Week 3 -- Produsage & EMS site

What uses might a collaborative wiki or blog have in your chosen (current or desired) work environment? How would they support learning and/or performance? What would be the design and implementation challenges if management tried to do this? What would be the design and implementation challenges of a user-initiated effort?

From last blog, wiki is spatially organized and great for editing. Blog is chronologically organized and great for diary or temporal sequencing.

My produsage project is creating a framework for an EMS community of practice, specifically a forum for sharing lessons learned from specific calls. The forum, therefore, must be like a blog -- each participant telling a story and sharing lessons learned, and like a wiki -- spatially organized for ease of reference. Ideally, each lesson learned will be tagged for searchability.

The challenges imagined were social -- developing the community, providing specific and brief guidance for posting, searching, commenting. Social issues include building trust and rapport, equipotentiality, heterarchial structure, communal ownership, individual reward -- without ever using these words. I wanted to create a culture where everyone felt ownership of the site and sensed value in participation.

The immediate challenges, however, are technical. Only the most naive of users (me) would jump to the psycho-social challenges! First, and foremost, you need a site. A site involves a domain name. Although freebies exist, all of the ones I visited were dominated by spam or pornographic posting. Sooo, on the advice of a friend (thanks Bryan!), I went to GoDaddy.

Then, I had to choose a domain name and pray it wasn't used. Then, I had to select what services I wanted. I actually went several times. Each visit was over an hour -- what does it mean to "host"? what is a picture gallery? to blog or not to blog? certify? privacy? Each visit, I perused more help pages, tutorials, demonstrations, counsel for domain names. Each visit was cut short prior to finalizing purchase due to 1) time for class, 2) time to board, 3) connection lost. Now, that I have finally settled on name and services, I have to wait 24-48 hours for web page access. Soooo, web page will not be up in time for Produsage assignment submission. By the way, you have to have a host!

Sooo, though I am planning to proceed with site (already have links, pics, initial posts, potential community), I will launch with Twitter and Facebook and keep you updated as web page goes live.

Design and implementation challenges if administration tried to do this are issues of trust, reprisal, and ownership. Morale in our service is at an all time low, so most medics would be loathe to contribute voluntarily (off clock) to administrative mandate. Potential participants would also suspect administrative motive -- is administration looking to mark posters as incompetent (if you "learned a lesson," why didn't you already know? -- are you incompetent?). Finally, participants would want to know who owns the content. If administration prompted participation, the project would have the appearance of a service limited scope and proprietary content.

User-initiated content needs to address all of these issues and assure community ownership, authorship, absence of reprisal, voluntary participation to share and learn and grow professionally.

But FIRST, ya gotta have a site!

--Barbara