One of the opportunities I had this summer was to attend the NetSquared conference in San Jose. NetSquared is a group that “enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.” They are essentially a resource that brings together ideas, geeks, and social good into one place, online and offline. The conference is one of the things they do, and I found out it while doing research for my thesis project. A group called VolunteerNow was submitting a project that was very similar to my thesis work, and I got the chance to meet up with them and talk.
The conference itself was mainly a forum for people to present and discuss what they were working on in order to find others and get support. It was a few months ago, but I thought it might be useful to summarize some of the main themes that came up. There were lots of them, but here are two that I thought were the most prominent.
Taming and Presenting data
Many of the projects were what people referred to as “mashups,” where data would be collected from various sources and overlaid onto a map or graph of some sort. A lot of the value came from digging up data sets and revealing the information to people, like Maplight, which brings out information about campaign contributions and the way that legislators vote. A lot of these projects stopped there, with their goal being moving people to action by making information available. I think there is a lot of potential for skilled communication designers to take part in these types of projects and use their infoviz know-how to help create the arguments.
New vs Existing Tools
One of the issues that kept coming up was the ways that people used tools. Should people use Flickr, Twitter, or build tools for a specific problem. Ideally I think it should be both. Since each situation or problem has unique issues, there should be some solution that caters to those problems, but then existing tools like Flickr can be pulled in for image hosting and tagging etc… Not only does it mean less cost, but also more chances for people to stumble upon your content.
User Centered Design
This issue is actually one that I found almost completely lacking. Often the designers were assumed to be the user, which was true in a lot of cases, or they simply felt that they understood the domain well enough to make something useful. While I don’t think this attitude brought about particularly bad ideas, it does make you wonder how much better the work could be if their process was a little more fleshed out.
The culture there was very much in line with a lot of the type of work that gets done in the same area. People were open to hacking, mashing, and doing things rather than spending a lot of time planning, which has its good and bad sides. To give a sense of the conference as a whole, and since I think the words people use are very important in reflecting what they do and what they care about, I wrote down the words that kept coming up throughout the conference, and grouped them:
- What community, organization, society
- How decisions, marketing, crowdsourcing, social networks, viral, sustainable, hack, mash, widget, data, information, tools, resources, open, mapping
- Why change, action, engage, productivity, utility, social value, transparency
Another thing I thought would be useful is the type of questions I heard audiences ask often, and are important for social entrepreneurial projects. If you have solid answers to these questions, regardless of your domain, you’re in pretty good shape:
- How do you reach people with limited access to technology?
- How is your project unique?
- What makes it different from x,y, and z?
- What is your business/sustainability model?
- Who are you targeting?
- Would people actually use this?
- How are you getting them to use it?
It was a good experience to interact with a group of people whose goals and values had less to do with money than they had to do with improving society. There is a real sense of openness and collaboration that I don’t see in many other places. There is also a deep passion that is visible as people take things into their own hands and push them because they believe in them. It was inspiring, and I hope that I can make it there again. I encourage any student or otherwise to get involved, since they accept projects at all levels completion, from being well-thought out ideas, to people in need of additional staffing.
