The key benefit of social bookmarking for NGOs is a better organisation of online resources. But there are other benefits. This article explores a social bookmarking scenario that could revolutionize NGO networking, knowledge sharing and campaiging. It also presents a solution for a recurrent problem when staff leave their organization: how can their knowledge be retained for their colleagues and successors? ( download this article as pdf)

The key benefit of social bookmarking for NGOs is the same benefit that everyone receives from the service – better organisation of one’s online resources and improved research capabilities. But there are other benefits. Let’s use an imaginary scenario to explore the different possibilities.

Imagine a fictional NGO, “Tech Journos Sans Frontières”, a mid-sized, Amsterdam-based but international group of science journalists that offers training and mentoring to science journalists in India, Kenya and South Africa and produces a monthly print and email newsletter on innovative uses of information technology in the developing world.

• TJSF decides to get everyone in their organisation both in Amsterdam and abroad to begin using a social bookmarking service – the same one – instead of saving links within their Bookmarks/Favourites.

• The group chooses an internal tag, unique to them - ‘tjsfinternal’ - that no one else uses. They attach this keyword, along with any other keywords appropriate, to every link they find useful. All staff members regularly click on this tag (or subscribe to its RSS feed), thus keeping an eye on what everybody else is reading and finding useful. TJSF publishes the feed of the tag to its own website under the title ‘Resources’ and visitors to the site keep up with the ideas that are au courant in the TJSF offices.

• Very quickly, the TJSF workers being sharing and discovering each other’s resources that they had previously kept in their browser Favourites or in Word documents or had sent to each other via email. Research done by individuals is no longer lost, and, better yet, much more easily shared amongst each other. Workers piggy-back off serendipitous avenues of research based on items others within the organisation have saved and those saved by others on the net who use the same service.

• The fundraising department constantly researches fundraising ideas and sources. The team use social bookmarking to share resources much more easily than before by tagging all new items related to fundraising with the tag ‘fundraising’. But then they start looking at what other people on the net have tagged with the same keyword, and the keywords ‘fundraising’ and ‘journalism’, and ‘fundraising’ and ‘development’ and so on, and they find fundraising resources they hadn’t considered before.

• All the different examples of innovative uses of ICTs discovered on the net by the writers of the email newsletter are saved forever within Delicious. The writers no longer have to trawl through back issues of the newsletter to re-find a particular technology or project. Even those ICT projects the writers decided not to profile in the newsletter can be saved in case they end up being useful in the future.

• TJSF is an international organisation but research is instantly findable by others in the organisation, no matter which computer they are at , anywhere in the world. Research doesn’t have to be duplicated.

• Previously, when on the phone with one of their trainers, or project partners, or funders and there was an item on the internet that was relevant to the conversation, the workers would say, ‘Hold on, I’ll just find it in my bookmarks. No, wait, I can’t find which folder it’s in. Can I email you the URL later?’ But now the workers just type in a couple of relevant tags and find the information straight away, or, better yet, just tell the person on the other line, who also uses Delicious (or doesn’t, because anyone can search most social bookmarking services, whether they have an account or not) and they find the resource just as quickly.

• TJSF is in a couple of coalitions –NGOs For More Public Badminton Courts; and the International Federation of Tech Journos And Others Who Rarely Go Outside. When members of the coalitions find web resources with some relevance to their work, they use a pre-arranged unique tag (along with other appropriate tags): ‘ottbad’ for the badminton fans, and ‘iftj’ for the geeks, and they are thus able to collaborate and share resources within coalitionsin the same way that TJSF does internally.
• Every year they host topical conferences and assign a unique tag to each event so that any blog postings or other web content related to or coming out of that event can easily be found both by attendees at a later date or by those who wanted to come but couldn’t.
• One day, three of the key individuals in the organisation leave Tech Journos Sans Frontières for better paying jobs with NGO Bigwigs Sans Frontières. Everybody in the organisation is basically happy for them, but they wonder what will happen to all the research that the three have done over the years. Wait! It’s no problem – they’ve saved it all in Delicious, which means that their replacements can easily access the vast archive of accumulated resources, making job transitions smoother. Meanwhile, those who left still on occasion need to access resources from their old job, and can do so, because social bookmarks can be accessed from any computer.

Naturally, your organisation may not want to make use of all these different applications of social bookmarking. Perhaps you are only interested in it as an online filing cabinet. Nonetheless, the above gives you an idea of what is possible.

by Leigh Phillips , science writer Contactivity bv, Leiden

March 2006

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