Don’t Do It Yourself
Recently, Alumni Futures published an article about a new Digg-style method for collecting ideas for alumni events and gauging interesting in them. The project is called AlumnIdea and is the being created for UC San Diego. Essentially, alumni can post new ideas for events and then vote them up or down, ostensibly giving the UCSD alumni officers a list of events they should start organizing.
This idea seems great at the outset. It’s engaging and it creates less work for the alumni office, since they don’t have to think of ideas for events. Though, as some of the comments in the Alumni Futures article pointed out, there’s the possibility that the alumni office wouldn’t have the staff or the funds to throw the events that got chosen. That’s a very good point and brings to the forefront the need to take the idea of participation all the way.
The idea of inclusive technologies like Digg and social networks are that they enable certain things to get done. In the case of Digg, a user can share a story and people can vote and comment on it. Engaged users can feel like they have a say in what media (because they do) and can feel like they have a venue for sharing news they find. Peripheral users can visit to find what the popular, democratic news of the moment is. Digg is an inclusive site that allows news-sharing. Likewise, social networks allow people to meet each other, often times in real life. The point of Facebook isn’t so much to get as many friends as possible, but to solidify already existing friendships and to make new connections that are more than just another tally in the friend count through groups, wall posts, messaging, etc. In each case (and most inclusive or social media cases), the technology acts as a facilitator.
In the case of AlumnIdea, the submission and voting system acts to facilitate getting ideas in the hands of the alumni officers, but it falls short of being a completely democratic tool to coordinate alumni events once it shuts the alumni out of the organizational process. Beyond just suggesting events, AlumnIdea could become an actual tool to engage the alumnae in the process of making an event happen. The alumnae are already using the site to suggest idea, and there’s no reason why that idea couldn’t be expanded to have alumnae organize fundraisers for the event, donate their time, or send out invitations to other alumni to promote the event.
If this concept is beginning to sound like Facebook groups, that’s because Facebook groups are one of the major grassroots organizational tools for alumni (unless Patrick Kelly from Plano Senior High School has stolen the group) and shouldn’t be ignored. Facebook groups work well because they collect a lot of energized people, but in this case the groups lack the direct tie to the alumni office and the office’s resources. Combining an energized base with institutional resources through technology can make events that were going to happen anyway (meetups organized through Facebook, for example) much more inclusive and can make events happen that otherwise would have not gotten off the ground (fundraisers or events that need an up-front investment, for example). The important part to remember is that it isn’t necessary to do it all yourself, often people just need a little push to do big things.
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February 17, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Your added insights are right on the mark – especially the aspect of “tech as facilitator of network interaction.” Thanks for the follow up. I linked here from my original posting.