Social Media Community of Practice

Social Media is the emerging domain encompassing participatory information and communication technologies that empower everyday people in society to easily access, organize, produce, distribute and comment on content. This includes web-based activities that you may know already and take for granted, such as social networking (e.g. Facebook, Linkedin), citizen journalism (e.g. blogging and twittering), collaboration and knowledge sharing (e.g. Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Google), and multimedia sharing (e.g. YouTube, Flickr, iTunes). It also includes other emerging participatory technologies that you may be less familiar with, such as interactive mobile phone applications and web applications that communicate tightly with mobile phones to create powerful new ways of accessing and sharing content.

We invite Social Media innovators and implementers who are developing and implementing Social Media innovations for scaling impact to join us!

For implementers

Social Media presents an opportunity for multi-stakeholder networks and other organizations around the world to address organizational and communications challenges, both internally and externally, as well as to actually transform the ways they serve and interact with network members, partners and beneficiaries. The opportunity is often overlooked, however, given the fact that the most prominent Social Media services like Facebook, YouTube and iTunes are oriented to consumers in rich countries for personal entertainment. The perception of risk of information overload or additional work accompanying the new tools also hinders its effective adoption.

By bringing together innovators and implementers, we are able to provide a space where implementers (and potential implementers) can gain an understanding of the power of the various Social Media tools already available and how they might implement them to scale the impact of their activities.

For innovators

There are also opportunities to contribute to the Social Media "ecosystem" and to help make Social Media innovations even better. Social Media is made possible by innovations, some new and some not so new, that operate largely behind the scenes and which are already scaling the impact of the web and mobile phones on the way everyone in the world with access to the Internet or a mobile phone works, plays, votes, and serves. These innovations include open source software licensing, creative commons media licensing, and open standards. Without them, none of the innovative and world changing Social Media services listed above would be possible or as widely useful as they are.

In the Social Media Community of Practice, innovators will gain critical insights into how people changing the world seek to implement Social Media innovations which they can go back and integrate into their innovations.

Joint projects

In addition to the community and shared learning benefits of the Community of Practice, we will also create opportunities for CoP participants to identify and implement joint projects that are of common interest to participants and have a high potential to scale impact.