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Looking across the articles in this month's FUMSI, I was somewhat struck by the pace of change we are seeing in our digital information landscape, something borne out by some recent work I've been doing on the British Election campaign. During the course of the campaign I used Dipity, the timeline tool, to curate a collection of over 100 interesting digital aspects to the campaign (http://www.dipity.com/currybet/Digital-election-timeline). I've subsequently been analysing them and what has intrigued me is how digital publishing, and in particular the social Internet, has shifted the balance of power from traditional gatekeepers.
When Britain went to the polls in 1992, the World Wide Web didn't exist. The communication channels available to politicians were tightly controlled by the party to which they belonged, who desperately tried to get airtime for their views on TV and radio, and in the printed press. Fast forward to 2010, and there was a multitude of channels available to the parties, and all of them used social media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to try and connect to voters. There was another key difference, which didn't really seem to impact on even the 2005 British Election. This was the much greater feedback loop and way of communicating in real-time for the public provided by Facebook and Twitter. It sometimes seemed that as soon as a strong political image emerged, it took the collective hive mind of the British public mere minutes to produce, upload and start spreading a spoof version.
This month's FUMSI collection reminds me of how much this real-time feedback and social collaboration has invaded our corporate and institutional worlds. Heather Negley writes about the real-time phenomenon, and how this is beginning to affect traditional information niches. It isn't just people tweeting their thoughts about games in the FIFA World Cup; it is people tweeting the symptoms of diseases, or using volumes of search queries to track the spread of an illness.
Scott Brown talks about the social production of content, with teams at Oracle fostering a wiki-based technical reading community and producing a volume of content and interactivity way beyond the scope of a single team directing recommendations. Kate Simpson describes how our information space needs have outgrown the strict document and folder hierarchy that has dominated computer operating systems and software for so long. We've grown so used to tagging things in albums on the Web, and using faceted discovery of programmes on our TV set-top boxes, that the old way just doesn't seem to cut it any more.
And in this month's Share article, Toby Ward looks at how the social intranet is increasing the sharing of knowledge. I can remember being at the BBC when having an intranet wiki was the sudden 'flavour of the month', or when implementing blogs internally was a strategy to 'transform business culture'. A few years later, and, as Toby points out, the penetration of this type of social software in intranets is immense. His article includes a brief case study on how the Province of British Columbia deployed social intranet tools and it is worth noting that, just like the rapid feedback loop involving the public in the recent British election, this is an organisational change that could not have been imagined even a couple of years ago. It is that rapid pace of change that makes our working environment so challenging...and, as far as I'm concerned, so rewarding and enjoyable.
Martin Belam is the contributing editor for the FUMSI 'Share' practice area.
This Share editorial appeared in FUMSI Magazine 30 (June 2010)
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