Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
were largely non-work related - instead the equivalent of small talk
around the water cooler really, allowing key participants to introduce
themselves and get to know each other. For instance, a post each day
relaying what the weather was looking like in their neck of the woods, an
often common icebreaker at the start of teleconferences, when participants
are dialling in from different parts of the world. This provided an easy
entry for users to get to grips with the software and get comfortable with
the idea of posting to such a public forum where the recipients are largely
unseen and unknown.
Some specifi c work-related use-cases emerged from our experiment.
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Ask your extended network a question. Either directed at the general
community, sometimes accompanied by a specifi c hashtag, or targeted
to a specifi c group. The benefi t seen here was that users realised they
now could quickly and easily call on an extended network of
professionals for help.
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Share a project/work/status update. This was seen as a good way of
publicising progress or the completion of a piece of work, perhaps
more widely than might be possible using traditional communication
channels.
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Advertise something that has been posted online elsewhere. For
example, a blog posting, paper or web page. Cross-posting was a
popular use of Pfollow as, again, it opened up the existence of a
resource or achievement to a much wider audience and was an effective
way for an individual to communicate their speciality, knowledge
gained or general expertise in a subject area.
Our experimentation with Status.net served to allow us to quickly
identify the following key requirements if we were to proceed with a
microblogging service.
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The ability to create groups proved to be a highly important feature -
we saw special interest groups, project teams and communities of
practice utilise Pfollow to quickly and easily form and share
information. The fact the groups that had been created were available
to view in public listing was also key as it allowed and encouraged
people to connect based on their interests and specialities rather than
arriving at a connection solely through their particular existing
organisational and/or geographical associations.
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Hashtags were important to allow users to structure and interlink
posts and allow areas of interest to emerge and be tracked by interested
parties.
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