Step-by-step guide about how to use Delicious.com (requested by DDRN)

Some weeks ago I facilitated a workshop for the Danish Development Research Network (DDRN) about the implementation and implications of organisational social bookmarking. It was an introduction to Delicious.com and because some were interested to get to know it better they requested a step-by-step guide for (1) creating a bookmark account, (2) installing bookmarking buttons, (3) mainitaining a social bookmark collection and (4) understanding the bookmarking collection. As a result, I piled up some of the important issues in a document.  The link to the document is mentioned at the end of this message, because before reading this guide I ask you to watch the next movie (3:25 minutes):

Now you can open the step-by-step guide. Please click here.

Presentation about social bookmarking with the Danish Development Research Network

I recorded the whole presentation and I was planning to share this together with the presentation. However, the recorded part was not compatible with my work station.  Therefore I am uploading the different slides with some of the information I shared during the presentation.

"One of the reasons why we have breaks in our working days is that we believe that it is good for the brains to give it a small break where it is not being overloaded. The brains need to be rebooted in order to let it work effectively in the second half of the day: the afternoon. Additionally, we need to think of our energy level. Therefore, a break should preferably exclude work-wise things and should preferably include food. Unfortunately, I am going to use your break to introduce a information sharing and collaboration tool which could improve the effectiveness of your daily work in order to contribute to the inclusion of research and research-based knowledge in development assistance. However, before I am taking all the pleasures away of a break, I was thinking of offering you a piece of cake"

"As you already have seen on the first slide, my name is Richard Lalleman. Originally I am from the Netherlands, but since January 2009 I moved to Copenhagen. In the Netherlands I attended a BSc in Library and Information Science. After that I executed projects/initiatives in information management within departments. So, what does the library needs to do in order to push and pull information. However, if organisations want to become innovative and smart, information management principles should be embedded from an organizational point of view. Therefore I moved to London for two years and attended a MSc in Information and Knowledge Management. This education has helped me to implement information and knowledge mgmt initiatives on an organizational level"

"So, currently I am working as independent consultant in the areas of learning, innovation and knowledge management. So how do you create a space where people can make sense and decide over new opportunities with the latest knowledge in a fast way. One of the initiatives I am currently working for is the Focuss.Info Initiative. This Initiative is being facilitated by the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands."

"The Focuss.Info Initiative is a portal to information and knowledge in the field of global development studies and research on the Internet (www.focuss.info). This information and knowledge is not selected by one person or organisation, it is a collaboration between students, researchers and individual practitioners established through the usage of social media tools."

"These tools deliver high deliverables against a low costs; the tools are freely available and enhance collaboration between individuals who never would have met before without those tools. Furthermore, the tools also promote efficient working methods, such as blogs, search engines and social bookmarking." [I also gave a live tour through www.focuss.info]

"We have all heard about and perhaps used bookmarking techniques while we are researching. [I showed a book that I read with many bookmarks just for me to remember some of the useful parts in the book]"

"In this respect is social bookmarking not rocket science. You have a book, there is a items we want to remember in the future, and make a bookmark by highlighting it or adding post-its. However, bookmarking has been reinvented with the latest Information and Communication Technologies. Therefore, social bookmarking is rocket science because with an overload of information and knowledge, we can easily create our own collection of bookmarks, which is visible to everybody so by maintaining a personal collection, you can automatically share it with people who have the same interests."

[I showed why it is important to use tools on the Internet to make sense of the information overload] "If you only see how many sites FAO.ORG contain (more than 9.000.000), you can imagine the importance of smart tools that can help you to manage your knowledge."

"Now we will look into delicious.com. This platform is one of the platforms that let you collect your favourite sites on the Internet." [I gave a live tour through Delicious.com and highlighted the following items: (1) how to log in, (2) what does the collection overview show us, (3) how to save bookmarks manually and with bookmarking tools, and (4) why is this way of bookmarking 'social'?]

"Firstly, while using social bookmarking to save your internal knowledge of useful websites, you automatically can see who bookmarked the same item, and from there, you can click and see what that person has more in his/her collection. As a result, DDRN is also learning from others and is improving its domain knowledge. Secondly, everybody within DDRN can add easily add bookmarks to the collection with the bookmarking tools. And because everybody can do this, DDRN will create more diversity in its collection of valuable websites. Thirdly, DDRN knowledge can be re-used and re-mixed by themselves on the DDRN website, but also by initiatives like Focuss.Info"

[end of the presentation and after that we had a discussion about how to open up or close down bookmarks from others which have been saved by DDRN. In other words: more using it is as an internal knowledge management tool]

Lunch meeting with Danish Development Research Network about social bookmarking

Next week I will introduce social bookmarking to the staff members of the Danish Development Research Network (DDRN) in Denmark. DDRN is a network linking research-based knowledge and development within the sectors of agriculture, environment, and governance. The overall goal of DDRN is to contribute to the inclusion of research and research-based knowledge in development assistance and in partner countries' development activities.  As a result, the website contains a great collection of valuable e-resources that is being maintained by the staff members.

The presentation, which I will soon upload to this weblog, will kick-off with what social bookmarking is. This will be done in just a couple of minutes, because social bookmarking is not different from what we always did when reading documents/books/papers (highlighting important text and adding bookmarks on the pages which were interesting to you). This activity of bookmarking crucial elements in a book, journal or document can also be done on the Internet.

Within the first Internet browsers, the option to save bookmarks from the Internet was better known as 'bookmark this page' or 'add to favourites'. You could have found a really interesting page on the Internet after complex searches with Google, Bing or other search engines. But what would happen when you log off your computer, could you still find the same e-resource back? In order to make sure that you could retrieve it again, people were bookmarking the pages via the browser. As a result, favourite websites were saved locally on your computer. One of the disadvantages was that the more favourite websites were being saved locally, the more complex the structure of folders became within your Internet browser. Another disadvantage was that when you were not behind the computer where the favourite websites were stored, you could not access the collection of favourite websites. As a result, bookmarking services were being launched on the Internet. Delicious.com is one of the platforms where people save their favourite websites on the Internet. Thus, via Delicious.com you can access your favourite websites wherever you are. The only requirement is that there is an Internet connection.

But what makes bookmarking platform on the Internet, such as Delicious.com, social? The social aspect is that it lets you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. In order to make sense of this, I will browse through a test account for DDRN on delicious (http://delicious.com/ddrntest).

First of all, the presentation about social bookmarking in general and Delicious.com specifically will result in showing the staff members of DDRN that by doing an individual and administrative activity - saving a favourite website for the DDRN resource collection - it is automatically being shared with other people than only the users of the DDRN website.  This improves the visibility of the DDRN.

Secondly, the DDRN can also follow other users on a social bookmark platform who have the same interests and perhaps can lead to a better overview of valuable e-resources within DDRN's themes.

Thirdly, the data in DDRN social bookmark account (the favourite websites) can easily be merged/integrated in other social media tools or the own website of DDRN. For example, Focuss.Info is embedding an open-source search engine from Google. This search engine is indexing the accounts of peers from all over the world who are only bookmarking in the field of global development studies and research. As a result, Focuss.Info generates specific search results and results in less noise for peers than generic search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.  Furthermore, the e-resources indexed by Focuss.Info are not only selected by librarians, but also students, researchers and individual practitioners.

So, if DDRN is dedicated to contribute to the inclusion of research and research-based knowledge in development assistance, they would be better off to continuing to save favourite e-resources on (open) social bookmarking platforms, rather than to maintain this in their closed content management system.  It is the task of DDRN to facilitate ways that push information to as many people as possible in a low-cost and efficient-friendly ways, and pull valuable information which could be mentioned on the DDRN website.