Posts Tagged ‘evaluation’

Thanks, post-survey, Tweetbook, and… what’s next?

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Conscience Un-Conference participants,

Whether you joined in the lively discussions at the Holocaust Museum’s offices or via Twitter, on behalf of the organizing committee – Tom Scheinfeldt of the Center for History and New Media, myself and my colleagues at the Museum, David Klevan, Heather Ratcliff (who unfortunately could not be at #conconf), Michael Haley Goldman and Rebekah Sobel – I must thank you again for your interest and enthusiasm in discussing how institutions of conscience, and people of conscience in general, can better use social media for social good. We had hoped a diverse group of people with different experiences and skill sets would enliven a conversation about shared concerns, and we are humbled and emboldened that it appears to have worked.

If the un-conference was a success, it was largely because of your willingness to share your expertise and knowledge with each other. Now, we hope you will help us plan for even better future un-conferences. As a first step, whether you participated in person or via Twitter, we would appreciate if you would take a few moments to fill out a brief post-evaluation survey.

As many participants expressed, we too would like to continue the conversations started Saturday and we welcome your thoughts on how we can help sustain them. There was talk that a shared, collaborative online space could help support conversation, information-sharing, and laying the groundwork for the Conscience Un-Conference in 2010. If the Museum were to create such a space, what would you want it to include? What platforms do you think would best support it?

Regarding the Tweetbook, I’ve pulled all the #conconf tweets from Saturday and will start compiling them into sessions. If you facilitated any of the sessions, I would greatly appreciate if you would provide me with a short write-up that can introduce the session’s tweets in the Tweetbook. If, like Rik or Julie, you’ve posted a summary of your session somewhere online, please let me know so I can paraphrase an intro from that.

The Tweetbook will include a table of contents, the tweets pertaining to each session in chronological order, and an appendix compiling all of the shared resources. If you have any other ideas for what should be included, please let me know.

Thank you again for your participation in the Conscience Un-Conference: Using Social Media for Good. Here’s to it being just the beginning.

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[Session Proposal] Social Media for the Attention Age: The Peace Media Clearinghouse

Friday, December 4th, 2009

If the media production barriers of the one-to-many model of traditional media are disintegrating with the availability of the cheap, convenient, and dispersed many-to-many network of social media, then these technologies also provide new challenges to us as individuals and organizations.

  1. As media producers we are now empowered to produce social media capable of worldwide distribution, how do we broadcast a coherent message through the background noise and engage the appropriate audience in dialogue.
  2. But since we are also consumers of social media, and consumption possibilities remain stubbornly fixed (there are only so many hours in a day), how do we prevent this information abundance from becoming an information overload?  How do we access the information that is relevant, accurate, and timely to what we are trying to achieve?

One possible solution could be to provide a centralized hub for information recommended by our peers (and thus most likely to be personalized and relevant), moderated by authorities in the field for accuracy, and updated continually by a network of facilitators.

The Center of Innovation for Media, Conflict, and Peacebuilding at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) is attempting to do just that with the Peace Media Clearinghouse.  This online resource provides a central site where educators, students, organizations, and the community of practitioners working in the conflict management field can access multimedia materials that support conflict analysis and prevention, conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation.

Following a brief demonstration of this online resource, we’ll open up the discussion to explore how other individuals and organizations have addressed these same challenges.

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Pre-un-conference survey

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

The un-conference thing is rather old hat for the Center for History and New Media (http://thatcamp.org/ and others), but the Conscience Un-Conference is the first time the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is trying its hand at this format. With help from the Museum’s program evaluator (and organizing committee member), Rebekah Sobel, I’ve prepared a very brief pre-un-conference survey (7 questions total) and a brief post-un-conference survey (10 questions total).

The link to the pre-survey is here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2T9ZHLN. If you have the time and inclination to fill it out, we greatly appreciate it.

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The Impetus to Act: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation and the “Reader-To-Leader” Framework [Session Proposal]

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

What do we mean by “action”?  There are more than a dozen entries in the Dictionary.com definition of the word. Two of them stand out for me:

ac-tion [ak-shun]   -noun

–An act that one consciously wills and that may be characterized by physical or mental activity.

–The causation of change by the exertion of power or a natural process.

So how do we effectively promote “conscious acts of mental or physical activity” in those who merely read, listen, or watch social media and are content to shake their heads in silent sympathy? How do we enable those with leadership skills to take charge and “cause change” in the context of technology-mediated social participation scenarios?

The great 19th century journalist, women’s rights activist, and transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, once said, “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader”. I will introduce the Preece/Schneiderman “Reader-to-Leader Framework” (http://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol1/iss1/5/) which posits four potential levels of social media participation: Reader, Contributor, Collaborator, Leader. The framework is designed to model a problem whereby achievement of strategic goals for user participation in collaborative media exercises is limited by our ability to influence users to participate at increased levels of responsibility and activity. And most relevant to our problem as purveyors of collaborative technologies, Preece and Schneiderman describe potential usability and sociability factors that may exert positive influence on users to engage with the collaborative media at increasingly higher levels.

After introducing basics concepts I’ll engage in a discussion of how the framework might be used to analyze our collaborative media efforts, set measurable performance goals for our social media programs, and extend the model with domain-specific usability and sociability factors.

Looking forward to a fruitful meeting of the minds!

Neal Johnson, Intranet Manager, National Gallery of Art

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Session Proposal: Measuring Social Media for the Social Conscious

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

this recent article http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=117581 is intriguing, as it is part of the discussion that started the idea to have this conference in the first place:  social media, web 2.0 tools, gaming, might attract audiences to participate, but don’t just casually “fit” in to consciousness raising, action provoking, emotionally heavy but inspiring content. So, a session on how we as a community can measure success using social media in our unique circumstances just might be interesting. for a short time on a Saturday. Thoughts?

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