Developing Your Organization's e-Strategy

At DigitalNow 2007, Sherry Budziak, President, .orgSource, moderated a panel titled, Developing Your Organization's e-Strategy. Panelists for this discussion included Brian D. Schramm, CAE, Director of Business Affairs, Society of Critical Care Medicine, and Patricia V. Blake, CAE, Executive Director, American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE).

In response to several questions regarding the ASGE case study, here is an overview of their Phased approach for technology implementation. Keep in mind, this approach was structured based on the mandated deadline. Depending on your individual organizational e-Strategy, another approach may work as well.

ASGE Case Study: E-Strategy - A Blueprint for Success

Phase 1
As our site had not been updated since 2002, the priority was to establish foundation elements for a new site starting with implementation of a content management system (CMS) (Ektron CMS 400) to provide distributed publishing capability. In conjunction with the CMS, among the core Phase 1 elements were:

• content audit
• new information architecture
• new branding and look and feel/graphic treatments
• tagline creation
• metadata for content
• single sign-on for authentication across the web site
• simple customization with MyASGE, and third party applications
• overhaul of user interface
• reworking of selective applications

Target: 75 days

Phase 2
We need to upgrade our core association management system (AMS) to pick up enhanced functionality for our fundraising capabilities along with a major renovation to our web interfaces to our core association management system (iMIS). The integration of the new AMS web applications with the CMS adds the second foundation element of our technology implementation plan. Phase 2 focuses on member self-service and the ability to have a very pleasant interaction with the organization. This phase will be implemented over 3-4 months.

Phase 3
Last, but not least, is the addition and integration of eLearning, Communities of Practice (CoP), and expanded MyASGE personalization. During Phase 3, we will focus on the strategy for implementing Communities and our eLearning programs.

For more details, feel free to contact Sherry Budziak (847-275-1840) or Theresa DeConinck at Fusion Productions (585-872-1900).

DigitalNow- the proven leadership conference for associations. Conference materials, workshop notes, survey result information, and on-site news are available before, during, and after the conference. Visit the official DigitalNow web site at http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow

Where Have All the Members Gone - Panel

I thought I would post the results from the conference survey since we ran shor of time at the conference.

Seated from left to right are: Beth Yoke of the Young Adult Library Association,Tami Bensky of Maryland Association of CPAs, Stephen Abrams of the Special Libraries Association, Paul Pomerantz of the American Society of Plastic Surgery, Stuart Meyer of the Emergency Nurses Association and Bonnie Cramer of American Association of Retired People. Ad that is me, Tom Hood of MACPA standing.

The Survey Results...

The top three issues Associations are struggling with in addressing the needs of the new generation of members are:

1. Integrating new technologies and approaches with existing Association structures (leadership, governance, departments, etc)
2. Time to experiment with new technologies
3. Understanding the potential of Web 2.0

Our panel's advice in this area was:

1. Call it "beta"
2. Don't call it Web 2.0 - it is really about engagement and participation!
3. Don't be afraid to try it - we should be inspired by Stephen Abrams 23 things in 15 minutes a day...
4. There is a real sense of urgency - could we lose relevance if we do not adopt these technologies early?
5. Get young members involved early so they have a real voice

The top five technologies Associations currently use or plan to use are:

1. Blogs
2. Podcasts
3. Social networking (myspace, facebook, etc)
4. Photo sharing like flickr
5. Video sharing like Youtube

Well that's it for this post, tell me what you think? I am off to make my wikipedia entry about our Association.

Flickr photos posted

Another great conference! Thanks Don & Hugh and the entire Fusion Productions team. This continues to be a must attend conference for me and our senior management team. I have tried to practice the art of Web 2.o and have posted some photos of the Digital Now experience you can check out at this link. Of course one of the best things about this conference is the chance to hang out with old friends and make some new ones. Hope you enjoy the photos...

Of course one of my favorites was the Reality 2.0 Session (even if it did include my son), I still learned an incredible amount about just how diffrent those millenials will be!

A lot of people also were asking about Second Life and I have also included a link to my blog where I talked about this and one to my post on the Virtual Worlds Conference I attended a few weeks ago in NYC. If you take the leap and create an avatar in Second Life, look me up on CPA Island or IM my SL persona, Rocky Maddaloni. Would love to get your comments on both the pictures and blog post - isn't that what we are supposed to do, take advantage of Web2.0 - publish and participate!

DigitalNow 2007: Day Three

This morning - the final day of DigitalNow 2007 - Stephen M.R. Covey presented provocative ideas about trust as an economic issue and offered counsel to attendees on critical competencies and behaviors for the cultivation of trust.

Become a member of the extended DigitalNow 2007 community. Visit the DigitalNow web site (http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow) to download up to the minute conference materials. Additions for Saturday, March 14 include:

• Session notes from Stephen M.R. Covey's keynote address
• Stephen's presentation slides
• DigitalNow 2007 factoids presentation
• Coming soon: Video from Stephen's keynote
  

DigitalNow 2007: April 11- 14 at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts~

DigitalNow- the proven leadership conference for associations - has sold out again! Conference materials, workshop notes, survey result information, and on-site news will continue to be available before, during, and after the conference. Visit the official DigitalNow web site at http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow

DigitalNow 2007: Day Two

After two days of thought-provoking keynotes and rich, educational break-out sessions, DigitalNow attendees are returning rave reviews through daily on-site web-based surveys.

On the morning of Day Two, Chris Trimble stimulated strategic thinking. In the afternoon, Susan Scott inspired attendees to get out from behind themselves and get into authentic, honest, passionate conversations.

It's not too late to participate! Visit the DigitalNow web site to download notes, presentations, and to watch video clips.

~DigitalNow 2007: April 11- 14 at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts~

SOLD OUT! DigitalNow- the proven leadership conference for associations - has officially sold out - again! Conference materials, workshop notes, survey result information, and up-to-the-minute on-site news will continue to be available before, during, and after the conference. Visit the conference web site at http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow

DigitalNow 2007: Day One

DigitalNow 2007 is well under way, and the energy at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club resort is high as more than 300 Association leaders connect, collaborate, and communicate.

Today's program included:

• Opening keynote by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
• Reality 2.0 and Association 2.0 panel sessions with Stephen Abrams, President-elect of the Special Libraries Association
  
• Breakouts in project management, web analytics, eStrategy, digital dashboards - and more!

It's not too late to participate! Visit the DigitalNow web site to download notes, presentations, and to watch video clips.

~DigitalNow 2007: April 11- 14 at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts~

SOLD OUT! DigitalNow- the proven leadership conference for associations - has officially sold out - again! Conference materials, workshop notes, survey result information, and up-to-the-minute on-site news will continue to be available before, during, and after the conference. Visit the conference web site at http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow

More CoP Resources Online

Online Resources

Collaborative learning environments sourcebook:
http://www.criticalmethods.org/collab/v.mv?d=1_1


Communities of Practice: Fred Nichols provides a primer in getting communities started.
http://home.att.net/~discon/KM/CoPOverview.pdf

CLII Communities of Practice: Original Educause inititative has morphed into CLII. CLII supports communities of practice to facilitate innovations and enhanced collaborative efforts among educational researchers and practitioners, whether they are a faculty member, education technologist, or learning designer. CLII explores and communicates how shared pathways of collaboration, process and methodologies can help bridge academic technology and learning theory to innovatively design and deliver improved capabilities and services in higher education. http://www.fipp.net/

Community 2.0 Conference: Blog Coverage
http://www.community2-0con.com/?p=238

Kaneva: An Alternative to Second Life
http://www.kaneva.com/

Patty Seybold (Past digitalNow Keynote speaker) blog on John Hagel’s keynote address at Community 2.0
http://outsideinnovation.blogs.com/pseybold/2007/03/community_20_co.html

Wales Rules: CEO of Wikia, commenting on the company's mission

"We are a for-profit company, but our investors and employees are equally focused on the social mission," Penchina says. "We hope to prove that you can build a sustainable business without copyrights, to serve our communities, and to enable advocacy on important topics like politics."

The article also has a great sidebar called "The Wales Rules for Web 2.0". There are 5:

1. Be Proactive
"I find the term 'crowdsourcing' incredibly irritating," Wales says. "Any company that thinks it's going to build a site by outsourcing all the work to its users not only disrespects the users but completely misunderstands what it should be doing. Your job is to provide a structure for your users to collaborate, and that takes a lot of work."

2. Be Transparent
"When you build a social network, you're asking people to use your facilities to build a community," Wales says. "If you have a lot of secret mechanisms that regulate your site, people aren't going to feel comfortable. It's about building trust."

3. Be Frugal
"You don't build a community by just pouring money into it. It takes time. You have to grow it in a healthy way," he (Wales) says.

4. Be True to Your Brand
"Really successful businesses and organizations build something so that people immediately know what they're about," Wales says. "You're building a level of trust so that people know what they're getting."

5. Be Trusting
"Some sites have a lot of controls to prevent bad behavior," Wales says. "But they end up preventing spontaneous good behavior."

CommunityNext; Conference on Online Communities and Social Networking. The next generation is about “niches.” http://www.communitynext.com/

Kiva: Online micro-credit capabilities (means “unity” in Swahilli). Lenders visit Kiva’s web site to find entrepreneurs from developing countries looking for a small loan. Kiva posts the funding needs online and anyone who wants to help can. To date over 40,000 people have used Kiva to lend money to over 5,000 borrowers in transactions totaling over $3M.
http://www.kiva.org/

Second Life (abbreviated to SL) is an Internet-based virtual world which came to international attention via mainstream news media in late 2006 and early 2007.[4][5] Developed by Linden Lab, a downloadable client program enables its users, called "Residents", to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

http://secondlife.com/

Whyville: Whyville is an educational internet site geared towards preteens and teenagers. Its goal is to teach students about science and business through games and roleplay. It is, similar in part to the popular site Neopets in that you control a character and live in a virtual community, where you can interact with other players.
http://www.whyville.net/smmk/nice

~DigitalNow 2007: April 11- 14 at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts~

SOLD OUT! DigitalNow- the proven leadership conference for associations - has officially sold out - again! Conference materials, workshop notes, survey result information, and up-to-the-minute on-site news will continue to be available before, during, and after the conference. Visit the conference web site at http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow

More CoP Resources: Articles

Articles

Communities of Practice, learning as a social system: One of the early pioneers of communities of practice, Etienne Wenger sets the stage for CoPs in her 1988 article.
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml

Association Communities of Practice: ISPE White Paper. Communities of practice at ISPE are being developed by like-minded practitioners with the desire to become actively involved under their own volition to address emerging industry trends. Communities of practice allow for these individuals to collaborate regarding issues in an open, efficient, and somewhat structured manner. Significantly, communities of practice will not exist simply as a result of an ISPE call for volunteers to participate in yet another committee, task force, or council. Rather, they will develop as a result of genuine interest shared by community members to learn and work together to solve similar problems.
http://www.ispe.org/galleries/cop-gallery/White_paper.pdf


Building Communities in the Federal Sector
http://www.fcw.com/article86168

Does identity matter in the online world? John M. Grohol, Psy.D. is an expert in online psychology and behavior discusses Wikipedia’s issues a few years ago, and makes the case that “registration systems” does matter. So in a “members only” world there is a point of difference for associations.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/identitymatters

Webrings could be considered a form of distributed web community. A webring is a collection of independent websites on a similar theme, linked together by standard navigation aids which allow visitors to easily jump from site to site. A webring is usually controlled by a ringmaster who decides whether to admit new applicants to the ring. The initial popularity of webrings appear to have worn off, possibly because they tend to form closed communities, unlike the more dynamic communities that emerge among blogs linked to each other via RSS syndication. There are nevertheless still many thousands of webrings and they may re-emerge as a popular form of personal and collaborative publishing.
http://dir.webring.com/rw

~DigitalNow 2007: April 11- 14 at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts~

SOLD OUT! DigitalNow- the proven leadership conference for associations - has officially sold out - again! Conference materials, workshop notes, survey result information, and up-to-the-minute on-site news will continue to be available before, during, and after the conference. Visit the conference web site at http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow

More CoP Resources: Books

Books

Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities: by John Hagel III (Author), Arthur G. Armstrong (Author) "The rise of virtual communities in on-line networks has set in motion an unprecedented shift in power from vendors of goods and services to the..."

The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (revised edition)

Written by the man known as the First Citizen of the Internet, this book covers Rheingold's experiences with virtual communities. It starts off with his home community, The Well, out of Sausilito, CA, and makes its way through MUDs and beyond. No one understands the compelling strength of online community like Rheingold.

Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change in Cyberspace (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives): This study examines how learning and cognitive change are fostered by online communities. The chapters provide a basis for thinking about the dynamics of Internet community building. They consider the role of the self or individual as a participant in virtual community, and the design and refinement of technology as the conduit for extending and enhancing the possibilities of community building in cyberspace. The volume will interest educators, psychologists, sociologists, and researchers in human-computer interaction.

Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities; There's been a marked shift in the philosophy of developing successful Web sites. The technologies (HTML, JavaScript, JavaServer Pages) no longer occupy center stage. Rather, functional objectives and the communities that grow up around them seem to be the main ingredient in Web site success. In her carefully reasoned and well-written Community Building on the Web, Amy Jo Kim explains why communities form and grow. More importantly, she shows (with references to many examples) how you can make your site a catalyst for community growth--and profit in the process. From marketing schemes like Amazon.com's Associates program to The Motley Fool's system of rating members' bulletin-board postings, this book covers all the popular strategies for bringing people in and retaining them.

Nine core strategies form the foundation of Kim's recommendations for site builders, serving as the organizational backbone of this book. The strategies generally make sense, and they seem to apply to all kinds of communities, cyber and otherwise. (One advocates the establishment of regular events around which community life can organize itself.) Some parts of Kim's message may seem like common sense, but such a coherent discussion of what defines a community and how it can be made to thrive is still helpful.

Read this book to help crystallize your thinking about community building, and to review strategies that work for real sites already. --David Wall

How Communities Add Value to the Member Experience: If communities are rich networking environments created to enable communication and interaction, why do we use listsrvs and discussion boards that limit our ability to provide context, personalize or harvest knowledge shared? This is largely in part due to the lack of understanding of a community's charter, it's reason for existing and the characteristics of its members. Fusion Productions and APQC recently presented together at ASAE on what a winning combination of community processes plus technology would look like.

COPs in Progress: APQC and the Texas Medical Association: APQC was enlisted by The Texas Medical Association (TMA) to help build new and better ways to work and succeed in a competitive marketplace through the implementation of Communities of Practice (CoPs). With over 40,000 physician and medical student members, TMA wanted to create a portal that would allow everyone in the organization to share solutions to the challenges of practicing medicine. Find out how APQC and TMA developed and piloted a CoP designed around one of the key issues for doctors and their staff.

~DigitalNow 2007: April 11- 14 at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts~

SOLD OUT! DigitalNow- the proven leadership conference for associations - has officially sold out - again! Conference materials, workshop notes, survey result information, and up-to-the-minute on-site news will continue to be available before, during, and after the conference. Visit the conference web site at http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow

Communities of Practice (CoP) Resources

Introduction
For more than 10 years Fusion has been working with associations in supporting one of the core elements of an association’s value proposition: networking and collaboration.

Fundamentally, the physical paradigms of annual meetings, conferences, special interest groups or divisions, local brown bag lunches, after work topics, list servs, discussion boards, usenet groups have all contributed to the fabric of connecting people to help people do their jobs better, advance their competencies and or/careers, or just connect with someone who shares common interests.

This year’s DigitalNow 2007 brings together many of the leaders of the next generation in social networking in the association sector with APQC leading two sessions on building communities of practice and a workshop dedicated to associations sharing best practices in moving to the next level. Critical issues looking at social networking, blogging, wikis, and just plain old fashion “not enough time” will be explored.

For transparency purposes, Fusion has been involved in CoPs for many years and we provide several CoP platforms. As there are many types of associations with varying models, so too is there a continuum of options to consider. We have come to grow and understand the value of community and more importantly its underlying conditions in an association's value proposition as we have consistently endeavored to highlight at DigitalNow. Our primary “value add” has always been the knowledge and experience in enabling associations to advance their value proposition in the digital world.

In essence, DigitalNow, CoP, and all the services and products we offer are about you. So, we have committed ourselves to providing a comprehensive set of resources for those that are interested in getting started, advancing to the next level, and preparing for the journey.

Fusion has conducted more than five surveys in the past seven years looking at what associations have been doing to move communities of practice. We will share these results as well as what the association community itself is doing with communities to advance both the art and the science of CoPs.

2007 is marking a rebirth in online communities, with MySpace, Facebook; Conferences such as Community Next and Communities 2.0, John Hagel’s keynote address revisiting his landmark book in 1997, NetGain.

Download the CoP Resources List here.

Stay tuned and let us know what works and what needs to be addressed.

"Communities of practice help weave broader value webs created by relationships and exchanges which in turn create extended knowledge systems" (Wenger et al 2002; 220)

~DigitalNow 2007: April 11- 14 at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts~

SOLD OUT! DigitalNow- the proven leadership conference for associations - has officially sold out - again! Conference materials, workshop notes, survey result information, and up-to-the-minute on-site news will continue to be available before, during, and after the conference. Visit the conference web site at http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow