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I have been following a number of Healthcare sites in and around the internet, looking for examples or case studies of how social media are used. In particular I wanted to find examples of social collaboration or communities that are focused on helping other members of society to better understand and contribute to the public wealth and health.
I attend #CPHC- Carpool Health Community, which has already garnered a strong and eager following, that meets weekly on a Tweetchat and has recently established a Google+ community to progress their ideas into actions and achievable care. Furthering their mission they are about to launch their own web community site, where Communities of Practice (CoP) can focus around specific conditions, diseases, traumas and behaviors. The biggest attraction of these CoPs is that community comprises more than just patients, it also contains experts from the medical side as well as members of families that have knowledge and experience of the specific topic.
Dr Steven Eisenberg is an Oncologist and he is one of the principal contributors on the Cancer Community of Practice. His contributions to the Tweetchat are listed below. Please feel free to engage with Dr Eisenberg through these embedded tweets, whether you need clarfication or simply want to extend the conversation or contribute to the value of his content.
He starts by defining is community of practice (CoP)
Cancer is a family disease. And I don’t mean just the patient’s family. #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
It’s the family of everyone who has ever had cancer, researched cancer or treated cancer. #CPHC — Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
He believes that it is this comprehensive family that holds the key to increased knowledge, understanding, improved care even to the point of opening up new areas of research and discovery. When asked how this would be effected, Dr Eisenberg provided a 12 step guide to engagement, including a prologue for the journey that needs to be taken.
T2: Info goes in one ear and out the other in the office. we need a safe place to let the info marinate and sink in/process… #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 1: Diagnosed then immediately get into your head and hard to hear anything else. #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 2: Go to Carpool Health and start the process of healing…how? I’ll tell you. #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 3: See that people are here, and sharing, and alive, and had the same exact thing as you. Docs love you here. #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 4: You start to feel that there is hope/support/love/a carpool #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 5: You feel that love/support/advocacy/family of care/you jump in the car/you tell me where you need to go today/we start driving #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 6: We make our first stop – research with a side of compassion. #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 7: We take a pit stop at the #7Cs diner (caring communication compassion connection collaboration creativity community)! #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 8: Now, connected to a community founded on love and self-expression, you start to feel powerful in your own shoes #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 9: You are now versed in connecting and contributing the FAMILY of people taking turns driving the CARPOOL #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 10: You are starting 2 feel an inner sense of peace, of confidence, that I now have a safe place 2 go, to self-express, 2 learn #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 11: The #7Cs are now a part of your soul – caring communication compassion connection collaboration creativity community – really #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Step 12: You take a really nice cleansing deep breath and repeat steps 1 though 12. #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
The days of patients blindly following any doctor’s advice are over: we ALL should embrace sharing knowledge/evidence/decisions/strength #CPHC
— Dr. Steven Eisenberg (@drseisenberg) February 26, 2013
Please feel free to seek clarification on any of these steps directly with Dr Eisenberg, I am sure he will be more than delighted to help extend the discussion and bring further clarity to his vision and goals.
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“Who wants yesterday’s papers?
Who wants yesterday’s girl?
Who wants yesterday’s paper ?
Nobody in the world”
– Rolling Stones 1967
We are besieged by information, knee deep and beyond. If you have a smart mobile device it comes at you from all directions, in almost all circumstances. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice we are drowning in a flood of communications freed by the spell of inexpensive ubiquitous technology, and try as we might we know of no counter spell to stem the tide.
This image was selected as a picture of the week on the Farsi Wikipedia for the 13th week, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The consequences of this growing tsunami are multifold, many as yet unsuspected or undetected, but the only sure thing is that life now is very different from what is was before.
“The Shallows – What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” by Nicholas Carr provides an insightful examination of some of the effects. One of his most important points is that we are becoming increasingly distracted. Our attention span is decreasing, as is our ability to digest information and commit information to long term memory. Since the well of known information, the internet, is always available, recovering information that we have consumed but not digested is only a simple search string away.
There is an argument that suggests that this frees up our brains for different and possibly more productive activities, and there is some evidence that this may be the case.
But the issue remains that we are constantly encouraged to deal more and more with the present and less and less with the future and past. Brevity is key, as any person on Twitter will attest; yet it seems to apply to all of our communications. Short, pithy soundbites or images, moving or otherwise, are the order of the day. Content is king, or so I am told; and those that excel at amplifying these messages, whether their own or others, are quickly harnessed by marketeers to prime the pump for their brand(s) content.
Over the last year there has been a sea change in this approach, and while content seemingly remains supreme, some are beginning to recognize the value of context. Now it’s not just content, but related content that brings value. Sites that “curate” content, that is collecting and displaying additional content that augments the value of the original content, are seeing factorial increases in year on year traffic, see Greg Bardwell’s post on Content Curation Sweetspot. Content remains king, and though context is queen, curation has become a pawn close to being promoted to queen as well.
But that is not exactly the way I see it. I have a slightly different perspective:
Firstly information has value beyond the present, depending on its relevancy. Over time that value can and will change according to the quality of the information; the lower the quality the lower the value. Information created in the past can be critical to knowledge and understanding in both the present and future. At the same time ephemeral information will only have transient value, usually its 15 seconds in the spotlight.
Secondly the role of curation is not just to assemble topical and stylish content. While that may be the purpose and goals of stimulating appetites for fashion and consumables, greater depth is required by those in search of deeper knowledge, usually provided by a context made wider with the dimension of time. My definition of curation more closely resembles the profession as practiced in museums and galleries. It requires a knowledge of history and an understanding of influences, qualities and intentions that produced the thoughts and artifacts under custody.
We have a duty to future generations to ensure that quality content is preserved, including the context that contributed to and proceeded from its publication. In the face of the rising flood we need to curate responsibly, identifying the quality contributions and marking the relationships to authors and content that define their contexts. And we have to do this is a uniform and open manner so that we have common access to riches of the past that help navigate our present and future.
Open Linked Data might be one of the more viable approaches afforded by technology, however it is in our interests to collaborate on the framework and standards that will enables us to preserve contextual relationships in content. Making curated content consistent and optimally shareable helps us all.
Nobody wants yesterday’s papers, but yesterday’s girls grew up to become Joan of Arc, Hidlegard of Bingen, Marie Curie and Marie Stopes, and the world would be a poorer place without them.
Originally posted on Internet Media Labs Blog – September 6th, 2012
Sometimes it is the little things that are the most useful in life: using a paperclip to retrieve a disc locked in a computer or as emergency back up when the hems on your clothing are in disrepair.
One virtual paperclip that has huge potential for Social Media is versioning.
Versioning, or more accurately, Version Control System (VCS), is the secret sauce that keeps agile development agile and multi-threaded tasks in synch. Versioning maintains content and context for any given artifact and is most commonly used in software development – in particular maintaining code bases or code trees.
Versioning is much more than a way to ensure edits and changes are not lost and can be tracked.
Version Control Systems have evolved to enable a protected, searchable environment, allowing individuals to create separate branches and then merge their modifications or augmentations back into the base. Each version can be searched and reconstructed, providing both stability and maintainability.
The quality of code is improved as bugs can be traced back to the time of their introduction. Quality can be further improved by including relevant comments and logs, all of which help provide richer history and valuable context when revisions or replacements for the code base are being considered.
While this is all very useful – I would suggest essential – for application development, versioning has even greater potential to support and improve the quality of most, if not all, collaborative projects.
Like the paperclip, VCS can be applied to any creative activity where content changes frequently, particularly where multiple contributors are involved. VCS allow contributors to create and evolve their own branches which can then be merged back to become the latest version. Using a VCS is so much simpler than using “track changes” in an office productivity document, which does not support multiple branches nor keep each saved change.
Reconstruction of office productivity documents case tempts the patience of even the most tolerant of individuals.
Let’s look at a few cases where the approach would be integral to effective effort and overall success of a collaboration.
Case 1: Collaboration Dictionary:
Standard Definitions and Terms are easy to establish when co-workers are part of a specific group. Common vocabularies usually develop in most communities, but writing down the words and their definitions is critical to ensuring that there are no ambiguities or misinterpretations.
When co-workers belong to different groups with their own vocabularies, the challenge becomes larger and the value of a dictionary rises.
As the group’s reach continues to expand, so too does the potential for miscommunication and misunderstanding. Authoring and maintaining the dictionary can be onerous, especially where it is approached from within a hierarchy, where one group or individual controls the content and holds the sole authority to augment, modify and publish.
Opening up the effort to joint collaboration is both expedient and efficient, providing there is sufficient control to ensure integrity and maintainability. A version control system will allow co-workers to define their respective areas of the dictionary, treating each term or collection of terms as a branch of the information base.
The VCS will facilitate the merging of the branches, as well as the ability to roll back to any version should it be required.
Case 2: Risk Assessment
Risk assessment is another key part of planning and demands copious amounts of input, discussion, review and revision. Similar to the Dictionary case above, risk assessment is relatively easy when performed in a small discrete group. Again when the scope of the project extends to other groups the complexity and effort required increases factorally.
Collaboration can ameliorate these difficulties, dependent on good governance and control. In this case VCS offers a bonus benefit, which is a full context of the discussions and determinations made during the lifetime of the risk that is being assessed.
Before VCS Risk Assessment documents were static and usually represented the final summary of assessment. But VCS allows that assessment to continue as a living artifact, providing historical context when new events and conditions demand a fresh analysis of the solution and its environment.
Case 3: Curation
I have often stressed the need to treat curation, and especially organizational curation, as a form of Information Lifecycle Management.
Organizational curation means that information is not just a publication, with fresh content for every issue. Information needs to be cultivated, nurtured, refreshed and made available when and where it may be needed.
Old information never dies, it awaits to inform future consumers of ideas and knowledge. So content is more than the data presented either visually or verbally, it is augmented by meaning and context, both of which can be accommodated in a versioning approach.
External Collaboration
The cases above are fairly common, but are usually contained within a particular organization or enterprise – in other words behind the corporate firewall.
Generally. in these cases the individuals, are part of the same organization (at least for the project at hand) and in efficient companies experience a common purpose, culture, and set of standards and policies.
The ever-increasing possibility of external collaboration on projects makes the value of a Version Control System reach the level within Software Development – i.e. Essential.
Moving Version Control to the cloud and enabling a distributed model makes the “essential” desirable. DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) removes the need for centralized management and the dilemma of either supporting every known platform and stack, or limiting the number of contributors to those that comply with corporate standards.
Distributed Version Control opens the door to wider communities, unrestricted by culture, location or time.
It proves the paperclip that keeps collaborative efforts organized, manageable and crowdsourced.
Photo by Tyler Howarth via Flickr Creative Commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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In a very short time curation has evolved from a minor supporting role to a major or even leading role in Social Media engagement. It is no longer sufficient to just share items of interest, breaking news and opinion, not if you want to be regarded as authentic and taken seriously.
Knowledge Condenser
Curation has many definitions, including my own: “Curation is the acquisition, evaluation, augmentation, exhibition, disposition and maintenance of digital information, usually centered around a specific topic or theme”. The Digital Curation Center (DCC) in the United Kingdom puts it more succinctly
Digital curation, broadly interpreted, is about maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use. (DCC)
Both definitions infer an information lifecyle process, that manages the digital objects from creation to deletion. Both suggest that capturing and adding value, whether by commentary or related material, is vital to the end product which is knowledge or information that can be referenced now and in the future.
Message Amplification
However the evolution of digital curation is experiencing some fragmentation. Not that this is bad, but it does suggest the differences should be understood as curation tools will differ in features and capabilities as each tries to satisfy its target customer base. So far I have identified 3 major distinctions in curation:
- Marketing Content: comes in several forms as marketeers move away from landing pages on Facebook and web sites, and seek to amplify brand presence through curated content.
- Information (or Knowledge Content): More focused on collecting and condensing information to support a topic or subject. Most commonly a reference site usually set up for either internal or external collaboration
- Personal Content – less dependent on content management features and capabilites: can either be used for amplification (self-branding) or condensing (information).
The question I would like to pose is who visits these curated sites and what are their preferences. The following poll offers choices in the style and content of curated sites. Please let me know which sites you prefer to access for either information or shareable content. I have made a further distinction for sites that are the result of either employee or community collaboration as they possibly differ from information sites in the degree of social participation (ie more social).
In a previous post I presented the challenges involved in deriving value from Big Data and in particular unstructured Big Data, which increasingly dominates the Social sphere. The tools that will enable us to make sense of the plethora of conversations, contributions and observations are still in their infancy and the likelihood that we will have to rely on human scanning and analysis for the short to mid term appears inevitable.
In his book, “The Shallows“, about the effect of the internet on our brains, author Nicholas Carr discusses the demands on our working memory or, as he puts it, “our mind’s scratch pad”. Working memory is our CPU and the agent that identifies and transfers information to our long term memory, which is our data store. It is therefore a pivotal component in our ability to seek out and retain knowledge.
“The information flowing into our working memory at any given moment is called our “cognitive load“. When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to store and process the information… we are unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term memory”
The internet and particularly the social web is constantly bombarding our working memory with stimuli that are intentionally distracting (this post is a representational example with multiple hypertext links in the first two paragraphs). The pervasiveness of mobile connectivity means that we are always on-line, and never at rest from the interrupting nature of the medium. This suggests we need assistance in processing the social media stream, firstly in being able to recognize important and relevant information, and secondly to earmark that information for further analysis, refinement or augmentation. The first requirement is for a social media radar, the second for a social information refinery.
Search remains our favorite tool that we use to seek out information. Google dominates with 4.7 billion searches a day, but Twitter is not far behind (considering its size) at 1.6 billion, and both services are growing fast (Google at 30% increase per year – Twitter at 50% per year). However there are certain limitations in both search functions evidenced by the changes announced by both companies in the past 12 months. Google has recognized the effects of Search Engine Optimization and the fact that we demand results that are more contemporary. Both companies have added semantic search elements to their armory, an acknowledgement that searches need to be relevant to time, location, context and searcher’s intent. However such elements are far from comprehensive. Furthermore because the definitions, rules and algorithms are unpublished the searcher is dependent on Google’s and Twitter’s interpretation of what was intended. We are still a code generation or two away from being able to parametrize semantic search using our personal or group definitions and meanings.
Turning now to the need for refinement, which is the ability to analyze what we have found, understand its value and relationship to other captured information, and to provide single or collaborative commentary on the discovery itself. Once again the technology has provided some rudimentary tools, commonly called curation tools. Related to museum curation, these tools capture and display information of interest. There are over 40 such applications and each provides a web page in which curators can display their captured content. In many cases the tools allow for comments to be added as separate components, listed in historic order with the most recent first. Some curation tools, such as Pearltrees, support content linking, allowing curators to provide insight into relationships between islands of information. Many tools provide a browser add-on that will enable the curator to save browsed/searched content to the curated web site. The tools are improving but there is still a small disconnect between the radar and the refinery functions.
Until now. SeeSaw is still a fledgling product yet it offers to bridge that gap between scanning and curation, and holds great promise in being able to map content relevancy and provide a lens on both active streams and refined content. What is particularly appealing about SeeSaw is that it is built for visual scanning. as opposed to lexical scanning. “See”, the radar component of the tool, filters live social media streams and displays the visual content of links and embedded graphics. For Twitter this is a vast improvement on current viewing dashboards such as Hootsuite and Tweetchat. where speed reading is essential in keeping up with fast moving activities and events such as chatrooms. SeeSaw not only displays the images but can also stream the video links within individual messages.
This visual facility has three immediate advantages. Firstly the participant can remain in the chat stream without having to hyperlink to a new page, which has been a major distraction and an extended opportunity for further interruptions and distractions. Staying in the same window enables continuous contact with the flow of active conversations. Secondly it enables the viewer to see trends within the stream, connections (ie who is talking to whom) and tangential conversations. Thirdly, and most importantly, it enables the participant to save active content in the stream to the Saw side of the product, and the bridge to the product’s curation functionality. A simple toggle button allows the reader to change between the active stream (See Board) and the curated site (Saw Board). In practice this allows the participant to remain in contact and context with the conversation, as opposed to the multi-windowed, heavy interrupt laden environment to which we have been constrained. Reflection and analysis can now occur after the scan or chat, ensuring that focus and attention can be appropriately applied to both.
SeeSaw is more than welcome to my active toolkit, it allows me to “Embrace, Extend and Expand” (via EMC, via Microsoft) my social media environment. It is more than a helpmate – it has the potential to be my primary Social Media Assistant.
The See part of Saw – watching the Social Stream for relevant information
- At last, science explains why there are Internet trolls [infographic] (betanews.com)
- Working Memory and the Classroom (my.psychologytoday.com)
- 40 Social Media Curation Sites and Tools (socialmediapearls.com)
- The Age of Relevance (techcrunch.com)
The cycle of network weaving activities – the larger the scale the more skilled the practitioner
June Holley, author of “The Network Weaver Handbook”, was the guest on a recent #ideachat , hosted by @blogbrevity, where she conducted a spirited and vigorous discussion on the role of the network connector and collaborator whom she describes as a network weaver. June believes that this is something we all do, often without realizing it. The skills can be learned and improved, it’s all about how we are aware of and relate to each other. Ultimately we should be able to transform the world we live in. To a large degree this is true especially in small to medium sized communities. However scaling to the immensity of the Social Media Universe requires those skills to be refined, amplified and extended to the point where the role is highly specialized and potentially very much in demand.
The chart above is an attempt to summarize the collective input from the participants in #ideachat, none of whom contested the notion that network weaving was learn-able, necessary or trans-formative. Indeed the flow of positive thinking provided a tsunami of skills and activities that were deemed necessary network weaver attributes.
Acquisition
The receptor phase of weaving represents the intake of content, context and resources. This includes searches and information gathered from multiple sources in monitoring and participating in community conversations and chats. Acquisition is equivalent to sourcing in a supply chain and represents the raw intelligence needed to fuel productivity.
Review
The review phase is the first stage of refining the raw intelligence. Analysis is the primary activity and is applied to understanding the meaning, authenticity and importance of content and resource.
Curation
The second stage of refinement is curation, taking the analyzed information and making it transparent to the served communities and the world at large. The refinement includes categorization (ie topics), classification, (eg value and relevancy) and commentary.
Association
The third stage of refinement is associating resources with communities, content or most importantly with each other, understanding how to apply the relevancy of information and resources to each other. The third stage is also the mapping stage of the process, and is vital to the success of the network weaver. As the weaver’s reach extends to national or even global scale other maps from trusted weavers can be incorporate into the weaver’s sphere of connectedness.
Construction
Construction is the implementation phase of network weaving. It is establishing connections based on the refinement process, closing the triangle as June Holley describes it, between resources, communities and other network weavers. Here the weaver is more than just a connector they are catalysts to action and innovation, whether directly contributing or standing back and monitoring the resulting activity.
Central to all these activities and processes is the governing principle of Cultivation. This is the set of nurturing skills that separates the good network weavers from the great ones. Cultivation is farming or husbandry in its highest form, not just building connections but feeding them, nurturing them, strengthening them and understanding their needs. It means being endlessly curious, constantly vigilant and forever questioning to ensure that the woven networks are as efficient and healthy as possible.
It is within nearly everyone’s reach to acquire, analyze and curate information on the social network; billions of Tweets, blogs, circles and walls are testimony to these skills being learned and practiced on a daily basis. Everyone has the capability to imitate the African Weaver bird and weave their own network of resource and content. But it takes special skills to associate, construct and maintain vast networks of content and resource. It takes a proficient weaver to connect each nest in the tree, and a master weaver to connect all trees within a region, all regions within a country and so on across the language and geographic divides that impede global connectivity.
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Image: vorakorn kanokpipat / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
It takes about 6 months of immersion and splashing about in the waters of Social Media to feel comfortable and confident enough to not just tread water but make strokes that might lead to reaching one of the other sides. That is of course if any of the other sides are visible, as the social network is far larger than any public amenity previously encountered by a an order of magnitude. For those about to jump in for the first time – do not be afraid – the temperature is fine and its predominantly shallow water. You wont get into difficulties and the worst thing that can happen is a little bit of personal embarrassment, but then nobody is really watching that closely.
During those months of familiarization, learning how to engage with Facebook, posting to your wall, writing up your “resume on steroids” aka Linkedin, pinning your curated content on Pinterest or taking the bolder step of blogging or tweeting you may have wondered a little bit about this medium, the proximity of millions of people all swimming about much the same as you. What is it? Rushing through the list of possible descriptors it’s a club, a hangout, its a place to share your thoughts and life with friends , it’s a knowledge pool, it’s the maker and breaker of news. it’s the university of life, the crucible of change even revolution, it’s a marketing paradise. Finally a reliable source on how commercial brands can track the public success of and reaction to their products and identity. And that is how it is viewed today. At a recent Social Media Week event in New York the main topic of conversation was how to use the social network for competitive advantage, with the focus almost exclusively on the marketing advantage. One of the biggest discussions of the week was who owned Social Media – marketing or PR, and ancillary to that was the often expressed sentiment that CMOs owned Social Media and the strategy around it. Furthermore that ownership and the technical budget that accompanies it indicates that the CIO should now report to the CMO.
Social Media spoils, Marketing versus PR, or Google versus Facebook or Apple
But before anyone stakes a claim on Social Media, shouldn’t we first understand more about Social Media, what it is, how it is structured (or non-structured) and what are the economics of the model(s), who are the principle players, what are the constituent parts, and what are the appropriate standards and rights that should attend the use and access to this massive data universe. And the questions do not end here. Most importantly what is the value of the Social Network to the individual, the private citizen, the corporate or public sector employee, the community, the enterprise, the nation, mankind? Without doubt it is worth far more than the sum of its parts, but the largest opportunity of all lies in collaboration. Being able to reach out and share is the fundamental behavior of the social network, and millions upon millions of people do so every day. They participate, contribute and collaborate freely and willingly, and it is manna from heaven for the marketing profession, who understandably have sharpened their knives to capture the likes and dislikes of the masses. But if that energy and effort is properly channeled, if tasks can be performed by social network teams, if thoughts and ideas can be evolved and extended to stimulate innovation then marketing will be just the tip of the value iceberg.
In the end no-one can or should own the social network, money will be made from it, reputations will be won or lost, but ultimately the social network benefits and belongs to all of us, to Everyman. We are all contributors, we are all curators, we are all custodians, and our first task as stewards is to define and describe the infant that is our charge, so that we may nurture and care for its health and growth. This blog will attempt to start that process, and with a lot of help from others (both a plea and an invitation) hope to bring some focus and understanding to the ever expanding pool of knowledge and resource that is the social network.
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opencollaborarchy 
Curation – in Need of a Cure?
May 15, 2012 in Curation, Information Lifecycle Management | Tags: Attribution, Brian Solis, British Museum, collaboration, commentary, Content, Curation, Curator, Data Administration, disposition, evaluation, exhibition, Information Lifecyle Management, Management, Network Weaver, Openness, organization, Pinterest, scoop.it, Social media, Social Network, Transparency | 3 comments
Photo from New Exhibit! Native American Cultural Objects at the CHP – Contributed by Francisca Ugalde and Cathy Faye.
A recent post by Brian Solis “The Curation Economy and the 3 C’s of Information Commerce” neatly deconstructed the information flow within the Social Network. The 3 C’s are creation, curation and consumption, and while consumption remains the largest activity he correctly identified curation as a vital part of the social information chain, as it is the intermediary and often principle connecting service between the authors and readers of content
There are many curation tools available (@williampearl Shirley Williams’ blog post references 40). Most serious Social Media participants use one or several of them to save interesting content discovered or referenced in their daily pursuit of engagement.
Though the name curation is applied to such tools as scoop.it list.ly Pinterest and others all too often these tools act as nothing more than scrapbooks, with photos and articles appended to pages because they caught our imagination, piqued our interest or satisfied our desire to be seen as a member of a community of interest.
It is true that many curating users perform a rudimentary evaluation to classify the curated content and to position it within a relevant category; an even smaller number provide some commentary on the content. But like a scrapbook these collections remain static with a last-in first-presented view of the collection that has been assembled. Content that was first collected generally remains buried under more recent entries, and interactive commentary is almost non existent. As a result the value of such collections is greatly diminished and the prime activity of social media curators appears to be browsing the curated pages of others in search of new content to display on their own.
This observation may be harsh, yet I believe that there are many curators who do far more than I have indicated here, however the current tools have limitations. Furthermore to raise curation to the level required to act as the intermediary between creation and consumption, as indicated by Brian Solis, we need to bring aspects of Information Lifecycle Management disciplines and processes to bear on the problem. In a previous post on the network weaver I had already identified curation as one of the 5 major components of the social networking architecture. It is notable that it takes up to 2 years for a post graduate to obtain an MFA in curatorial studies or a Curation Diploma from the British Museum. I have used the British Museum course curriculum as a basis for identifying the sub components of Social Media Information Curation.
Information Lifecycle Management concept applied to Social Media Curation
As can be seen from the diagram the information lifecyle has no end. Disposed (ie stored) information still needs to be maintained and re-evaluated and this is the task I have described as Collaborative Husbandry or collective farming. This is equivalent to the constant reexamination of requirements in The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), as current and new information can change curated landscape very quickly, and skilled curators should be able to adjust the curated content to accommodate this. The more sophisticated and comprehensive the collection the more curating resources are needed to maintain the information quality, which leads me to believe that enterprises will seek and appoint skilled curators and possibly even a Chief Curation Officer as they become increasingly dependent on external information and resources.
I would be interested to hear of additional requirements for Social Media Curation, as I believe we are still in discovery mode on what is needed to better identify, collect, discuss and exhibit the knowledge that is cascading through the global Social Media.
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