Nonprofit Participation In A Web 2.0 Community Portal

ABSTRACT

Since Putnam‟s observations that suggested a crisis of community was linked to communications technology uses, researchers have tried to assess the civic impact of the Internet. Though opinions have varied over time, the general consensus would seem to be that there is great potential for the Internet in that it potentially provides citizens with access to information that can support goals like civic participation. This paper introduces a design intended to leverage that potential in a geographic community. Using WiFi and location-aware technology, community information can be tied to physical locations of a geographic community in a way which increases its visibility and usefulness. The design also makes use of various Web 2.0 technologies to overcome common challenges of previous community technology designs. As key players in the local community, nonprofit organizations are interviewed about their current uses of technology and their communication practices. Implications are drawn from these interviews for the specific design as well as the use of Web 2.0 technologies for civic and community purposes.

Chapter 1 

Introduction

This thesis is concerned broadly with a future direction of design for community informatics and more specifically concerned with the appropriateness of a particular technology design for participation by local nonprofit organizations.  It introduces the features and design rationale of a prototype which is believed to be a unique kind of local community portal that is based on an aggregation of community information through the use of Web 2.0 technologies and which is also intended to support mobile computing through the integration of location-based services and geo-tagged information. It presents a qualitative study of 14 local nonprofit organizations which focuses on the themes of current practices and technological capacity to assess the appropriateness of the community portal design, as well as begin to address a broader research question about the potential for community technology designs which focus on integration of existing Web 2.0 tools to address community informatics goals.

Technology and Community

As information technology has advanced, community networks have appropriated technology in ways appropriate to community needs and the affordances of various technologies. In fact, community informatics can be understood as the response of tradition, in the form of communities to change, in the form of information technology (Williams & Durrance, 2008). Community networks such as the Blacksburg Electronic Village came at a time when access to the Internet was emerging as reality for large numbers of households and thus such efforts were appropriately focused on getting community members connected to the Internet. The focus of such efforts was on the use of basic tools such as email and websites, with a focus was on locally relevant content and connections. As the Internet use has grown, such tools are still in use, but a wide variety of web content and services have overtaken the volume of content of local origin and focus.

From the perspective of those interested in strong democracy, one of the greatest strengths of the Internet is its ability to make information available regardless of geographic boundaries (Sunstein, ). Rather than being limited to local sources of knowledge, social norms, or political perspectives are that are geographically available, citizens of any given community can now find a diversity of potential alternatives. For example, a isolated individual in a socially conservative (or perhaps an overly progressive) geographic community can find hope in an alternative perspective from elsewhere in the world. Those in a given minority in their local community can find social connections and support that may help to relieve feelings of isolation, strengthen their self-esteem and perhaps find a voice which can speak out about local intolerances or injustices.  And those with uncommon perspectives or interests can communicate, coordinate and take action together across geographic distances that would otherwise be prohibitive. This is both a great promise of the Internet and a potential challenge, depending perhaps on the nature and intention of the minority opinion.

The Internet itself can largely be considered as location agnostic. By design, geographic distance is largely irrelevant as is the location of servers fulfilling an http request. It is this fact which has allowed information technology to fuel globalization. Information intensive business services can now be provided as easily from almost any part of the world as they would be nearby. But at the level of geographic communities, this feature of the Internet has potential consequences. One consequence could be the impact that globalization has had on many communities: as the sources of production have been relocated across the globe, there have been profound economic and social impacts on many communities.  For community networks, this means that many more non-local sources of information are readily available to web users. Rather than a community portal of local origin, often one of the key pieces of many community networks, the starting point of many users is more frequently a search engine. Without such a common Internet landmark, there is little to connect Internet users within the same geographic community when they are online. In short, the continued growth and ubiquity of the Internet seems to have produced highly networked communities while undermining one of the key pieces of early community networks (Carroll & Rosson, 2003).

Web 2.0

The current Internet landscape, or at least its coverage in the media, is dominated by what has been fuzzily defined as Web 2.0.  Often used as more of a buzzword than an applicable formal definition, the Web 2.0 term has been applied to a range of web-based tools, technologies and services that move beyond the limitations of earlier web standards. And while the hype may overshadow reality in some cases of Web 2.0, there are some important defining features which may ultimately be relevant to community networks. These are 1), sophisticated web-based interactions that can rival the functions of desktop applications, 2) the distributed nature of such web-based services that makes content and features available across platforms as well as independent of specific hardware, 3) the leveraging of protocols for the sharing and distribution of information across the Internet, 4) a focus on user-created content which has lead to more sophisticated, user friendly tools that are increasingly using WYSIWYG interfaces and require much less formal programming expertise, and, 5) a focus on the social and interconnected nature of the web, epitomized perhaps by social networking services such as Facebook.

Though still reliant on basic features of the earliest Internet such as the clientserver model and hypertext transfer protocol (http), many Web 2.0 tools and services have added layers of more sophisticated technology such a Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) to create much more dynamic web pages. Rather than just loading or refreshing static predefined pages, the use of these kinds of technologies allows for the creation of web-based services which can essentially provide more sophisticated clientserver interactions and provide browser-based applications such as spreadsheets and word processing which can rival the functionality of common locally installed applications such as Microsoft Office.

One advantage of such web-based tools can, of course, be in their cost. Compared to Microsoft Office, which is near ubiquitous in many professional contests, many of the most common document-oriented tasks can be handled using the free web-based applications provide by Google and others. Another advantage is in their availability from almost any Internet connected machine, reducing the requirement for a specific computer or even network to be accessed in order to accomplish such tasks. A needed document need no longer be on a “work-only” machine but can be available anywhere Internet access exists.

Such web-based applications are not only able to replicate the functions of locally installed applications but can also add a new dimension of sharing and collaboration not available with locally installed desktop tools such as Office. Services such as Google Docs allow for the sharing of documents with other users on the Internet, allowing for either synchronous or asynchronous review, composition and editing. Additionally, a variety of permissions support anything from one on one document sharing to group collaborations to the public posting of a document using a URL unique to that document, which can then be embedded in a variety of ways in almost any web page. For example, by linking a text document and a spreadsheet in Google Docs, the public URL of that document can be embedded in a web page to create a survey or registration form that provides updating graphs of responses in near real time. Beyond this example, content can be shared across the web through a variety of protocols such as RSS and iCal which provide the means for creating feeds for web content and calendar information that can be shared across a variety of web contexts and desktop applications.

User-Generated Content and Syndication

A range of web services have built a business model entirely around providing a framework for their users to submit their own creations. Sites such as Youtube (www.youtube.com) and Flickr (www.flickr.com) focus almost exclusively on providing a framework for users to submit their own digital content. This content can then be displayed, organized, tagged, shared and embedded in a variety of web contexts. For example, a user‟s photos can be posted to Flickr then made available on that user‟s personal website in a way that provides more sophisticated functions than would be available to the user on her own. As with Google‟s services, many of these applications are free to users, as their content is sold against advertising for the hosting service while the site provide application programming interfaces (API) that allow the repurposing of hosted content on terms that support the original hosting site, usually through simple branding and links that lead back to the hosting service. User generated content is also used by many sites not as a main service but as a way to enhance existing services, such as shopping site Amazon‟s (www.amazon.com) features for support of  user reviews, content (such as a user‟s own product images or video) and product forums and user groups organized around product categories.

Social Networking and Social Media

Several Internet-based services have evolved to both articulate and expand one‟s social network. Facebook, the largest, essentially allows for the public display of an individual‟s basic profile information, photos, and links or simply current thoughts. In addition to individual profiles/pages, the site allows for the creation of pages for groups, events, and organizations. Users content can be shared through Facebook and an increasing number of websites integrate links to Facebook such that nearly all of someone‟s online life can be shared, syndicated and observed.

Twitter has also emerged as an immensely popular social media tool that allows people to broadcast short text messages which are organized by user created tags, in a format referred to as micro-blogging. Twitter has been used in a variety of interesting ways, with its simplicity and real time impact leading to innovative uses. It is commonly used for basic communication but has also been shown to reveal emerging trends such as breaking news and has been used as part of disaster responses.

Impact of Web 2.0

Taken together, this heterogeneous set of technologies and tools have contributed to a large amount of innovation on the Internet and provide a whole new set of affordance for webbased system design. Content and services can be syndicated, shared and embedded in many ways leading to a high degree of flexibility at with its use requiring a lower degree of programming exactness of detail as well as integrated with desktop applications. This powerful set of tools has been applied to a wide variety of applications, but how could it be applied to the goals of local community?

Civicinity Community Portal

The idea for Civicinity emerged as part of the process of designing of web-based civic applications for using mobile technology in a local community setting. Previous efforts had focused on the iterative design of a mobile event calendar for large-scale community events. The basic design goals of the work were to both replicate the basic information available from paper event schedules and to expand on the basic functions through the available technology, for example by adding location-based features to the system and by adding mechanisms for social awareness among event attendees.

Nearing the end of that design‟s potential for additional useful iteration, attention turned to the theme of the potential value of applying what had been learned through the mobile event calendar to a year-round community calendar. Based on the current implementations of the community calendars concept locally, we saw several areas that we though we‟re problematic from the standpoint of the community. First was the fact that at least six separate community calendars existed in the local (small) community. From the perspective of nonprofit organizations, we reasoned that posting an event for which you wanted to create public awareness to all six calendars would be both inconvenient and unlikely. The result for local community members would be decreased awareness of community events unless they themselves went to all six community calendars. The existence of a web-based standard for sharing calendar data made a technological solution rather obvious: design of a community calendar around the iCal standard which community organizations could populate through the creation and maintenance of their own public event calendar using a free service such a Google calendar. The benefits of this basic design were that individual organizations could be solely responsible for their own calendar information and would not have to go to any outside site to post their events while the aggregation of all the individual organization‟s feeds would result in a single comprehensive community calendar. The basic approach of calendar feeds further suggested the use of RSS feeds to aggregate syndicated community news such feeds already provided by local news outlets also suggested an additional means for community organizations to raise awareness of their events or activities.

With the basic design rationale of aggregating syndicated community content, we added an additional element to the planned system in consultation with local community partners: increasing awareness of the portal and its contents through its presence on downtown WiFi hotspots. In consultation with the local business improvement district and borough government, we are in the process of  coordinating additional partners to implement all the proposed features of this design. To summarize key design points, this system will provide a location-aware community portal that is accessible both online and at WiFi locations within the borough that will aggregate community information using RSS and ICal feeds.

 

 

Figure 1:  Screenshot of the Civicinity Prototype

The following scenario illustrates basic features of the site:

Mike goes to Webster’s for coffee and while he is there he decides to check his email. As he clicks past the terms-of-use screen, he sees the State College Community Portal and sees an advertisement for a sale the clothing store just up the street. He has some time to shop before he meets his wife for dinner, so as he finishes his coffee he heads to the store. While he is there he sees some really good deals that he knows a friend might like so he opens the community portal page again on his iPhone and sends a message to his friend through the embedded local chat client. After doing that he also sees that a show he would like to see is opening the next night at the State Theatre. He decides to go there for tickets before he heads home.

While the scenario is primarily economic, similar scenarios are focused on both the social and civic potential of the portal once implanted downtown. From the perspective of downtown merchants, our system is desirable as something that might get people to stay downtown longer or come downtown more often as they are more aware of opportunities downtown. By prioritizing nonprofit information, we believe the downtown presence of the portal will raise overall awareness of nonprofits and their activities in the community.

Since nonprofits organizations are central to this plan, not only as potential beneficiaries of increased levels of local awareness but as important sources of community information for this system, their ability and interest in participation was assessed at two separate points during this design process. The remainder of the work provides a brief overview of previous work related to the goals and design of the community portal, followed by the methods, findings and implications of this study.

Nonprofit Participation In A Web 2.0 Community Portal

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