Fieldwork part 2

My "field"
As I mentioned in my earlier entry on fieldwork, WiserEarth (www.wiserearth.org) become my "field". It is social networking site with over 45 thousand registered users and hundreds of different groups and initiatives. WiserEarth is often compared to Facebook - WiserEarth have what Facebook is lacking, a common goal, not merely collecting as many friends as possible, but also a vision of social change. Behind the building of this platform is the organisation Natural Capital Insitute (NCI), and its founder - the famous Paul Hawken (environmentalist and author of many books including Blessed Unrest: How the largest Movement in the world Came into Being, and Why No One Saw It Coming.) WiserEarth vision is to work as One, to unite people around a common goal, mobilize people and come up with solutions. Gather stories of success, collaborate, discuss and gather groups of like minded.


Entry
As a newbie and researcher in WE one is overwhelmed with all the possibilities, all the activity going on. Which group should I join? How do I know that this is the right for me? How could I understand this massive community? Is it possible to perform reserach here? Who should I talk to and so on. My strategy initially was to select a few groups, join them and share my thoughts and hopes around my research. I choosed around 3-4 and joined them, introduced myself in different discussions/chat. I was also soon invited in a pair of new groups by people who found me and my profile (where I presented myself in pretty much the same style as in this blog) and soon I had a constant stream of updates coming to my inbox. As soon as I had become familiar with some of the groups I started to introduce myself to individuals I found interesting (especially persons with knowledge about technology, activism and peace but also sustainability, WE and social media). It only took about a week to get to know the friendly atmosphere that is significant for WE (at least for the groups I´m a member of), but my impression of the platform "culture" was that it was a bit messy. A lot of people was members in a variety of groups and a lot of groups had interesting discussions. Still, it seemed like a lot of groups had activities outside WE as well (and they only used WE for contacts). I missed the coordination of action and thoughts (even though some groups inside WE most certainly tries to solve some of the major problems in the world) in WE as a whole, that is, the vision of the platform and the members acting as a whole.


Fieldwork
Interviews in anthropology and ethnology is seen as a rich resource of informations and give us a valuable insight in how people perceive and interpret the world. My first interviews via skype and facebook was planned and performed about two weeks after my first entry on WE and they took around 2 hours each. It was very interesting interviews ranging over a wide variety of different questions. I soon understood that my research focus was of great interest but also that my quest for the perfect online innovative collaboration platform could´nt be performed over a 10 week period (especially not since it took 2 weeks to find WE and expert informants). Many of my informants was experts in their area and gave me valublae insights and tips about building a community. It is by now very clear that a community in the style of the ProPeace Platform is (and must be) a long (and slow) process but also that many organisations and persons around the world is interested in the creation of this kind of platform.

A community of communites
In a netnographic perspectives, one should choose a vibrant community with members focused around one topic/interest. WE is really a community of communites and could also be compared with a marketplace or a city square with different discussiongroups (all interesting in their own ways). My informants gave me insights in their own professional lives, both online and offline, inside WE and outside. They have given me information about how one can think around community-building but also how one can think around peace and mobilisation of people towards action. My netnographic material consists of 6-7 deep interviews (that is qualitative interviews ranging from 1-2 hours), e-mails, transcripts from various forum discussions and texts from and about WE. Even though I have a very richmaterial, I don´t think that I have the key to how to build the perfect ProPeace Platform. But I do think that I have many valuable tips and strategies, metaphors (which works as models in how to think about building and maintaining a community) but also what doesn´t work and what one could avoid (here technical discussions and forums for improvements in WE has been a rich resource).


Ethics
The stakeholders in this research is not only myself and TFF but also members of WE and more specifically my informants, of whom many have said that they are very interested in my future results. I have also been invited to share my results and work with other organisations in their work. When it comes to social change, I think this is very doable, especially since this is not about a competition, but rather about cooperation.


The Future
My research will be presented to The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research in January 2011. I´m in my analysis phase right now and have a lot of material to transcribe, decode, translate and analyse. The final product will take the form of a strategy for how TFF should think around the building of The ProPeace Platform (that is, it will be a recipe around how one can create an online culture of propeace and collaboration and initiate people to participate in this creation). I will update my blog (more frequently) with more refelctions around my analysis and the future work.

eCollaboration and work organisation: How social are Social Media really?

I went to a seminar on thursday at my departement (Departement for Cultural Sciences) at Lund University. The guestlecturer was Professor Fritz Betz, a sociologist from University of Applied Sciences in Burgenland. He spoke about concepts such as eCollaboration, Enterprise 2.0 and social media and the focus evolved around the internal use of these concepts which was illustrated by examples from his previous projects in 4 different companies.

According to Betz there seems to exist a kind of technological determinism among companies, which means that they want to implement eCollaboration tools and features from the social web eg. blogs, Wikis, forums and so on in order to achieve innovation, sociality and mobilisation. How this should be done, except from buying and installing eCollaboration tools, is often vauge and blurry among descionmakers within companies. The mere existence of social media is believed to create collaboration. According to Betz, this was only true to some extent within the companies where he had performed his research. Employees didn´t use the tools in the same way that they used social media privately. Often the communication was limitied to e-mail system or external forums (such as wikis).

This could be analyzed in a dozen of ways, but one reason for why eCollaboration tools in many companies does not work has to do with power and control, according to Betz. Employees are not keen on open discussions involving bosses on different levels, and different departments are not keen on letting material and info free because then they also need to decrease the level of control. Therefore, social media, eCollaboration and Enterprise 2.0 is merely "buzzwords" but the discourse around these concepts have changed the way we think and interact in organizations. The traditionally hierachical organization should nowadays be a network(ing) organization and the traditionally closed company is open. The divide between producer and consumer is blurred, we talk about prosumers, about crowsourcing and wisdom of the crowds, where consumers and employees is invited to the developement of the company or the organization.

The seminar did not give me any concrete insights in how to initiate people to become a part of ProPeace, but it did give me some hints about how Social media can become social. The participation need to be active, and the atmosphere of a ProPeace platform must inspire to that activation. It also need to be voluntarily and follow the principles of tranperancy, accessibility and personlisation. As Betz said; "social media is about social practices, they are not social in themselves". This means that a platform must offer the cues of practicing sociality. A user is not always aware of the bigger picture, that their use of a wiki, or blog actually forms and develops larger social movements. “One uses new (technological” tools without realising to what extent they influence ordinary life” (One of Betz informants). 

Another important aspect is to create a "community of practices", whereas the community members together constructs a storytelling, a certain culture related to that place, which in turn creates a strong brand for the company/organization. For further information on this topic, I would like to suggest an article (unfortunately only available in Swedish) about the external use of social media by companies:

http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/sociala-medier-tar-over-i-foretagen-1.1217636