I think you are right on with those questions, especially focusing on the movement of contacts/communities and not just actions, etc. The question that comes to mind for me is: what will the community want to share with their contacts when they are using our space communicate and take action? How do you make your space one in which people come up with ideas for social enterprise, share those ideas, and then collaborate to make them happen?

Obviously, we could talk about this all day – or at least all afternoon in another Social Media Afternoon 🙂

re-reading this, your idea of mashups of applications & spaces reminds me of what i was trying to get across with the idea of ‘cloud campaigning’; http://www.internetartizans.co.uk/cloud_campaigning.

fwiw, we want the new Make Your Mark onoline community to be the kind of ligament that connects different applications and spaces.

So far we’ve used drupal to create a thin online layer that can plug in to other applications via APIs.

The question is how we enable people to bring their contacts / communities with them; how do we make best use of openID or facebook connect or google friend connect…

dan

I think you touch on a big issue for many people: separate but equal 🙂 Some people may want their content and contacts to float between spaces online but not enter into other spaces, keeping professional and personal lives separate. As we enter a meshing phase of internet spaces, this will clearly have to be addressed.

I’m so excited to see The Resource Center’s work in 2009 serve the community and really looking forward to watching how the connections happen. Keep us all posted with the developments!

Yes – let’s do more with less in 2009!

Thanks again!

The idea that one’s contacts and content will just “be there” whenever one is online is a fabulous one. Oh that it will be solved in 2009! We clearly see Facebook and Google competing to fulfill that need with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, but people have other networks as well (Ning, MySpace, Live Journal, MyBlogLog and more) so how that problem will be solved remains to be seen. Making it easy but still allowing individual control (for those that compartmentalize their personas) will be key.

Your observation that tools must “be driven by needs of already-formed communities” is spot on. This will be the main focus of The Resource Center in 2009 as we create an interactive space within our website for an already vibrant National and Community Service community, and help teach that community to leverage additional tools.

As the already well-connected nptech online community spreads its knowledge, let’s hope 2009 fulfills the promise of “doing more with less”.

1. what is strategically right/best for the organization’s existing community
2. tools that offer support of a rich and free community online so if/when they have problems they can reach out and get help without a lot of $

But, not every situation can best meet #1 with a free support community. It’s getting easier though.

Do you think that organizations adopting new tools appreciate a free, online support community or do they prefer/want/need an offline avenue of support?

Things will definitely be coming together in ’09. We’ve seen it before with Facebook’s move to open up and the way many other platforms and widgets were able to integrate. Should be fun to watch!

Is there a certain tool or combination of tools you wish would be developed?

Thanks for contributing!

I think that the one major thing we will see in 2009 is that everything will start to really come together and I suppose complement each other.

What I’m trying to say is that in the last couple of years a plethora of different ventures has launched and become available and more widely ‘accepted’ too. BUT not all the ventures have yet found their place in the online community (or community in general for that matter). This I think will change greatly in 2009 and we’ll see a new more collaborative approach with lots of exciting great new ideas forming.

But somewhat echoing what David Wilcox is saying about having to keep things simple and perhaps even make it even more simple to ensure everyone, techies and non-techies alike, will feel comfortable exploring and bringing thoughts to the table.