I have been reading your posts with great interest and wondering how i could contribute. Its maybe that i am unclear as to whether my thoughts woudl add value to this discussion but i thought i woudl share them anyway. I was thinking about this alot and how i have been trying to engage people in my authority around this stuff, so i share my loose approach with you.

1st – we listen, we can use many tools to do this but the important things is to listen..your dave fleet signpost was a great example of how we can actually go about doing this.

2nd – we participate, we start to get our feet wet and try different tools and see how we get on, your posts some time ago about your expeince with twitter were excellent examples of this.

3rd – we let go of any control we feel we had and allow the conversations to flow. This is the most difficult bit for people and is quite hard for local government.

4th – we engage, we actively seek to start dialogues in these spaces, the work Tim Davies is supporting us with around youth participation with SNS is a good example of how we are moving in this direction.

5th – what can we actually use to do the above – I guess the toolkit you refer to will provide some of this? or have i misunderstood?

Anyway good luck and i am happy to trial or get involved with this should you feel i could add something.

Carl

just one other thought re toolkit scope, in case there’s still space?

Fledgling onliners, once they’ve accepted the idea in principle, may perhaps need hand-holding in how to converse, look at other’s contributions etc. etc., so it may make sense to plan some structure into early exchanges.

Academics have developed some experience with this, having had to welcome annual waves of new bods for some years now, and Gilly Salmon’s 5-step model is a well-known example of the sort of framework within which you can set simple tasks, deploy conversation pieces, etc etc. (There are bits & pieces of useful material of these types needing to be collated, perhaps?)

I wouldn’t at all wish to hype it – it was an initial experiment locally – but the online communities ‘course’(?) that we participated in here late last year might indicate the sort of thing that it’s easy to set up and run. The Learning Technology team at a href=”http://www.iriss.ac.uk/”>IRISS, who are the small-but-perfectly-formed crew who ran this, have done more since, and would be well worth contacting.

Just a thought,
Peter

Sorry – you’ve surely considered this quietly already!

But keen to pitch in if it had any legs.

cheers now
Peter

I developed this categorisation table a while back … needs an update
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfvmzhpw_653vm7vjdn

and you could link the toolkit to a game like this
http://socialmedia.wikispaces.com/Communications+game

maybe with an A-Z
http://socialmedia.wikispaces.com/A-Z+of+social+media

any use as part of the mix? Glad to collaborate if so …

David