Twitter has popularised the use of #hashtags as a way to aggregate relevant tweets together. #hashtag is a special kind of tag because people learn about them before using them. For example, if I want to apply a hashtag for information architecture, I will lookup Twubs, a hashtag directory to see if I should be using "information_architecture", "information-architecture", "#ia" or some other hashtags, based on the original intention of the hashtag, the popularity of the hashtag, the quality of information represented by the hashtag and the type of people I want to reach. This is unlike tags, which is a typical summary of content using keywords that mean something to the originator. #hastags have this powerful self-organising ability. It is this inherent ability of #hashtags that allows us to build communities organically. This is nothing new, it was the intention of #hashtags in Twitter.
Hashtag everything!
Here's something new: what if we extend this ability to #hashtag everything. Our discussion topics, wiki articles, blog posts, events, personal profiles, video, images, documents and etc
We essentially harvest content and people to create online communities organically
Mission impossible in the www
Well, it's going to be a tall order to make this happen in the www. Firstly, #hashtags works if there is one place to do one thing. #hastags work in Twitter because it is the de facto place to tweet, making the use of #hashtags in twitter scalable and plausible. Wikipedia is the de facto place to write wiki articles but unfortunately there's no #hastags implementation. This brings us to the second problem, that #hashtags is not a standard. So even if #hashtags are implemented in Wikipedia, the same #hashtags used in Twitter make no sense to Wikipedia without integration. If we aren't convince that #hashtag everything on the www is almost impossible, start considering the video, image, document, blog, discussion, networking... tools that are residing all over the place.
Yes, hashtag everything on the intranet
If it's not possible to #hashtag everything on the www to build online communities, let's shift our attention to the intranet. On an intranet, we have a defined set of audience and we have control over the way the intranet is designed. Employees come to the intranet because there are no other place to find the information and do the things that are offered by it. Given this advantage, we can potentially make this happen. We can setup just one instance of a tool each - one "Twitter", one blog, one wiki, one document repository, one discussion forum and etc to achieve economies of scale with #hashtags. Next, we'll have to show staff members the concept of #hastags and how easy it would be for them to contribute and participate. Once these are done, we need to pay some attention to information security and groupings.
Take care of information security and groupings
We have to make it easy for each staff member to define their networks. Each staff member may define several networks of their immedate colleagues, project teams, communities and etc. How defining these networks are made easy is another discussion altogether so we'll just assume that it can be done neatly with the advancement of UX. With the networks defined, it's just a matter of selecting which networks we want to share our contributions with.
Conclusion
This idea was inspired by a recent project to connect around 120,000 staff members on a social intranet. Traditionally, we've been trying to create online communities by first creating a space for them. The problem with this approach is that we have to figure out who the potential community members are and the community's configuration (matchmaking community activities and the appropriate tools and features required), and then have a core community team to drive it's success. For a participant, he has to figure out what relevant communities are available and then decide on which want to join. This problem applies to both small and large organisations, with the magnitute escalating depending on their size. #hastagging everything is a relook at how online communities can be formed without being distracted by the traditional process of setting one up.
Personalisation also becomes easy just by means of subscribing to #hashtags that we care about.
But it'll take time before this idea gets popularised. We'll need time to digest this idea, refine it and then wish for technology innovation to happen. It's a big idea and we'll therefore need a big heart for this.
This idea was inspired by a recent project to connect around 120,000 staff members on a social intranet. Traditionally, we've been trying to create online communities by first creating a space for them. The problem with this approach is that we have to figure out who the potential community members are and the community's configuration (matchmaking community activities and the appropriate tools and features required), and then have a core community team to drive it's success. For a participant, he has to figure out what relevant communities are available and then decide on which want to join. This problem applies to both small and large organisations, with the magnitute escalating depending on their size. #hastagging everything is a relook at how online communities can be formed without being distracted by the traditional process of setting one up.
Personalisation also becomes easy just by means of subscribing to #hashtags that we care about.
But it'll take time before this idea gets popularised. We'll need time to digest this idea, refine it and then wish for technology innovation to happen. It's a big idea and we'll therefore need a big heart for this.
Just because physical communities are set up this way, it doesn't mean that online communities have to.
8 Responses to “Forming organic online communities on the intranet: #hashtag everything!”
that is a great suggestion; I will try to start doing #hashtagging - everywhere
and first thing, I will align my tag cloud with hashtag.org
thanks a lot!
Hi Tim, let me know if you're going to start hashtagging everything... I'll be thrilled to see it!
It's an interesting idea! If you can make it work, definitely put it in for next year's Intranet Innovation Awards :-)
PS. is this pretty much just "tagging", ie tag clouds, folksonomy, etc?
What's really happening with hashtag everything concept is that we're aggregating ALL content by topic or subject.
If we were to get the same thing going with current corporate content, we're really looking at a corporate taxonomy. We all know how difficult this can get sometimes!
The hastag everything concept then makes is really simple to implement the intent of a corporate taxonomy -- to give a holistic view of all corporate information, this includes both formal and social information.
This could also be a good option for companies who have gone too far ahead without a corporate taxonomy and now want to do something about it.
Thanks for the post...given me something to think about.
Hi James, I'd be glad to see this idea implemented somewhere too. You brought up a relevant point on folksonomies and I should have mention this.
Folksonomies as we know is primarily driven by social tagging. It originates from terms that mean something to an individual which then gets socialise with others who are using the same tags. The challenge here is that tagging inevitably increases the diversity of tags instead of converging it. The application of hashtags is driven towards convergence. I've pointed out the activities in the post that supports the convergence intent.
Clouds are great for exploratory search and exploratory search only becomes easier if there are categories to help limit the scope of information. So in the context of this post, it'll be good to see a tag cloud for the #ia community.
When we tag stuff, it has to first satisfy our needs for future use and if it happens that our tags socialise with others, that's good, and we're not too concern about synonyms or if anyone at all is using that tag. But for hashtags, we apply it with a community mindset - "I want like-minded people to find it and talk about it".
The other consideration about tags is that we need to have critical membership mass to produce enough tags that will coincide. Hashtags on the other hand will work without large membership base.
Very Good article on online community power...
Hey Simon. The idea of hashtags outside twitter also crossed my mind when I looked at it from a technical perspective.
Actually, all you need to complete your idea is already available: enterprise search. The special character # bound to an expression without any space in-between makes it very simple for a search engine to filter for this information. Thereby your search results become sharp like a database query.
The search engine will be able to close the gap between knowledge databases with metadata (corporate taxonomies), unstructured data (for example on file-shares) and all intranet content like webpages, blogs or wikis.
Thinking about this I also see an opportunity concerning the customized i-related platform our users more and more expect. E.g. your Amazon shop is fully personalized and tied to your interests. Nevertheless in KM we still use the paradigm that you have first to go to a place and collaborate there on a certain topic. It is still topic-centric and not people-centric.
By using hashtag everything I can stay on my personal blog or store to my favorite folder structure while contributing to a community. I produce my personal track record, a proove of my competence, but the single contributions are well feeded into the different topic-centric community sites at the same time.
If you are interested in this subject just get in touch with me. Would be a pleasure to exchange thoughts!
Hey Daffy,
I can't imagine any other tools that can cut across different content management systems apart from Search.
My example for #ia looks at picking up the "#ia" keyword and the file-type in order to generate the interface we see there. This idea comes because file-types are typically captured in content management systems automatically. But therein lies the challenge in metadata definition... some systems may call it "file-types", "filetype" or even "ft".
To bridge these differences in the internet space, we may need to have an interfacing layer, something similar to Yahoo Pipes, which enable us to aggregate content based on parameters that is defined by a human being, so that the variations of how we define file-types can be overcomed.
In an intranet, we have more control over the application of enterprise taxonomy and metadata schema, so the need for the interfacing layer is not required. And with them in place, we can also design for faceted navigation in the context of a topic (e.g. "#ia").
My original idea is to have the # element in the title, so that it invites navigation/query to explore the topic further, and also make it a "rule" for contributors to share content to a community easily.
Post a Comment
Trackbacks
Leave a trackback