We're advising a very exciting project to build a neighborhood knowledgebase of caregiving services for seniors.  The idea is to enable caregivers, seniors, their families and friends to all work together in collecting, discussing, and validating ... a caregiving neighborhood empowering itself through knowledge sharing.  It seems like an ideal application for social media but ...

The neighborhood is largely low-income and of course the target audience is seniors.  How many people in this group spend all day online typing text into Twitter, FaceBook, etc.?  Will a conventional wiki, blog, or microblog interface be useful in either collecting or disseminating information?  We're concerned that we'll build a conventional text-based digital clubhouse and nobody will come.

Conversations which are already happening on social media platforms can be shared, archived, sorted, aggregated, analyzed and networked around the world.  But obviously there are a lot more conversations that are NOT already social-media-ized.  And despite the millions that connect daily with Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, and other popular platforms, there are billions more that just ... don't.  

Do we (relatively early adopters) care about that?  Do we simply wait until everybody else joins us, sooner or later, as we are sure in our hearts they will?  Are we going to twist arms or preach sermons to get them all to sign up?  Or should we find ways to extend our own conception of (digital) social media to include and embrace other forms of conversation, when there are real benefits to doing so?

A tweet (or any piece of social media passing in front of our eyes) is not really information until we think about it.  It's just STUFF.  And we don't think about stuff until it catches our attention.  What we really do with social media is SCAN it.

Alvin Toffler coined the term "information overload" to describe a state of too much, too fast ... a worsening condition that would seem to afflict all of us ...

Americans Consume 34 GB of Data Daily

The concern that we are somehow generating "too much information" goes back many years:

Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and Interactive Voice Response apps and servers are getting increasingly sophisticated.  It's easy to imagine a "voice web" which replicates most of the functions of a text web, and perhaps reaches certain types of users, communities, conversations, and content scenarios that weren't possible before.

If you've been working with social services, healthcare or other community efforts that ideally reach out to broad audiences, you immediately become aware of the limitations of Twitter, FaceBook etc.  Many of the people who are most in need of services will never in the course of a day (or year) log in to a text-based social media platform.  What do you do to reach out to them?

It might not be obvious at first glance why taxonomies are important to storytelling and social media, but the more you work with the concepts, the more critical some kind of knowledge structure seems. 

In capturing knowledge from the flow of blog posts and messages, we're imposing structure on a particular subset of the conversation.  If the microcontent flow becomes substantial, and the narratives being created are important to you, then you will  need a way to manage that stream of  material, or drown. 

Is there a need for a "taxonomy of caregiving" ... a common language and knowledge structure that will help us collect conversations and stories, and provide access to content on home care and caregiving?

People and organizations in healthcare informatics talk a lot about taxonomies, but they tend to be focused in two areas:  medical research on the one hand, and practice- or patient-data applications for healthcare providers on the other.  People interested in social media and healthcare are typically focused on patient communities that self-organize around specific conditions, on health records accessible to patients, and on patient advocacy and participation in medical treatment.  This data tends to be condition-focused or policy-oriented.

Microcontent is a big revolution happening in small but fast increments.  The idea is that when you shrink the average size of a "quantum" of communications, the speed and quantity of communications tends to increase.

#microcontent examples: 30sec commercial; 140 ch tweet; 160 character SMS; 100 word blog; 2 minute video on YouTube; 1 photo on Flickr; 1 sentence or picture or link on Facebook.

Trying again ...

Bertrand Duperrin has written an interesting post on how promoting adoption of social media / collaborative behaviors in a corporation (often referred to as Enterprise 2.0) is a matter of how such behaviors are incorporated into routines ...

http://bit.ly/EcGsh

It also very much speaks to the "people" issues of storytelling within purposeful communities.  However much members of the community agree on a shared agenda, and the value of storytelling to that agenda, they still need to find a way to incorporate it into their daily routine.  And that's a complicated equation.

Here's a quick list of the issues that seem to affect how much you document / communicate / contribute each day to a community dialogue (let's call it storytelling in general):

 Are you self-documenting?  

We've been talking to a lot of foundations and voluntary organizations who are doing great work, and we've been trying to support their need to document that work for a variety of critical purposes, including internal and external communications, program evaluations, and collaboration.

To what degree is it important for a community to be "self-documenting".  We (Learning Worlds Institute) as an organization, and I personally, struggle with that constantly.  If you're busy doing the work, it's hard to stop and document that work.  But in most cases it is critical to the long-term success of what you're doing (whatever it is) to document / communicate / celebrate.