what Amnesty is up to, get involved, and take an interest in the world around you.