Nptech skypecast agenda

 

 

 

Beth's notes during call: bethnotes

 

My summary here: http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/01/nptech_conferen.html

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

 

0. Quick round of intros (it's great to know who we're talking to)

Marnie Webb, Peter Campbell from Goodwill, Nate Olsen, Beth Kanter, Nancy White, Lauren, Billy Bicket

 

 

1. What do we want to learn from the existing nptech data?

* Nancy: consistently tagging but never looking at the tag until Beth started doing the tag. Some participant behavior of her own that she wasn't noticing.

* Billy: How we can identify and engage the people who are tagging in ways beyond tagging, connection to the people who are in this space; taggers and their interests beyond tagging

* Nate: Happy to see the nptech.info site as a way of collecting the tagged information

* Peter: we go to a bunch of different places to have information rises to the top, ptech tag helps people rise to the top, the website collects all the tags but it would be great to build in some information to find out what people are following

* Beth: digg aspect, more community filtering, right now it's a waterhouse

* Peter: nptech.info gets more hits than he would have guessed

* Marnie: how would we collect the information about use from people who are using a news reader to work

* Marnie: interested in finding out the kinds of things being tagged -- what are themes or topic areas that people are interested in

* Beth: good resources on online resources, really good study, vendors who tagged so there is certainly some self-promotion going, newcomers show up by tagging something like TechSoup,  big news shows up by repeat tags

* Nancy: anyway to visualize the patterns of use -- people who scan the tag, filter by who is tagging, filter by repeat tags, pairing of tags

* Nate: everyone familiar w/ the various ways that people can play around w/ various URLs histories via the tools

 

 

2. Is it reasonable for us to talk about how the tagging project can inform a taxonomy?

--- why do we want a taxonomy anyone?

--- are there exisiting taxonomies (we have one at TechSoup and I'd guess that telecentres.org has one too) that we might build on?

--- how would this inform directories like Capaciteria or TechFinder

Marnie: described some of the history of tag. Is it useful to talk about a taxonomy or is it more about search?

Peter: the trouble w/ making a taxonomy and making it successful

Beth: the thought of working on a taxonomy a really awful thought, especially w/ it being a collaborative project, but a taxonomy aids w/ the retrival process.

?: That only works if you are very familiar w/ the taxonomy

Nancy: for finding specific things which is different than finding patterns. A tag cloud and help you see a pattern, not retrival, have people on the nptech tag site played w/ tag clouds

Peter: not really

Beth: pointed to Chris' data, which is presented in a tag cloud

Everyone agrees that Chris' data is really interesting

Nancy: npk4d tag compared to nptech, would be interesting

Peter: occurs to him that the nptech tag is the place to build the taxonomy

Beth: points to the work the legal services community is doing, categories around standards

 

 

 

My own thought: Maybe there are two streams -- patterns and sharing; and retrival

My own thought: Maybe the nptech site could analyze that data rather than just the del.icio.us data so that we can get a cross-section of the tag

 

 

 

3. Do we think that the nptech tag can inform this taxonomy?

--- How?

--- Add anything to the data we want? Questions we might have that the data could inform?

 

 

4. Are there other ways that we can use the nptech tag so that it can be more useful?

--- Check out some of the various thoughts about why it isn't working?

--- how do the events, say, bookmarked in del.icio.us match up to the events in upcoming and the photos in flickr? Do we want them too?

--- How does this relate to the search that was set up?

 

 

* Peter: nptech.info site could be a centralized place where clouds, research etc get down to do something like build a resource, could certainly put some management so that people can learn a little bit about the project

* Nate: coming from a newcomer perspective, something like that would be quite useful because it helps to introduce people to the conversation and allow people to get their bearings

* Peter: making it a home for the project makes more sense than what it is now, expose some elements that could make things more useful to people who have a taxonomy

* Nancy: building a social search approach to nonprofit technology that layers taggers on top of it; there is usefulness to some degree of a formal taxonomy, this could help provide some more boundaries to people; the folksonomy is about the edges, there is a whole other part of people who are interested in the edges. the social search on top of that is what adds value, showing people's behaviors and how they are making sense of it. both the taggers and the tag consumers. Keeps coming back to the idea of social search.

* Nancy: interesting to see a cloud of the nptech taggers and how often the tag

* Beth: interesting to see the aggregate tag cloud

 

* Nancy: see how those tag clouds change over time