Social Media consultant Marc Cortés has kindly invited me to join a 27 people document where to draft our Predictions for Social Media in 2010. Though most of the professionals featured in the document come from the communications and marketing field — and, hence, the final outcome is populated with advice and forecasts on related topics — there is also a little room for politics and governments.
My reflections, though not explicitly stated, are more targeted towards researchers and knowledgeable people — to whom the Web 2.0 has at last provided a voice on their own despite their affiliation — and to knowledge workers and knowledge intensive institutions in general.
I here below translate my part into English and reproduce the full document and the “headlines” of all other contributors.
Social media will channel activity towards what is relevant: the portfolio
In the coming years we will be closing the circle and be back to personal and institutional websites, though these will in any way look like the ones we visited in the dawn of the World Wide Web.
We have performed a necessary initiation journey taken by the hand of social media, so that we could be introduced to the new and growing possibilities of the Web. Blogs and wikis showed us what was possible in a bi-directional Web, where content and even services creation could be decentralized and exit institutions. Social networking sites added the human factor to the network we had recently created: bi-directionality became multi-directionality, multi-diffusion. Blogs created the bourgeoisie of the Internet, and social networking sites opened it up and democratized it for the rest of the society.
But it is as easy to use social media as it is difficult to manage them and make them work for out benefit. It is likely that whoever wants or has to have a reputation on the Internet just cannot keep having tentacles without a visible head. Social media must be funnels that lead to us: we neither can manage chaor eternally, nor can we expect that whoever looks for us finds us or reconstruct us amongst this total maze of confusion.
This does not mean that we are not present in the relevant channels: it is there where we will mainly interact. But the critical mass of our digital persona must be as near as possible to our self.
What we do, what we are must be centralized. It is the image of what we do and become the one that has to be decentralized, not the essence.
I plead for the construction of the portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.
Predictions for Social Media in 2010
Alfonso Alcantara: Consultor y coach en desarrollo profesional y empleo 2.0 “En 2010 las redes sociales definitivamente serán las autopistas de las ideas.”
Jacobo Álvarez: Director Negocio Grupo Intercom y Socio en Multiplica “El 2010 el año en el que, al menos en el móvil, la suma de geolocalización y redes personales y profesionales nos liberen del exceso de información y nos ayude a acceder a información más relevante de nuestro entorno”
Jose Luis Antúnez: Fundador de YouAre y Coorganizador de Evento Blog España “El real-time es la extrapolación de la vida real a la web. Y en la vida real se hace dinero vendiendo y pagando cosas”.
Enrique Burgos: Responsable de Marketing Relacional de Unidad Editorial “Solo demostrando el valor que aporta a las marcas (económico & imagen) se lograra una mayor comprensión por las altas direcciones de las empresas”
Cesar Calderón: Socio Director en Autoritas Consulting “2010 será el año en el que las administraciones públicas descubran los Social Media y comiencen a conversar con los ciudadanos”
Marc Cortés: Socio-Director RocaSalvatella y Profesor Marketing Electrónico (ESADE) “Dejaremos de hablar de Social Media y empezaremos a hablar de Social Business”.
Adolfo Corujo y todo el equipo de Llorente & Cuenca: Director Senior Llorente&Cuenca “Para el usuario, 2010 será el año de… La explosión de la búsqueda en Tiempo Real”
Roberto Carreras: Consultor de Comunicación y RRPP “La web en tiempo real, que durante 2009 dio sus primeros pasos como fenómeno, vivirá en 2010 su consolidación.”
Fernando de la Rosa: Socio y fundador de Seis Grados “2010 es un año de re-invenciones: el principio de nuevos mercados y la agonía de otros”.
Roger Domingo: Director Editorial Deusto / Gestión 2000/ Alienta / CEAC “La incorporación del mundo de la empresa a las redes sociales conllevará también un incremento de la publicidad en las mismas, lo cual pondrá en peligro la tan deseada “conversación cluetrainiania””
Fernado Fegido: Director de Negocio Digital de Caja Navarra “El año 2010 será otro año en el que deberemos de seguir evangelizando y capacitando a muchos responsables de Márketing y Comunicación”
Tristán Elósegui: Responsable de Marketing Digital de Canal+ y Organizador del The Monday Reading Club “La crisis va a favorecer el crecimiento de los medios sociales”
Ricard Espelt: Regidor de Nuevas Tecnologías de Copons “La ciudadanía, cada vez más consciente del poder de las redes sociales, va a provocar pequeñas “revoluciones” en el devenir de la política española”
Marek Fodor: Emprendedor y Business Angel del sector tecnológico “Bajará notablemente el crecimiento de twitter, comparado con el año 2009”.
Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez: Responsable de Comunidad del BBVA “Se dará el caso de comunidades enteras que renuncian a las redes sociales, que se bautizarán como “Amish digitales””
Albert García Pujadas: CEO Nikodemo “El video se impondrá como formato de comunicación habitual y como soporte publicitario de primer orden”
Xavier Guell: Weyoose y Coorganizador de Cava&Twitts “Adiós humo, hola servicio”
Javier Martín: Blogger y emprendedor Es la hora de vender!
Jose Antonio del Moral: CEO de Alianzo “Volveremos a hablar de Web 2.0 y no tanto de social media. En el fondo todo es social y no sólo los media”
Ícaro Moyano: Director Comunicación tuenti “¿GRPs? Mejor recomendaciones”
Sebastian Muriel: Director de red.es “Será el año en el que no se dejará de hablar del Social Media en los medios tradicionales”
José Luis Orihuela: Profesor de la Universidad de Navarra “La red y sus aplicaciones se vivirán cada vez más como una experiencia móvil”
Alberto Ortiz de Zárate: Director de Atención Ciudadana en Gobierno Vasco “Empezaremos a hacer un uso inteligente de las redes sociales. En ese camino, la relevancia se desplazará de las herramientas hacia las estrategias de comunicación”
Ismael Peña-López: Profesor Universitat Oberta de Catalunya “Abogo por una construcción del portafolio, por una vuelta a la web personal o institucional, utilizando los social media como un juego de espejos que nos refleje allí donde debamos estar también presentes”
Genis Roca: Socio Director RocaSalvatella “En resumen, las palabras clave para este 2010 serán: Indicadores, Gestión y Resultados”.
Esteban Trigos: Marketing Innovator Director – Double You “las marcas empezarán a incorporar en sus mensajes un nuevo giro a la hora de comportarse: serán más sociales
Marc vidal: CEO de Cink “Será el momento de los Net estrategy por encima de los Managers de comunidad”.
In 2005, Tim O’Reilly published a seminal article — What Is Web 2.0 — in which he provided a definition for the term Web 2.0, which had gained a huge momentum during the previous year since the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference in October 2004.
The concept gathered both technological and philosophical (in the sense of behaviours and attitudes) issues. At the technological level, it dealt about the importance of the web as a delivery (of content and services) platform by excellence; data as the core component of all kind of communications and interchanges; software as a service and not a product, then becoming more important access to software than its “physical” purchase; predominance to RSS and associated procedures for the exchange of content; or (while keeping the importance of the web as a platform) the need to create technologies that were portable across devices. At the philosophical level, and both cause and consequence of the technological advances, the spread (and enabling) of a contribution and participation culture by the society at large (and not only by institutions or organized associations); the acknowledgement that anyone could actually contribute with their knowledge and opinion (the “wisdom of crowds”); the raise of a culture of mixing, assembling and aggregating content; and the will to have rich user experiences when interacting online (vs. A passive, unidirectional, monotonous approach which had been common ground in the previous years).
Besides the “formal” definition of the Web 2.0, it has more often been described through some tools and the new and characteristic ways of using them: the blog and the nanoblog, the wiki, social bookmarking, photo and video sharing websites, tagging and “folksonomies”, syndication and aggregation, etc.
After this philosophical approach – boosted by the technological advancements – many have adapted some of the core definitions to many aspects of life. Thus, for instance, Education 2.0 often referred to as a shift from unidirectional lecturing towards a more participatory approach of learning, based in collaboratively creating learning materials, an intensive usage of web 2.0 tools, or openness and sharing of the process of learning, just to name a few. And along with Education, we can find debates around Research 2.0, Culture 2.0, Government 2.0, Journalism 2.0, Enterprise 2.0… and Politics 2.0.
But, quite often, we do not find specific definitions for such concepts, taking for granted that the reader will be able to do the translation from the Web 2.0 to the Whatever 2.0. I here provide my own definition of Politics 2.0, which I needed for a paper I am preparing about Politics 2.0 in Spain:
Ideas: not closed and packaged propaganda. Ideas that can be spread, shared and transformed by members of the party and partisans, sympathizers and supporter, and the society at large;
Open data: ideas are backed by incredible amounts of data and information made openly available to the general public, and most time provided with open licenses that allow their reuse and remix;
Participation: of all and every kind of people and institutions, blurring the edges of the “structures” and permeating the walls of institutions, making communication more horizontal and plural;
Loss of control of the emission of the message, that now can be transferred outside of mainstream media and diffused on a peer-to-peer and many-to-many basis by means of web 2.0 tools;
Loss of control of the creation itself of the message: being data and participation available, web 2.0 tools at anyone’s reach, and with minimum digital competences, the message can even be created and spread bottom up;
Acknowledgement, hence, of the citizen as some who can be trusted (and used) as a one-man think-tank and a one-man communication-media;
Reversely, possibility to reach each and every opinion, target personal individuals with customized messages, by means of rich data and web 2.0 tools, thus accessing a long tail of voters that are far from the median voter;
Construction of an ideology, building of a discourse, setting up goals, campaigning and government become a continuum that feedbacks in real time.
I admit that this is neither a usual or a formal description, nor a comprehensive set of characteristics. I believe, though, that it could serve in providing a fair framework to contextualize and explain what’s happening at the intersection of Politics and the Web 2.0.
I don’t usually go personal in this blog, but this is a very special occasion:
On September 8th, 2009, at 18:00h, in Barcelona, I’m doing the defence of my PhD thesis Measuring digital development for policy-making: models, stages, characteristics and causes, which deals about the digital economy and whether governments should help in its development for it might have a positive impact on the real economy and on the society at large (say “aye” to everything).
Thus, so far there’s only room for waiting… and acknowledgements. This is how my PhD thesis begins:
Dedication
To the people that pushed, that pulled and that accompanied me on the way:
To my parents, Ismael and Mª del Pilar, for having always stayed behind me and pushing me ahead with the best of gifts ever: education.
To Pere Fabra Abat, for staying in front of me by committing to my project and making out of me a scholar.
To Mercè, for staying besides me by grace of a Benedettian deal; for letting me know, every day, that I could count “con usted / es tan lindo / saber que usted existe / uno se siente vivo”.
Acknowledgements
My first thoughts in this section necessarily go to Tim Kelly. I will never find the words to thank him for his time, the only thing in the world we (still) cannot buy, and I much regret the fact that I will have little chance to pay him back for all his personal dedication. Of all the things I owe to him, I will just mention confidence, almost blind confidence, when he accepted to supervise my dissertation. Confidence, almost as scarce as time.
This dissertation somehow has its roots planted in 2001, when I first took the path of ICT4D. Hanne Engelstad and Yolanda Franco, Joan Fuster and Carles Esquerré were there to join me in to build an audacious project that made of me a professional. Remei Camps joined shortly afterwards, followed by Mónica Choclán, and Josep Salvatella came in and out with most valuable advice. Thank you so much.
Joan Torrent, Francisco Lupiáñez, and Pilar Ficapal were crucial in the third part of the dissertation – and, personally, at many other stages. They deserve a lot of credit for many of the successes that might be in the quantitative part of the dissertation: I am glad I did follow their advice. Joan gave me extra advice in some formal aspects of the dissertation which I highly highly appreciate.
To Agustí Cerrillo, David Martínez, Miquel Peguera – especially for taking it very personal –, Diana Amigó and my other colleagues at the School of Law and Political Science of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya for endless and friendly support when I needed it most (i.e. throughout the whole process).
I owe big gratitude to the anonymous reviewers that sent feedback with most interesting suggestions about the original manuscript.
I am in debt to Tim Unwin (ICT4D Collective, Royal Holloway University of London) for – amongst other things – trying to build a discipline out of the blue and coming up with the Annual ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium and for his commitment and support for novices in the field. The three editions (so far) of the symposium have been amazing learning places. Besides Tim, thanks go to other faculty that thought the project was interesting enough to take part in it: Erkki Sutinen, Khalid Rabayah, Seugnet Blignaut. A special thought goes to Gudrun Wicander, Florence Nameere Kivunike, Isabella Rega, Marcus Duveskog, Annika Andersson, Mathias Hatakka, Marije Geldof, David Hollow, Peter Rawsthorne, Paolo Brunello, Evelyn Kigozi Kahiigi, Ugo Vallauri, Clint Rogers, Mikko Vesisenaho and all other participants for making it possible and unselfishly sharing their knowledge and warmth.
I have enormous gratitude to John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, Urs Gasser, Marcus Foth, Amar Ashar, Mike Best, Ethan Zuckerman and the rest of the faculty and participants in the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme 2007, held at the Harvard University’s Berkman Center in July that year. There have been few times when I have worked so hard and even fewer times when it was so worthwhile.
I have a big sense of gratitude to Dennis McCauley (The Economist Intelligence Unit) and Irene Mia (World Economic Forum) for the time they spent with me and the patient answers to my questions on their respective indices.
A special thought goes to Amy K. Mahan. I’d really love it if you could have read these lines. Thank you so much for the information you sent and the warmth with which you sent it.
Justin Smith (Inside Facebook) and Linda Collard (Synovate) sent, respectively, valuable data on Facebook and Social Networking Site: I really appreciated that.
To Ben Compaine (Boston University), Mike Jensen (IT Consultant) and Phillippa Biggs (International Telecommunication Union) and Divakar Goswami (LIRNEasia): thanks for the dialogue.
To María Rosalía Vicente Cuervo (Universidad de Oviedo): thanks for your own dissertation and kindness.
Very very… very special words to Alison Gillwald, Charley Lewis, Christoph Stork, Khaled Fourati, Alex Comninos, Steve Esselaaar and all the people at the LINK Center: your work rocks. Everybody should recognise about its value and, most important, its relevance and the difficulty of doing it in the most challenging continent. You deserve my deepest admiration.
I deeply admire George Sciadas for his work represents a turning point in the debate about e-Readiness and the measuring of the Information Society. I also do want to thank you for writing back after the confusion: that was really kind.
Richard Heeks (Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester) deserves my deepest admiration too for also contributing to build a discipline out of the blue and, indeed, for sharing the making of it online.
Teresa Peters and people behind Bridges.org have my deepest recognition for, in my opinion, having drawn the blueprints of e-Readiness.
Manuel Acevedo, ICT4D Consultant and another brother in arms at the PhD programme, is able to mix cleverness and kindness in unprecedented ways. Thanks for Madrid, Sevilla, Bonn, Gijón and those still to come.
To the Italian cluster: Paolo Massa (Scientific and Technological Research Centre of Bruno Kessler Foundation), Marco Zennaro, Enrique Canessa and Carlo Fonda (Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics): Thanks for just being great.
John Daly (Development Gateway) edited one of the first – if not the first one – ICT4D blogs I ever read, always coming up with interesting news and insights. I am also in debt to other ICT4D and Information Society experts who shared their knowledge through their blogs (and other digital platforms): Christian Kreutz; Mikhail Doroshevich; Florian Sturm, Martin Konzet and all the people at ICT4D.at, Jon Camfield, Ricard Ruiz de Querol, Tryggvi Thayer, Enrique Dans, Jaume Albaigès and Olga Berrios.
Same as above, but at the institutional level: LIRNEasia, i4d journal, TIER, CIS Washington, PEW Internet Project: please do keep on publishing your stuff.
The ivory tower wouldn’t have crashed down without the friendship of the Spanish ICT4D and NPTECH community, to whom I owe the unquestionable honour to be always kept in their minds José Antonio “Tito” Niño (Spanish Red Cross); Agustí Pérez Foguet and Enginyeria Sense Fronteres Catalunya; Yolanda Rueda, Adrien Mangin and the people at Fundación Cibervoluntarios; Paco Prieto, Jimena Pascual, Josema Alonso and the people at Fundación CTIC; Jordi Duran, Ramon Bartomeus & the people at iWith.org; Frederic Cusí, Cesk Gasulla and the people at Fundación Esplai; Xavi Capdevila and Guillermo Rojo at Fundació FIAS; Valentín Villarroel and Ingeniería Sin Fronteras Madrid; Carlota Franco, Mar Vallecillos, Elena Acín, Paloma Ortega, Marta Reina, Marisol García, Paloma Fundación Chandra; Mai Escobar and Fundación Bip-Bip; Àlex Garcia-Albà and Alexandra Haglund-Petitbó at Agència Catalana de Cooperació al Desenvolupament; Rafael Ruipérez Palmero at AECI Colombia; Gemma Xarles at the Escuela Virtual para América Latina y el Caribe.
Robert Guerra (formerly ICANN and TakingITGlobal, now Freedom House) and Michael Trucano (infoDev at The World Bank): thanks for counting me in.
I want to thank Karin Deutsch Karlekar and Sarah Cook for letting me participate in the reviewing of the questionnaire for the first edition of the Freedom on the Net report. That was a thrilling thing to be in from the start.
A thank you, and a big kudos to the organizers and participants of the Web2fordev conference in Rome, for making of it a milestone in several senses.
I owe César Córcoles (School of Computer Science and Multimedia Studies, UOC) an explanation (or an apology) about communicating vessels and non-reciprocity (or imbalance, to be fair) in knowledge exchange. Stop it, so I can pay you back.
Enric Senabre, a brother in arms at the PhD Programme, might be surprised to find himself here. This is the price you pay for humbleness.
Julià Minguillón and Josep Maria Duart, (UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning – the both of them – and RUSC Review of ICTs and Education – the latter), Agustí Cerrillo (Master in e-Administration) and Rosa Borge (Master in e-Governance) have a curious way of helping people out by giving them more work. It’s insane, but it’s fun, especially when it is related to one’s own research interests.
Mercè wants to appear in the acknowledgements section too – despite already appearing in the dedication which I tell her is better –, so here you are.
There is some supporting people that I might have forgotten: exhaustion plays havoc on memory. My humblest apologies to those who consider having earned for themselves being cited amongst these lines.
À Evite A.: “Perdono tutti e a tutti chiedo perdono. Va bene? Non fate troppi pettegolezzi”.
Last May 14th 2009 I imparted a seminar entitled Measuring digital development for policy-making: Models, stages, characteristics and causes. The role of the government in the framework of the Internet, Law and Political science research seminar series that take place at the School of Law and Political Science, Open University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain)
Though I had previously presented part of my phd research in public, this is officially the first time that I present final results.
The presentation only shows a brief introduction to Part II (quantitative analysis) and partial highlights from Part III (quantitative/statistical analysis), which makes most slides quite cryptic without a speaker (more cryptic, I mean).
Put short — very short —, after defining a conceptual framework (the 360º digital framework) the research draws 4 stages of digital development (after cluster analysis), the three of which are but different levels of a similar digital development path, and the fourth of them a completely different digital development model: leapfroggers.
These stages of digital development are characterized (a profile for each of them is described), and some determinants (causes) for this digital development (or underdevelopment) are calculated by means of logistic regressions.
Main ideas/findings
The research shows the huge importance of governments in framing and fostering digital development, which is more important and should be more direct the less digitally developed is a specific economy.
It is important to note that government action should be, firstly, focused in framing and give incentives to the real economy, entrepreneurship and innovation; and secondly, to foster the digital economy by means of providing it with an appropriate policy and regulatory framework but also by means of “pull” strategies.
Thus said, the findings show that digital development is compatible with both liberal and Keynesian policies, and that supply-side policies and direct intervention are only worth applying below a minimum threshold of infrastructures. After some infrastructure is installed, policies should especially focus to trigger demand (not to increase the aggregate demand, which is a completely different thing).
This goes against the belief that the government should subsidise computers or content; but it also goes against the belief that the government should just care for the regulatory framework: public policies are a determinant of digital development.
What policies then? Fostering digital services, both private supplied as public e-services, as these services will pull de demand more effectively than other kind of policies.
Two caveats:
Basic development (income, health, education, equality) accompanies any other kind of digital development, which means that it has to be addressed first hand and, indeed, be the target itself where to apply the benefits of digital development.
Leapfroggers show that another model from the previous one is possible. It is my concern, nevertheless, how a model based in a powerful ICT Sector aimed towards international trade will impact the domestic economy beyond an eminently direct level. In other words, policies fostering a domestic digital development will have both direct and indirect multiplier effects, the latter being the most powerful ones and, maybe, absent in a leapfrogger model.
La acción ciudadana depende, en gran medida, de la concurrencia de dos factores. Por una parte, la identificación y difusión de una necesidad de amplio interés y, en la medida de lo posible, en poder reclutar apoyo para dar respuesta a dicha necesidad. Por otra parte, por la capacidad para acceder a los recursos necesarios para cubrir, de forma efectiva, dicha necesidad. En la medida que la información y la comunicación juegan un papel cada vez más importante en ambas cuestiones, las nuevas tecnologías se posicionan como la herramienta por excelencia para el empoderamiento de la ciudadanía.
This book chapter is the last one of a series of writings and speeches around the concept of the Personal Research Portal that began its journey in 2006. As the (so far) last from the series, I think it is the most accurate one, benefiting from the reviewers observations (thank you). I am grateful to the editors for having given me the opportunity to think over some concepts and polish them up. On the other hand, the book is full of very interesting chapters by authors that are actually paving the path of digital skills, online communities, etc.
Abstract and editors’ notes
We here propose the concept of the Personal Research Portal (PRP) – a mesh of social software applications to manage knowledge acquisition and diffusion – as a means to create a digital identity for the researcher – tied to their digital public notebook and personal repository – and a virtual network of colleagues working in the same field. Complementary to formal publishing or taking part in congresses, and based on the concept of the e-portfolio, the PRP is a knowledge management system that enhances reading, storing and creating at both the private and public levels. Relying heavily on Web 2.0 applications – easy to use, freely available – the PRP automatically implies a public exposure and a digital presence that enables conversations and network weaving without time and space boundaries.
[…]
Peña-López proposes the concept of the Personal Research Portal (PRP) – a mesh of social software applications to manage knowledge acquisition and diffusion. This is premised on the belief that there is a place for individual initiatives to try and bridge the biases and unbalances in the weight that researchers and research topics have in the international arena. The chapter highlights the main perceived benefits of a PRP that include building a digital identity, information sharing, the creation of an effective e-portfolio, and the sharing of personal and professional networks. He concludes that the main challenges that need to be addressed include access to technology and developing appropriate skills, problems that are recognised as stemming from the digital divide.
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