Over the past few years, colleges and universities have taken on the largest marketing and outreach efforts in their entire histories.  They have reached out to potential students, current students, alumni, donors, and many other constituencies on a wider scale than any other time in their histories.  But, this new marketing push did not originate in any public relations office.  It didn't come from alumni relations.  Nor did it come from foundations or any other office the is typically responsible for marketing.  Instead, it has happened secretly from those people who are on the frontlines in our organizations.  Libraries, arts centers, advising centers, tutoring centers, student groups, academic deparments, and countless individuals are creating pages in Facebook, tweating away, posting photos to Flckr, and blogging away. Web 2.0 tools have turned staff members into marketers, public relations officials, and media outlets all rolled up into one. Our faculty, staff, and students are, and have been, reaching out to the rest of the world in ways that we could never have imagined a decade ago.  

 

Since the mid-90s, the Web infrastructure has become pervasive.  Desktops, laptops, and, now, mobile devices jump onto wired and wireless networks. Most Web 2.0 tools are easy to use taking Web publication out of the hands of the techies and putting it into the hands of everybody else. They are most often hosted on remote servers that have taken the burden off of campus networks.  Thus, college Web sites have gone from a controlled environment with established workflows to widely distributed systems that link together disparate servers on campus and beyond.  

 

Additionally, the fact that, for the most part, these tools are free removes much of their from the management processes. The budgetary process is often the strictest and most controlled process on our campuses. This the place where the battles over unlimted needs are held for limited resources. Programs, tools, and people who operate outside of this process (i.e. they don't cost anything) go largely unnoticed on campuses. This is absolutely true for Web 2.0. 

 

It is not hard to imagine the conversation between a manager and a staff member.  

"Can I start a Facebook page for our Advising Center?"

"How much does it cost?"

"Nothing."

"Sure. Go for it." 

 

Policies and procedures may exist to address how staff members use technology, how they communicate to the public, or who can or cannot represent the institution.  But, these policies are not anywhere nearly as formal the budget process. When a process is outside of the budget, it is loosely tied to the organization.  Administrators may be unaware, or they may not have an incentive to really be involved with processes that do not impact budgets.  

 

David Weignberger in his book Everything is Miscelleneous, identifies a conundrum of control with Web 2.0 tools.  This conundrum is faces colleges. Web 2.0 tools fall outside of much of the control mechanisms of our management structure. The effort it would take to really control these tools is beyond the reach of most administrators.  Additionally, really controlling these tools would probably make our organizations less effective. Exerting control could potentially take away important tools from employees who are working with all good intentions to do their jobs.  But, standing by and doing nothing we run a risk.  We risk undermining the strategicy and well-though-out marketing and outreach efforts.  The question becomes when does a parade stop being a parade and become a mass of people standing around holding instruments looking at floats crashing into each other? 

 

 

The Myth of Control

The idea of control may be a bit of a misnomer. It's not like there has been perfect control in the pre-Internet world.  

 

Academic Freedom

 

The Wisdom and Diswisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki in his book, the Wisdom of Crowds, defines three types of problems addressed by crowds.  

also the idiocy of crowds

 

Cooperation Problems

If a staff member starts a Facebook with her or his personal Facebook account, that person essentially controls that page.  If he or she leaves the college, what happens to that page? Many (most?) Web 2.0 tools are hotsed on remote servers, not on campus servers.  There are important questions about ownership of information and access to sites.  

 

The most tenacious people tend to dominate online.  

 

Coordination Problems

I have always thought that driving The rules we have make actions predictable.  People understand their roles. 

 

They are able to take safe actions because it is easy to understand what other people are going to do. Now, we can get a bit frustrated with traffic and there are people who are not the best of drivers.  We've been in fender beners and more serious accidents, but when you consider the numbers of people who drive and that it is still pretty unlikely that we will get into an accident on each trip, 

 

One of the most amazi

As a contrast, think about the grociery store 

 

Solutions

1. create rules for coordination

1.1 define types of communication

1.2 discuss how this work

 

2. Increase transparency 

3. Get messages out there  

 

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Talking about Blogs may sound so 2004, but there are still many healthy blogs posting great information.  With 

 

the use of RSS, the information from blogs are flowing into other social networking sites.

 

We live in a mashed up, mixed up world.

 

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old notes

article for change?

Does my blog research show that there is a coordination problem? 

FB, Twitter, blogs, are popping up all over.

bypass controls: budgets, participation, IT, etc 

danger in immediacy, especially when emotions get involved.  

This may be one of the largest marketing pushes by colleges of all time, but administrators may not even know it is going on.  

When does the parade become a mass of people just standing around?  

Can we coordinate people?  

 

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Eric Schmidt's rule about Web 2.0: "Don't fight the internet."

 

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.

 

Definition of Web 2.0

The Web As Platform

Harnessing Collective Intelligence

Data is the Next Intel Inside: Who Owns Data, Who Enhances Data, Who Controls?

End of the Software Release Cycle: Perpectural Beta, Users Co-Developers

Lightweight Programming Models: Simplicity Reigns (GoogleMaps is a good example)

Software Above the Level of a Single Device: Not Just PC to PC but Handhelds

Rich User Experiences: Bottom Line

from Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0?

 

3 Problems Handled by Crowds: Web 2.0 Essentially Seeks to Create a Crowd Around a Service or Site

 

1. Cognition problems: Will have difinitive solutions: how copies of this will sell?  Who will be president?  Who will win the Super Bowl?

2. Coordination problems: Require members of a group to figure out how to coordinate behavior with each other while knowing that others are doing the same.  How do we drive down the road?  How do sellers and buyers find each other? How do companies organize operations?

3. Cooperation problems: Challenge of getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together.  Paying taxes, dealing with pollution are all coordination problems. 

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

 

three types of innovations: mountain bikes, that math problem from gladwell, that language insight (from gladwell, or maybe use John Nash example, or radio), 

 

Conundrum of Control

"But just about every industry that creates of distributes content--ideas, information, or creativity in any form--exerts control over how that content is organized. The front page of the newspaper, the selection of movies playing at your local theater, the order of publicaly available facts in an almanac, the layout of a music store, and the order of marching bands in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade all bring significant value to the companies that control them.

        This creates a conundrum for business as they enter the digital order. If they don't allow their users to structure information for themselves, they'll lost their patrons. If they do allow patrons to structure information for themselves, the organizations will lose much of their authority, power, and control.

        The paradox is already resolving itself. Customers, patrons, users, and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information. And we're doing it not just as individuals. Knowledge--its content and its organization--is becoming a social act." David Weinberger,Everything is Miscellaneous, p. 133

 

 

Critical Mass: Striking a Balance

Need to get enough people to keep a service working, but not too many to control.

 

"That goes back to a major theme of web 2.0 that people haven't yet tweaked to. It's really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data." Tim O'Reillyinterview on Wired.  

 

"Note that unless there is a large, existing group of participants, it will oftentimes take a few months, perhaps even a year, to achieve "critical mass." Christopher Carfi Prerequisites For Setting Up A Business-Driven Web 2.0 Effort

 

"I think social network fatigue becomes the major hurdle standing in the way of reaching critical mass." Jon Udell, Critical Mass and Socail Network Fatigue

 

 

Brook's Law

Innovation, solutions, great ideas & synergies come from large groups, but larger groups become difficult to control and manage.

 

"Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later." More generally, Brooks's Law predicts that the complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done only rises linearly. Eric Steven Raymond "How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity" from The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Quoted from Fred Brooks of IBM and author of the book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering first published in 1975 and reissued in 1995.

 

 

Trade off Between Efficiency and Service

In services, ideal would be same service for all, but customers have differnt needs, expectations, and abilities, so they introduce variability into services.  There are 4 strategies for managing customer-introduced variability

1) Classic Accomodation--> lots of employees, adapt to customer needs

2) Low-Cost Accomodation--> self-service, low-cost labor, automate tasks

3) Classic reduction --> convince customers to to adjust their expectations, customers compromise

4) Uncompromised reduction --> target customers on preferences,

from Frances X. Frei "Breaking the Trade-Off Between Effeiciency of Services" Harvard Business Review. 93-101 Nov. 2006