Social Software for Social Entrepreneurs

Lee Brynat of Headshift Moments makes a recent presentation on how the new "social software" can help scale communities of interest at very low cost.

1. Social networks are at the heart of social enterprise – so called "social software" can make it easier to build and scale these networks in support of collective action.
2. Social computing is not new; social software is a welcome return to the core purpose of the net: connecting people.
3. Online social networks are emerging as a core infrastructural element - a kind of organisational immune system - that can support distributed, values-based communal activity.

Lee defines social software as:
- Simple, easy to use tools and services using open standards
- Aim to create social affordances through network effects
- Augment, not replace, human interaction
- Model of networked individualism.

Lee's approach towards implementation and his general guidlines are indeed insightful - he says:
- A balanced approach of networked individualism and free-style group forming can unleash dialogue and collective action
- Manage feeds, not items: informal weblogs, feed aggregation and bottom-up metadata can help solve the content problem
- Online social networking works best for a specific common purpose, not for its own sake
- Engage with people on their own terms and build the network person by person, group by group
- Embrace rather than deny complexity: "Small pieces, loosely joined" is more resilient than command and control.The full presentation is available here. Lee also goes on to provide suggestions for implement social software within enteprises.A good presentation with lot of details - I particularly liked Lee's emphasis on flexible metadata models and total aggregation and syndication.Lee is spot on when he talks about IT department as an impediment - by focussing on Classic IT barriers to action
- Overformality and inflexibility of systems, preference for centralised command and control software.

Lee, adds on that there are so many useful and innovative social enterprise projects , but here's a few cheap and easy ones to get started:

1. Start a weblog and persuade everybody involved to talk about their work in an open, honest and engaging way
2. Use a newsreader; find and read all relevant weblogs and other online sources in your field of interest
3. Offer RSS feeds for your content and make sure you can be found on Google, Techorati and other search engines
4. Find other weblogs that talk about issues of interest, find intersections with you own work and comment on them / link to them to begin connecting your conversations with the wider world
5. Take photos of what you do and tag them on Flickr with terms related to your area of work
6. Put links up on Del.icio.us with similarly relevant tags
7. Get yourself onto LinkedIn and other online social networks, talking and writing about what you do
8. Use an internal wiki to organise project documents, to do lists and commonly used information
9. Offer Weblogs to your partners and supporters so that they can talk about the issues too - then when people are posting regularly, aggregate the content using user-defined keywords or tags and perhaps apply some form of text analysis to identify common themes