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

Notes from call

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Marnie Webb, CompuMentor

Peter Campbell - nptech site, involved with tag for 2 years

Nate Olsen - web-based projects for humantarian projects, KY

Beth Kanter, MA

Nancy White, Seattle

Lauren,  Western, MA - Web2.0 sites for nonprofits

Billy Bicket - Compumentor

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

-Realized that I wasn't looking at the data - consistently tagging, but not looking at the resources - some participant behavior of our own

-How can we engage and identify the people who are tagging?

-Who are the people involved and how to leverage people?

-Relevant places that we go to let the information "rise to the top" -

-What is interesting re: NpTech is that it is about filtering or people pointing to it?

-Like a Digg aspect, the community flitering, vs 1-2 people filtering.

-Waterhose. Small groups drink from the hose, sub to feeds. Others get it through a filter via people's website reviews/pointers, etc

-The issue of the tag has been flat - proposed a taxonomy

-People are following the tag via a newsreader

-Knowing what people are tagging?  What is that people feel are important to share with each other?

-The Attention Stream, Who tags the material? The repeat tags?

-Visualization - played with different tools for visualizing data, URL history,

-Find out the first tagger --

-Sophisicated tools from IA people

-Product manager at Yahoo to help dig into the data for us

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

Definition of Taxonomy:

Categories and words in order to organize and retrieve information

=Go back and forth on the viability of creating a successful taxonomy - communication challenges

=For finding specific things versus patterns -- taxonomy is useful

=npk4dev versus nptech http://npk4dev.wordpress.com

=There is a need for search and retrievel that a taxonomy can do and can help more sophisicated information sharing via a web site with other web sites -- techsoup

=Search tool for retrieval

=If a taxonomy could be built, the NpTech community might be the place to do it.

=What kinds of tools (programming language) are used?

=Is this ngo/humanitarian slice on semantic web?

Legal Services community book - w/ tagging. Standards vs taxonomy.Categories of information published on a website that statewide websites can pick and choose which content they want to then publish at the state level published via RSS

Folksonomy process, they looked at that data, analyzed it for their controlled vocabulary

Narrow use - is the taxonomy to share and retrieve info

Big picture use - the patterns

Peter: The NpTech Site - a central place to go for information, updates, on whatever is happening with NpTech tag - whether a taxonomy, etc.  Going beyond the tagging.   A few people responded that they would be willing to help out.  At minimum, the site could expose patterns.

What about the number of sources?

There are more than one taxonomy in the field.  We can't dictate to individual organizations and ask them to revise their taxonomies.  The NpTech Tag as a community project is the place.

Nancy:  Building a social search approach - that layers our social network on top of search.  Is a formalized taxonomy or not?  There is a usefulness to some degree of a formal taxonomy.   There is a second wave adoptor - people who aren't good at pattern analysis - needs something less messy.

There is a need for both the neat project and the edges.   The social value - are they tagging? Who is tagging?  How are they are making sense?  What are the practices of the taggers and tag consumers?  Social search.

Provide more information on a centralized site, take some ideas from search, and looking at Chris's data - may be fairly easy to organize the next layer of taxonomy for people to use it and find things.

Web site done with an introductory tone.

Would be interesting to see a cloud of the nptech taggers based on frequency.

Community forming part of the -- can a tag be a magnet for forming a tag?