A number of things recently have lead me to reflect on the nature of interactions between social media, research organisations and the wider community. What the first decade of the social web has taught us is that organisations that effectively harness the goodwill of their staff or members using social media tools do well. This approach is antithetical to traditional command and control management structures.

Cameron Neylon

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A number of things recently have lead me to reflect on the nature of
interactions between social media, research organisations and the wider
community. There has been an awful lot written about the effective use
of social media by organisations, the risks involved in trusting staff
and members of an organisation to engage productively and positively
with a wider audience. Above all there seems a real focus on the
potential for people to embarrass the organisation. Relatively little
focus is applied to the ability of the organisation to embarrass its
staff but that is perhaps a subject for another post.

In the area of academic research this takes on a whole new hue due to
the presence of a strong principle and community expectation of free
speech, the principle of "academic freedom". No-one really knows what
academic freedom is. It's one of those things that people can't define
but will be very clear about when it has been taken away. In general
terms it is the expectation that a tenured academic has earnt the right
to be able to speak their opinion, regardless of how controversial. We
can accept there are some bounds on this, of ethics, taste, and legality
-- racism would generally be regarded as unacceptable -- while noting
that the boundary between what is socially unacceptable and what is a
validly held and supported academic opinion is both elastic and almost
impossible to define. Try expressing the opinion, for example, that
their might be a biological basis to the difference between men and
women on average scores on a specific maths test. These grey areas,
looking at how the academy ( or academies) censor themselves are
interesting but aren't directly relevant to this post. Here I am more
interested in how institutions censor their staff.

Organisations always seek to control the messages they release to the
wider community. The first priority of any organisation or institution
is its own survival. This is not necessarily a bad thing -- presumably
the institution exists because it isÂ  (or at least was) the most
effective way of delivering a specific mission. If it ceases to exist,
that mission can't be delivered. Controlling the message is a means of
controlling others reactions and hence the future. Research institutions
have always struggled with this -- the corporate centre sending once
message of clear vision, high standards, continuous positive
development, while the academics privately mutter in the privacy of
their own coffee room about creeping beauracracy, lack of resources, and
falling standards.

There is fault on both sides here. Research administration and support
only very rarely puts the needs and resources of academics at its
centre. Time and time again the layers of beauracracy mean that what may
or may not have been a good idea gets buried in a new set of unconnected
paperwork, that more administration is required taking resources away
from frontline activities, and that target setting results in target
meeting but at the cost of what was important in the first place. There
is usually a fundamental lack of understanding of what researchers do
and what motivates them.

On the other side academics are arrogant and self absorbed, rarely
interested in contributing to the solution of larger problems. They fail
to understand, or take any interest in the corporate obligations of the
organisations that support them and will only rarely cooperate and
compromise to find solutions to problems. Worse than this, academics
build social and reward structures that encourage this kind of
behaviour, promoting individual achievement rather than that of teams,
penalising people for accepting compromises, and rarely rewarding the
key positive contribution of effective communication and problem solving
between the academic side and administration.

What the first decade of the social web has taught us is that
organisations that effectively harness the goodwill of their staff or
members using social media tools do well. Organisations that effectively
use [Twitter](http://twitter.com "Twitter"){.zem_slink rel="homepage"}
or [Facebook](http://facebook.com "Facebook"){.zem_slink rel="homepage"}
enable and encourage their staff to take the shared organisational
values out to the wider public. Enable your staff to take responsibility
and respond rapidly to issues, make it easy to identify the right person
to engage with a specific issue, and admit (and fix) mistakes early and
often, is the advice you can get from any social media consultant. Bring
the right expert attention to bear on a problem and solve it
collaboratively, whether its internal or with a customer. This is simply
another variation on [Michael Nielsen's](http://michaelnielsen.org/)
writing on [markets in expert
attention](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-future-of-science-2/) --
the organisations that build effective internal markets and apply the
added value to improving their offering will win.

This approach is antithetical to traditional command and control
management structures. It implies a fluidity and a lack of direct
control over people's time. It is also requires that there be slack in
the system, something that doesn't sit well with efficiency drives. In
its extreme form it removes the need for the organisation to formally
exist, allowing a fluid interaction of free agents to interact in a
market for their time. What it does do though is map very well onto a
rather traditional view of how the academy is "managed". Academics
provide a limited resource, their time, and apply it to a large extent
in a way determined by what they think is important. Management
structures are in practice fairly flat (and used to be much more so) and
interactions are driven more by interests and personal whim than by
widely accepted corporate objectives. Research organisations, and
perhaps by extension those commercial interests that interact most
directly with them, should be ideally suited to harness the power of the
social web to first solve their internal problems and secondly interact
more effectively with their customers and stakeholders.

Why doesn't this happen? A variety of reasons, some of them the usual
suspects, a lack of adoption of new tools by academics, appalling IT
procurement procedures and poor standards of software development, and a
simple lack of time to develop new approaches, and a real lack of
appreciation of the value that diversity of contributions can bring to a
successful department and organisation. The biggest one though I suspect
is a lack of good will between administrations and academics. Academics
will not adopt any tools en masse across a department, let alone an
organisation because they are naturally suspicious of the agenda and
competence of those choosing the tools. And the diversity of tools they
choose on their own means that none have critical mass within the
organisation -- few academic institutions had a useful global calendar
system until very recently. Administration don't trust the herd of cats
that make up their academic staff to engage productively with the
problems they have and see the need to have a technical solution that
has critical mass of users, and therefore involves a central decision.

The problems of both diversity and lack of critical mass are a solid
indication that the social web has some way to mature -- these
conversations should occur effectively across different tools and
frameworks -- and the uptake at research institutions should (although
it may seem paradoxical) be expected to much slower than in more top
down, managed organisation, or at least organisations with a shared
focus. But it strikes me that the institutions that get this right, and
they won't be the traditional top institutions, will very rapidly accrue
a serious advantage, both in terms of freeing up staff time to focus on
core activities and releasing real monetary resource to support those
activities. If the social side works, then the resource will also go to
the right place. Watch for academic institutions trying to bring in
strong social media experience into senior management. It will be a very
interesting story to follow.

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Image by cameronneylon via Flickr  A number of things recently have lead me to reflect on the nature of interactions between social media, research organisations and the wider community. There has been an awful lot written about the effective use of social media by organisations, the risks involved in trusting staff and members of an organisation to engage productively and positively with a wider audience.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

The personal and the institutional