Social Reporting
Bev Trayner has been thinking about reporting socially (let’s NOT call it Reporting 2.0 please, tempting though it may be!), developing one of David Wilcox’s great ideas. She contrasts the formally constructed semblance-of-authority-and-completeness report with David Wilcox’s idea of social reporting as capturing “stuff” (ie the powerpoints and handouts), “stories” (ie what people think about the matter) and “conversations” (ie how people interact around the matter). She has some nice suggestions for why this might be useful:
”* Keeping a shared memory of “what happened” through more than one people doing it, often in quite random ways, and brought together by tags;
- Using different types of media for reporting, each media type being accessible to different types of people with different purposes for “reading” the (social) report;
- Extending the conversation beyond any one mode (such as face-to-face mode, telephone conference mode, lecture mode) making sure you include people who were not “there”.
- Putting reporting in the hands of more and different types of people with access to different tools, technologies and approaches.
- Modeling different ways of helping people to make sense of an occasion.
- Shining a spotlight on periphery voices by looking out for and recording what they say.
- Advocacy – raising awareness, highlighting good practice, having an impact in ways that incorporate a wider type of audience than just those who will plough their way through traditional written text.
Some of the characteristics of social reporting are that it’s informal, visual, and it doesn’t present itself as an accurate representation of the truth – but, rather, as perspectives from different places and angles.”
I can see this working beautifully for participative events and maybe even collective journeys. I like the way that ease of capture starts to become a factor, how even the composition of the “social reports” can become a collaborative, emergent thing. I like the way that it leaves space for the more formally-composed traditional reports to spring from the resources created by the social report while leaving their evidence visible and explicit. I’m sure Dave Snowden’s Sensemaker software could be laid over the top of this for larger scale sensemaking and pattern analysis. Lovely stuff.
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