Career Space E-zine

This past week I attended an elearning session at UBC about an innovation in social bookmarking to promote sustainability. Last spring UBC approached a local problem and an opportunity for core branding in sustainability. With the World Forum being held in Vancouver and over 350 university courses laying a claim to covering sustainability in their curriculum and no organizer to explore the richness thereof on campus they looked to technology to enable and engage stakeholders in sustainability solutions. They created a system called GUSSE: Global Urban Sustainability Solutions Exchange - http://gusse.org/ which is a social bookmarking system enabling urban professionals and citizens to pool and explore solutions in their cities. The prototype was a mashup. I love it when things come together in new and innovative ways to create solutions that are a byproduct of collaborations! I’m also a die hard del.icio.us user and needless to say I get quite excited to hear about a new use for social bookmarking.

David Voigt (Director of Digital Learning Projects, Faculty of Education - UBC)went into some detail about global problems which were caused by a world urban tsunami with the numbers of people moving to cities going up. As a result of this the types of sustainability problems have increased in that we’re sharing air, power and housing problems. The question was asked “how can you quickly scope the solutions?” It is definitely overwhelming, and consultants were expensive. Despite that there was no lack of solutions and it was deemed a collective learning problem. How can cities learn from one another? GUSSE was the solution to this. The key is participation and the product is collective intelligence which is free. With authority these days not having much credibility with regard to direction, people are more open now to this type of collaboration.

Lee Iverson (Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering - UBC), got a bit more into the technicalities of social bookmarking systems and how they can be a beneficial medium for research, study and bringing communities together. In a general it is an approach that can be highly personalized and creates an online memory system for resources that can be shared with others. This in many respects can create a community in key interest areas. The key feature of these social bookmarking systems is the “folksonomy“, which can be a fairly personalized way of organizing one’s resources, it’s non-hierarchical, non-structured and as more users add their “tags” it increases the findability of the information. This is commonly called “wisdom of the crowds” or crowdsourcing. With the combination of social bookmarking, blogs and tagging there is the potential for creating a “meme” tree for popular topics. One question I had here was that while you can use the wisdom of the crowds for adding unique tags for valued findability would it not also benefit from the addition of a structured taxonomy created by trained professionals (such as Librarians/Information Specialists)?

I found the discussion on tagging and communities in particular quite interesting as while new topics of concern may float upwards and create new constructive conversations and solutions I also wondered about the possiblities of certain interest groups using these systems to create campaigns for their own personal crusades and causes. Is this a potential dark side to it?