"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

About

Brian Kelly gave a talk on Building on Use of Personal Web 2.0 Technologies at the Online Information 2009 conference. The conference was held on 1-3^rd December 2009 in the Olympia Grand Hall, London.

The talk, which lasted for 25 minutes, took place in the session on "Evaluating, recommending and justifying 2.0 tools" which formed part of "The social web: transforming the workplace" track on Tuesday 1^st December from 14.00-15.30.

In addition to speaking Brian chaired this session.

Talk: Building on Use of Personal Web 2.0 Technologies

Title

Building on Use of Personal Web 2.0 Technologies

Speaker

Brian Kelly

Proposal for

Conference

Theme

Practical Web 2.0

Form of presentation

Research results

Three key learning points

1. An understanding of how an individual's use of Web 2.0 technologies can benefit the organisation
2. An awareness of the risks which individual's use of third-party Web 2.0 technologies might entail
3. An understanding of strategies for minimising such risks to the organisation

Date And Time

Tuesday 1^st December 2009 in the session running from 14.00-15.30

Outline

The benefits which Web 2.0 services can provide to organisations are now becoming widely understood. A range of Web 2.0 technologies including blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, social sharing services, social networking, etc. are available which can help organisations achieve their organisational goals and support members of the organisation in their professional activities.

In order to build on the initial successes there is a need for further advocacy work, but also learning from initial experimentation. There will also be a need to recognise that use of Social Web services and the associated culture of openness, sharing and risk-taking does not reflect everyone's preferred style of working.

Since many of the popular Web 2.0 services are intended for use by individuals, rather than organisations there will be a variety of risks to the organisation in use of such tools which may not necessarily be fully appreciated by the individual users. Such risks will include issues related to the sustainability and reliability of such services together with questions about the ability to migrate not only data but also comments, communities, access rights, etc. In addition to the risks associated with the services themselves, there are also the risks to the host organisation related to the user of the service. What if inappropriate language is used on a blog, for example? But even if the individual does make use of such Web 2.0 technologies in an appropriate way or if editorial processes are deployed there are still the questions as to what might happen if the individual leaves the organisation, is sick for an extended period or, indeed, dies. In such circumstances will resources which may be regarded as organisational intellectual assets, be lost? Will unmaintained blogs become full of spam? And what if an employee is sacked and chose to delete data and accounts which had been created for work purposes?

This talk will explore these issues and describe a risks and opportunities framework which is being developed to assist in the identification of possible risks, and strategies for managing such risks. This framework recognises that an avoidance of risks can lead to a failure to exploit opportunities and so does not seek to avoid use of externally hosted Web 2.0 services entirely.

The talk will be based on a previously published paper on "Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends" and related work in this area.

Biographical Details

Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus, a post funded by the JISC and the MLA which advises the UK's higher and further education communities and museums, libraries and archives sector on standards, emerging technologies and best practices for use of the Web. Brian works at UKOLN, a national centre of expertise in digital information management, which is based at the University of Bath.

Brian became involved in the Web in its infancy when he helped set up a Web site in January 1993 whilst working at the University of Leeds. He moved to his current job in 1996.

Brian is an experienced speaker having given over 300 presentations during his time at UKOLN.

Brian was presented with the Information World Review's Information Professional of the Year award at the Inline Information 2007 conference.

Brian's current interests include making use of standards and supporting accessibility from a user-focussed position, exploring the potential of Web 2.0 and developing best practices for individual and organisational use of Web 2.0. His recent publications include "Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2.0 Services", "Contextual Web Accessibility - Maximizing the Benefit of Accessibility Guidelines" and "A Contextual Framework For Standards".

Slides

Building on Use of Personal Web 2.0 Technologies

[MS PowerPoint 97/2000 format] - [HTML format]

 

Accompanying Resources

For a list of related resources please see the del.icio.us social bookmarking Web site using the tag 'online-information-2009'.