I tag the hand that feeds me: examining

aggregation and tagging

in the nonprofit world

Beth Kanter, May 30, 2006

Unscientific Content Analysis based on Examples Found on Net2

Findable

What are some ways thatNonprofits can pick the low

What are some ways thatNonprofits can pick the low

Social Aspect, Discovery

What did you tag?

What are some ways thatNonprofits can pick the low

What have you tagged?

Sharing Your Knowledge

http://del.icio.us/poco

Publish w/RSS feed to your blog

A story ….

I’m off to the computer lab across the street to help a client with a job search …

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kros/

Wow!

And I’ll email you the info for the food stamps online application tutorial later …. have to go….

“benefits” folder or “food stamps” folder … Yikes, I have over a 100 folders!

Crap!

Alice’

s

Jane’s

Billy’sSally’s

Jim’sLisa’s

Walter’s

Mar

nie’s

Nancy’s

And I’ll email you the info for the food stamps online application tutorial later …. have to go….

There is must be a better way …

And I’ll email you the info for the food stamps online application tutorial later …. have to go….

And I’ll email you the info for the food stamps online application tutorial later …. have to go….

Plays with del.icio.us

Hmm … I can ditch those diskettes!

And I’ll email you the info for the food stamps online application tutorial later …. have to go….

Discovers the social aspect

I can wander through other people’s bookmarks by tags and find related items in a way that helps me get at various topics

Is this a better way to share and track each other’s resources than our current system.

We need some standard tags to make this work.

Playshop

Check out the resources I found tagged with NPTECH.

Tagging? Delicious? Tell me more ….

A little later …

And I’ll email you the info for the food stamps online application tutorial later …. have to go….

And I’ll email you the info for the food stamps online application tutorial later …. have to go….

How do we explain this to

our ED?

We need some standard tags.

Will this produce a quality set of

resources or more chaos?

Let’s try an experiment and see

what we learn …

And I’ll email you the info for the food stamps online application tutorial later …. have to go….

Bootstrapping delicious to publish resources to web….

• share web resources internally and find them more efficiently than email silos

• publish resource lists to an otherwise static web site

Tagging a tool for npos to …

• Tagging policy or standardized tags

• Some instructions• Helper tools to

make work process efficient

• Willingness to experiment

• Anything else?

In practice …

What are some ways thatNonprofits can pick the low

Challenge:

Reflection Questions for wider adoption

• How can enthusiasts talk about the results more versus the process of tagging?

•How do we help NPO leaders (whose learning styles or organizational context make it difficult for them to) understand the value of tagging? •How do we support or encourage a collaborative tagging practice that leads a quality set of resources?

•How do we manage the “messiness” of tagging to avoid information overload while still reaping the benefits of the social aspect?