Schlagwort-Archive: Volonteurope Conference

Internet, Social Media & Volunteering (Part III)

Hannes Jahnert | 12. Oktober 2010

In older days the world was a plate, after that it was a ball and just now it is a network. (cp. J. Tomlinson 1999)

It’s a simple truth: The world is changing. Not only the technical development is in process, the human development is in process too. Even more: The biological and the social nature of men got completed with a technical one. Already in 1985 Donna Haraway realized that and penned “a Cyborg Manifesto”. Her credo:

“We are all Cyborgs!”

Of course this special Cyborg Metaphor didn’t mean scary creatures like The Borg from Starship USS Enterprise. It’s more about “prosthetic devices” as Haraway wrote. Its about devices we use (we have to use), if we would take part in our society.

Naturally in earlier days these devices havent been computers. Even during the 1980th the currently development of the Internet wasn’t foreseeable. The standard devices in these days, when the world was a plate, were the font chiselled in a rock or smoke signals send through the sky. After that, when the world becomes a ball, paper and pen, books and newspaper got the devices men used (and have to use) to take part in society. With the development of computers and the network technology since the later 1960th computers got an greater extend of the daily reality in our society.

In the last two parts of this column about “Internet, Social Media & Volunteering” I described the rise of the Internet, the so called Web 2.0 and Social Media. In this part — at the moment the last one — I’m going to point out some ideas how we can use the Internet for our work with volunteers.

Usage of the Internet while working with volunteers

Round about 475 million Europeans are using the Internet (Internet World States, June 2010). That is more than 58% of all Europeans and nearly a quarter of the internet users of the whole world (24.7%). From several statistics in Germany we know, that most of these internet users are well situated and young until middle aged people, which actively take part in socially development. They inform them self via online newspapers and talk to their friends on Facebook (or other social networking services). They sign petitions and backup online campaigns with themes they’re passionate about. All in one: They use the internet as integral part of their daily communication.

Many volunteers use the Internet in exactly this way — of course: volunteers aren’t any other kind of men, volunteers are Cyborgs too. They communicate via e-mails and social networking services about their daily work and engagement. They are writing what they’re doing and what they think about projects they’re involved in. In our days of computer and network technology communication gets more and more decentralised and because of that uncontrollable. Accordingly to this the first step to use the Internet and Social Media for the work with volunteers should be to open up an interactive cannel to volunteers online.

Sending e-mail newsletters to them, adding them as friends at social networking platforms and making useful communicational offers via textes, hyperlinks, video and podcasts to them could be a good fist step. But to interact with volunteers not only means to inform them! It also means to open up a feedback channel to them and discus their input and implement it to your work — even if it is critical.

Why should you do that?

Taking the people of Scoopvill from my last post as example we can say that giving and getting feedback via Social Media is very simple. Open up a channel can help you to canalize the feedback so that it simply reaches the right person and don’t become the word of mouth that’s maybe peeve to you. Think about what happened at Scoopevill: Sylvia produces ice cream with pickles. Not many people loved it but they find it interesting and perhaps tell their friends:

Oh, if you like to taste a very special ice cream, you have to visit Sylvia!

What should have been happen if Sylvia didn’t open up a feedback cannel to her stakeholders? Surly she would have wondered why just a few men love her pickle ice cream. Perhaps she would have changed to vanilla flavour. But that were already produced by the ice cream factory in a very good way. Sylvia would have set up a senseless business competition she could not win and break up the production of an interesting flavour that already has had a couple of loyal fans.

All in one: Feedback can help us to improve our work — and especially our volunteer management — because we get to know what’s going on with our volunteers, what our volunteers are thinking about our organisation and were the shoe is pinching. Of course providing a pubic feedback channel to the internet community could be precarious. Both, laudation and critic, becomes publicized. A few organisations already realize that and tried to set up an own social network for their volunteers.

In my opinion that is not a very good idea! Even if some social networking services have not the very best privacy policies, the volunteers and other stakeholders we’d like to reach are their and not at another platform — especially not at ours. Organisations, that’s my catchphrase, have to communicate were their stakeholders are!

… and of course online volunteering

Another idea to use the Internet for the work with volunteers I already described at the last years Volonteurope Conference in Sarajevo. The idea of online volunteering is as simple as the catchphrases that organisations have to communicate were their stakeholders are: They have to offer volunteer opportunities were their volunteers are! Offering opportunities that volunteers can carry out via the Internet from their home or work computer can help to involve volunteers that because of time and / or geographically barriers normally have no access to volunteer opportunities. Therefore please find my last years presentation about “Fit 4 Online-Volunteering – The essential investments” and the presentation slides:

Surely the Internet offers many other opportunities and challenges we have to discuss. But interacting and encountering on a par with volunteers and stakeholders have to be the primarily principle of all our Social Media activities. Offering real advantages and communicating in a transparent way can help to improve your work as well as building up robust networks and finding more volunteers for our organisations.

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Internet, Social Media & Volunteering (Part II)

Hannes Jahnert | 26. September 2010

At the end of July I published the first part of my column about Internet, Social Media and Volunteering. On one hand it is part of my preparations for the ‘master class’ session at 19th Volonteurope Conference in Athens this year. On the other hand it is also an approach to raise the interactivity even before the start of the conference.

In my last blogpost I tried to describe the history of the Internet since the first really usable computers in 1957. I ended with the web interface “World Wide Web” as the Internet we know today. In this current post, which affiliates to the first one, I’ll try to explain (1st) what happened in the later 1990th until the early 21th century, (2nd) the rise of the so called “Web 2.0” and the term “Social Media” and (3rd) some basic standards in the field of Social Media.

(1st) Web 1.0 and its big crash:

At the end of my last post I pointed out that the World Wide Web was seen as the next big market place. Especially the technical development of graphical interfaces, that allows more than a cryptic flow of information as we know from films like The Matrix, lays down the barriers for ‘normal’ users. With the very popular web browsers MOSAIC (1993) and NETSCAPE (1995) the Internet became more and more a mainstream medium. Users could get informed via the Internet easily and the idea of something like a virtual shopping mall without any barriers of time and space stimulates this so called New Economy.

Everyone would take part in this development — everyone would get a piece of the pie: On one side there where many tradesmen who set up (once in a while crazy) business models, on the other side there where many private investors who wanted to earn money with the stocks of this businesses. Because of the scorching development and the very high stock quotas tradesmen could find venture capital investors for business models like selling e-mail ads to consumers — businesses that never sell anything. All in one the New Economy wasn’t a consumer based market. It was a phenomenon of the financial economy that got inflated like a soap bubble and even burst like it. The graph below shows the development of the NASDAQ, the biggest American stock exchange for those electronic businesses.


After the dotcom-bubble burst in 2000 many businesses disappear until 2001. Only a few start-ups from the New Economy survive. Start-ups like Google (founded in 1998) and Amazon (founded in 1994) that really offer a value to their users. But what was the value these services offer to their users? Why did they survive the big crash of the New Economy?

For Google we find the answer in the nearly exponential rising of the WWW (remember the graph at the end of my last post). If it was possible that users could get informed while surfing through the early WWW and clicking from one site to another now they have to search for information they’re interested in. With the PageRank Google offers the first search engine that afforded really usable search findings. (The Pulizer Prize winner David A. Vise wrote down the whole amazing story of Google.Inc in 2005) But what’s about Amazon? In contrast to Googles PageRank a bookshop was really not a new invention. Actually Amazon seems to be the result of the New Economy and it’s thinking of the Internet as something like a virtual shopping mall.

Sure: primarily Amazon is a bookshop. The major difference is the great variety of books Amazon offers, and the way it sells them. First of all: Amazon uses their advantage that they don’t really have to store all the stuff they sell. In contrast to the bookshop around the corner online bookshops like Amazon are able sell special books and niche products they could order if someone ask for them. Because Amazon is the biggest player in that market they earn money with an effect named “Long Tail”. The embedded video shows a lecture by Chris Anderson about the Long Tail from 2006.

The other value that Amazon offers, are the ratings, descriptions and comments from their users. On one hand user references are more reliable than ordinary ads sended by the companies that earn the money. On the other hand the advertisement for the niche products they sell is simply not lucrative.


Taking Amazon as an example I think we can point out, that only those services survived that offer real values to their consumers and users. Amazon used the advantages of the web strategically and created values that are only imaginable with web technologies. Even if we won’t earn money with our web services in the way Amazon do it, we have to keep that in mind. In view of the still rising number of web services, private homepages, blogs and social networks we shouldn’t step into this field without a strategy that present unique values to the users.

(2nd) Web 2.0 and Social Media

But what exactly means “Web 2.0”? At the end of my first blogpost I wrote about the ‘social part of the Internet’ that exists next to all the others like e-mailing or shopping and information sites. The Web 2.0 is not about a further development of the Internet as a technology. Protocols like the TCP/IP and decentralised data are still the core of the Internet — and equally the core of the Web 2.0. Actually the term Web 2.0 is nothing more than an advertising phrase that means a new way to use and develop the existing Internet technologies.

Tim O’Reilly — whom ascribed the invention of this term — published a very popular article about “What is Web 2.0” in 2005 (it also got translated in several languages). In his article he pointed out several transformations from the Web 1.0 to the Web 2.0. For example, the transformation from the information cannel Internet to the Web 2.0 as a daily (working) platform, the transformation from expert knowledge to crowd intelligence and the transformation of the relation between technology and processed data.

Tim O’Reilly shows in his article that the usage of the Internet has changed after the burst of the dotcom bubble. (I described above.) Unfortunately there is not really more inside this article — especially because the differences between the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 don’t get really clear. Private homepages e.g. where used as diaries even before the term “weblog” came up and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s WorldWideWeb-Broser (the first browser developed by the father of the Internet himself) allows its users to edit the web even before the term “produser” was invented.

What after all really makes a difference between the Internet before and the Internet after the millennium is the range of Social Media that increase every year. If an editor of the early WWW needed a lot of knowledge about HTML an editor of the Wikipedia or even a blogger like me don’t need to know about <table>, <border>, <head> or <body>. The usability of web services like the Wikipedia and blog software like WordPress got much easier in bygone years. Everyone can use social software easily. Everyone can set up a weblog and start using Twitter or Facebook within 10 minutes. Everyone can use social software and take part in Social Media.

Social Media after all allows us to take part and face its development not only as users but also as producers (“produser”). But since I asked above, what “Web2.0″ exactly means, I also have to ask what the exact meaning of “Social Media” would be. If we’re stickler for the term Social Media it seems to be a tautology. Because every social act is about communication every media we use to communicate have to be social. According to Social Media there’re two reasons to use the term anyhow (following Stefan Münker 2009):

  • First (the less good reason): “Social Media” is a proper name for a kind of media that allows us to socialize via the Internet. It’s even pointless to criticise the sense of proper names. I could just as well ask what my parents goal was, when they named me Hannes.
  • And second (that’s the better reason): There is really a difference between “old” media and Social Media. Even if nobody read a book (as an example for an old medium) the book is a medium that allows a social process (reading, learning or whatever). If nobody uses, reads or writes in Facebook, Twitter or other Social Media services they don’t allow any social process — they’re simple inexistent. Social Media, we can say, are the result of its use.

(3rd) Using Social Media

But what means using Social Media? At first please have a look to another commoncraft video, a town named Scoopville and some delicate sorts of ice cream :-)

The inhabitants of Scoopville use Social Media at first to inform about and advertise for their ice cream. Secondly they’re using the house boards to develop their products while asking for feedback. Using Social Media makes getting feedback pretty easy. But that’s not all. The creation of new sorts of ice cream became possible because they got a new technology with which they could match flavours they know with the regular ice cream.

As I pointed out above, this technology is not about a new protocol, a new release of the Internet or less than ever any kind of a machine. It is a metaphor for the development of the Internet itself. We saw that the Internet’s core is decentralised data and it’s automated put together via web browsers (remeber the second video in my last blogpost). Exactly this remains even if the development goes on. Decentralised data no longer means only that the websites are saved at servers from which they are made available. It also means that the content (the images, the videos, the animations and the textes) cames from many different servers. At the website this content only gets matched (or better: mashed) by the carrier of the web service.

To summarize this post I think we can point out once again that the only thing that changed in the last decade is that nowaday ‘normal’ users are able to match the content — not only paid experts. This mashing up existing content to new products at the own website, the possibility of giving and getting feedback, the information about what is going on and the advertisement for created products are some of the basic standards in the world of Social Media. If you have a closer look to this website (my blog) you’ll find all of it.

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Internet, Social Media & Volunteering (Part I)

Hannes Jahnert | 28. Juli 2010

A few months ago the board of Volonteurope has accepted my proposal for its 19th conference this year in Athens. Just like I’ve already done it for my infoshop for the Lebenshilfe at castle Rauischholzhausen earlier this year, I’ll prepare for this presentation via my blog. Of course not only to improve my written English! Following the feedback from last years participants, Piotr Sadowski (the Volonteurope General Secretary) asked me, and (hopefully) all the other presenters, to raise the interactivity of the ‘master classes’. I’ll do so and I will give the chance to all of you to interact already during my preparations …

Let’s get on in:
I think as a first step to get into the theme “Internet, Social Media & Volunteering” we should talk about what exactly we’re talking about. We must talk about the Internet as one part, then we take a deeper look at Social Media and finally we want to know how we can use this ‘new technology’ for our work with volunteers and even how to improve voluntarism at all.

Fortunately it is not necessary that I explain the history of the Internet or the idea of the so called ‘Web 2.0’ and Social Media. Other people have done this in a more visual way before. That’s why I decided to compose a variety of videos and animations from which I point some important facts out.

At first we will take a look at the history of the Internet. This video is round about eight minutes long and begins with the first usable computers in 1957.

From this video I think we can point out the following facts:

  • The Internet is not generally the result of a military project called ARPAnet. Already the term “Internet” is the result of the development in France — not the United States. Furthermore the data protection system in the USA weren’t thinkable without the technical development before.

  • Because of technical problems and the idea of knowledge management decentralised computer networks like the ARPAnet were developed.

  • All in one the history of the Internet is a history of solving different problems and the history of combining various approaches worldwide.

After the hardware of ARPAnet was removed in 1990 not only the Internet goes on. Its development goes on too. Sir Tim Berners-Lee published his program markup language HTML and the World Wide Web, the Internet as we know, was born.

The next video is a production of Commoncraft, a small company in Seattle – Washington – USA that motto is “our product is explanation”. Commoncraft is publishing very good videos “in plain English” which are free to use (CC-Licence). Please watch also one of the other 30 videos of Commoncraft at youtube.com.

Important facts in this video were:

  • The whole World Wide Web is, like the Internet before, about decentralised data and driven by different protocols — we don’t really need to know exactly how it works.

  • But: What we need to realise is that millions of servers with billions and billions of web pages are findable via their URLs. That is why we have to push our websites via linking and linking and linking …

  • “Information of the whole world can reach our computer.” Contrariwise: All our information we load up to the Internet, can reach people from all over the world

The rest of the WWW history is proposed quickly: After Berners-Lee published his Hypertext Markup Language more and more websites were published. In the graph below you can see that the development was nearly exponential. With browser programs the Internet got usable for everyone — not only for scientists and experts. More and more companies published an own website and tried to sell various products. The World Wide Web was seen as the next big market place and because of that temporally, this is what it’s growing up to.


So far and no further about the history of Internet and the “Web 1.0”, like Tim O’Reilly named it in 2005. In the next post we will take a look at the social part of the Internet. I use the expression “social part” because the other parts of Internet aren’t gone. All the thoughts I pointed out in this post still exist next to the new social part. The decentralised data transfer between computers still is the core of the Internet. Even if we don’t have to understand exactly how it works — the TCP/IP is just as important as in the first days of the Internet and without web browsers we couldn’t use any Social Media tool.

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