Okay, I’ve progressed somewhat with facebook. I may eventually come around to “no, just don’t go there,” but I’m beginning to see the lure of its community building features. Will it turn out to be a solution for AAUW? I can’t tell yet, but here’s what I’ve seen so far.
The whole system is *very* centered on the individual. This is a paradigm shift for me where I think of information as stored in organizational buckets (e.g. web sites) with the particular author somewhat “hidden”. Blogs are, obviously, a step towards exposing authorship, but the way I’ve been using them it’s still been the “content” that’s the focus, not the characteristics of the individual (activities, likes/dislikes, etc., etc.).
Individuals can be connected tightly (by becoming friends) or loosely (by joining the same network or the same group), or just be two members of facebook without any connection.
If they are friends, they can (subject to preferences that can be set on either end)
- Share contact information
- View each others activities within facebook
- Share RSS feeds
If they are members of the same group they can
- Be notified of each others’ postings on the group’s wall or discussion board (because, by default, one gets notified of all changes to the group area)
If they are members without any common connection, they can still send each other messages within the system. This is different from LinkedIn. Sending a message to a stranger does expose some of the author’s personal information, and I suppose there are recipients who ignore all messages from folks that they don’t actually know.
Networks, like groups, provide a place to “discuss” and share information. In addition, events are tied to networks — when you create an event you select one of your networks to associate with the event. While branch events can, of course, be posted as part of the local network, this may be a reason to figure out the administrative steps needed to have an AAUW network created rather than just using an AAUW “group.”
The process of notifying a group about an event seems to be a two-step thing. You can invite “friends” to an event, but to get the word to a group, you need to post to the group area (probably the “wall” since there’s apt to be little discussion?). However, if you’re the group administrator, you can invite the group members of the “related event” at the time it is created.
There’s still the sticking point that to see ANYTHING on facebook, you must be logged in to facebook. This is a huge issue for using facebook as a general purpose tool. But if there is a need to reach the audience that facebook makes available, the effort of the double maintenance may be appropriate.