Developing Socially Responsible Engineers at Columbia University

Days on Campus, an event for prospective undergraduates, provides an opportunity to reflect on the Engineering School and CTICE’s missions and strategic visions. The language we use is that the School treats engineering as the liberal art of the twenty-first century. We firmly believe that a working knowledge of engineering, technology, and applied science is an essential part of the education of today’s global citizens. We want to educate future engineers and applied scientists to be both technically capable and socially responsible. The School’s mission emphasizes education, research, and social responsibility. The key strategy for linking these three elements is robust community engagement throughout the student’s academic path.

From early admission events to students’ first day on campus, we try to communicate the importance of academically integrated community engagement. This is a big aspect of our academic identity: we are the only major research university to require credit-bearing community engagement courses for all entering engineering students. These students become part of a greater collective: more than 800 students and faculty from across the University who work on community projects. Other community engagement opportunities include 30 credits of course offerings as well as co-curricular programs and focused internships.

Click image to see video of SEAS wheelchair swing project

Every engineering student takes our unique introduction to engineering: “Design Fundamentals Using Advanced Computer Technologies,” our first-year design course that is a cornerstone of a student’s academic experience at the Engineering School. The course uses our proven community-based learning pedagogy: students learn by doing, working in small groups to create real design solutions for real clients in New York City.

This course forces students to tackle complex projects and solve real-world challenges while, we hope, recognizing the social and cultural implications of what engineers do, and the beneficial role engineering can play in today’s society. We believe that students should not merely master academic skills, but also learn to apply engineering knowledge to real world problems in a responsible manner. Our first-year students have designed a playground swing for individuals confined to wheelchairs, a greenhouse for the Frederick Douglass Academy (a local public school), and a specialized walker for patients at a local assisted living facility.

Our goal is to train a new generation of global citizens who are technically skilled, intellectually creative, and socially aware. We want to instill in our students a sense of social responsibility, the ability to make ethical decisions, and a genuine awareness of the communities where students practice their skills.

During their remaining three undergraduate years, students have other academic and co-curricular opportunities to apply technical knowledge and skills to community challenges. Through the Engineering School’s growing number of interdisciplinary courses and minors, students can look at complex problems through the combined lens of science, technology, and society studies. One of our strengths is our strong foundation in the liberal arts, and the School encourages every student to enroll in an interdisciplinary or liberal arts minor to help them learn to view technical challenges in non-technical ways. By selecting a minor in, say, political science, economics, or human rights, a student can study technology within the context of social norms and global cultures. Similarly, our interdisciplinary minor in entrepreneurship helps students identify opportunities to use technology to promote economic development in communities. In multiple entrepreneurship courses, students work with entrepreneurs to support the development and delivery of new products and ventures. They quickly learn that a new product or service may work technically, but will not be accepted by a community either for cultural reasons or because of a lack of infrastructure.

We believe that providing students with real world projects, working with real clients, and attacking context-specific problems helps develop the socially responsible engineer. At Columbia, our students don’t have to look far to see how theory plays out in practice. Does a technical design work in a community context? Is it culturally appropriate, in this or another community? How can politics or policy derail an otherwise elegant technical solution?

Most importantly, at Columbia students do not measure success simply by how much they learn, but also by the positive, tangible, meaningful change they make within the community and upon the world.

CTICE Twin Missions: From Classroom to Community

When we explain what CTICE is about, we often start with what we call our twin “community-based learning” missions. The first mission is to improve student learning: How can we structure our educational offering so that they effectively teach the knowledge, skills, and capabilities we want students to learn? The second mission is to  have a positive impact in the community: How can our programs help individuals and organizations flourish and achieve their objectives? We want our programs to increase the community’s ability  to be economically vibrant and self-sufficient.

Our community-based learning classes attempt to integrate these twin missions into the curriculum in measurable ways. Students need to acquire specific areas of content knowledge as well as effectively apply this learning in the context of real community challenges. The community, in turn, must benefit from the students’ efforts in tangible ways.

For community-based learning to be effective, a student has to be able to transfer classroom knowledge into a real-world application that leads to tangible results. For this transfer to occur, students have to bridge the gap that occurs naturally between knowledge acquisition and application. I call these “transition gates,” points in the learning process where students can reflect on the learning and receive feedback.

For example, the First-Year Design Course provides opportunities for students to acquire design knowledge and then apply it within the context of a community project. As educators, we are always experimenting with the optimum balance between knowledge (theory) dissemination and transfer (practice). Part of this balancing act has to do with sequence, when is the best time to deliver specific content and when should the student apply this new knowledge in the lab or field. CTICE adopts a “just-in-time” methodology.

In the first-year class, this is relatively straightforward because the design process embodies a sequence that all students follow. By following the typical design sequence—problem definition, research, conceptualize, test, evaluate, and build—a teacher has natural transition gates that allow the students to stop, take newly acquired content, reflect, and then apply this knowledge in a laboratory and/or field context.

Experience has taught us that students need to acquire several socio-behavioral competencies to be able to transfer technical content to community settings (or any authentic context). To some extent, competencies vary according to context, but for community capacity-building projects, we know what these competencies include active communication, collaboration, and project management. In a design project, it is not sufficient to understand the process and the associated technical tools required for specification and testing. To apply these tools, students need to communicate effectively with their community clients, clearly defining problems and identifying customer requirements. Students need to understand the problem and the requirements for a satisfactory solution before they can develop design specifications. Furthermore, open-ended type design problems require teamwork and project management. Students must work not only with fellow peers, but also with advisors, instructors, outside experts, and others to solve the problem and provide a workable solution. Negotiation and compromise are hallmarks of open-ended problem solutions. Finally, managing the design sequence and its many tasks requires organization, defining tasks and responsibilities, and staying on schedule.

Many pedagogical strategies help students develop community-building skill sets and support the transfer of learning from theory to action. CTICE educator strategies include weekly reflections, design journals, video documentation, and multi-source assessment methods. These methods are applied at the transition gates I discussed earlier, providing the students an opportunity to reflect on how new knowledge applies to a community project. We provide frequent performance and project feedback during these transition points as well.

CTICE educators have developed several pedagogical strategies and tools to support reflection and feedback within transition gates: reflections on particular assignments, design journals, etc. These help students apply newly acquired skills to community projects.

A particularly fruitful avenue has been multi-source assessment and feedback, a formal process that provides students with critical information from several sources—themselves, peers, instructors, advisors, mentors, and community members—about their specific behaviors and skills. Multi-source assessment gives students a better understanding of personal strengths and areas needing development.

Professional Developer

CTICE proprietary multi-source assessment tool is the Professional Developer, an online survey process designed to provide students with constructive, developmental feedback regarding their effectiveness on several specific cognitive and behavioral skills. The basic Professional Developer application allows student team members to rate both themselves and their teammates on items designed to identify skills based on behaviors that have been found to be important for practicing engineers. An administrative application collects and compiles the data, generating confidential reports that compare an individual’s self-evaluation with his team’s evaluations across the same categories. This developmental feedback highlights a student’s overall strengths and pinpoints areas for development. Educators receive reports on the skills at the team and class level.

For the design class, the Professional Developer helps students not only to self-reflect but also to develop the community-building skills required to work effectively on community projects. This method is powerful. When integrated as an assignment within our design curriculum, multi-source assessment enables students to identify strengths as well as areas for further development, helping us realize the mission of facilitating the transfer of learning from classroom to the community.

Social Technologies in the Workplace: Policy Transparency is Key

Originally published April 3, 2009.

As discussed in previous posts, social technologies enable fast, open, multi-directional communication leading to authentic collaboration and innovation. As others have noted, the speed of this open communication lies in stark contrast to the permanence of the digital footprint left by each participant. In everyday, face-to-face conversations, there are always slips and mistakes that are quick to be forgotten or forgiven. But now, especially with the ubiquitous nature of text messaging, on-line chat, and micro-blogging, the fast-paced information exchange that rivals its predecessor in speed, can easily be archived for permanent retrieval.

There is a growing disconnect between the individual’s personal experience with social networking versus the use of the same technologies in the workplace environment. At this point of the technologies’ evolution, most active participants have engaged in daily, streams of authentic communication with friends, family members, and many causal acquaintances. This kind of fluid, open dialogue has become the norm for these active, social media participants. They take this behavior with them as they move from one context to another: distinctions between personal and shareable, private and public are blurring. 

There is nothing new about these concerns, and privacy advocates have already started a conversation about their implications. What needs to be added is how the socially responsible organization participates in this dialogue. How can these organizations adopt social technologies as an integral part of their business or mission strategy, but also manage the influx of new employees who have already embraced this new way of communicating? We are in a transition period where organization policy and practice lag behind technology advances.

Organizational leaders need to look at these increasingly ubiquitous technologies from the perspective of organizational policy regarding use, monitoring, and privacy. Prior to considering policy and practice, a deeper look at an organization’s values and culture is required. Leaders must develop an understanding of how transparency is viewed and practiced within the culture of the organization. This introspection begins with the definition of transparency? How does leadership define transparency? Does it entail all areas of operations — financial, customer relations, supply chain interactions? Is there more tolerance for openness in some areas over others? Are there inconsistencies in practices? (The New York Times blog post last week reported that the Department of Homeland Security has a Facebook page, but does not allow employees to access Facebook at work.) Organizations need to take stock of how they really feel about the open flow of information, both inside and outside the walls of the institution. What tolerance level does management have for customer feedback on products or shareholder resolutions on governance?

Part of assessing transparency involves an organization’s tolerance for risk. Open communication and actions are inherently risky and not easily accepted by risk-adverse organizations. For example, recent studies indicate that more than two-thirds of employers engage in some form of employee monitoring. As the argument goes, monitoring technologies – including email and social technologies, such as Facebook — is important because they expose employers to increased liability in employee discrimination suits; open potential challenges to protecting informational assets; and create conditions that dampen productivity.

On the other hand, employers are setting themselves up for potential liability for intruding on their employee’s privacy rights. This is a clear case where the law is falling behind technological evolution. There are few precedents set in this area of labor law to date. The current wisdom is that employers will monitor and employees should be careful as to what content they make public. However, this conclusion leaves much to be desired.

Of course, the mindset that leads to the above arguments is based on risk-adverse thinking. Many organizations have developed a risk-adverse culture, based on a history of litigation and/or business failure in the broader sense. The pervasive attitude is that employers need to watch for potential liability, even when the legal landscape is far from clear. Other organizations try to manage risk differently by providing clear, transparent policy. In this case, behavior is not constrained, but enabled by establishing clear boundaries through explicit polices and practices.

My workplace does not provide much guidance, and I have observed first hand the problems resulting from this lack of clear direction. Recently, we had a situation where a human resource action was recommended based on a pre-employment discovery on a social networking site. The University provides no policy statement about the use of such technologies as part of the due diligence on candidate selection. Similarly, we have no policy about monitoring individuals, once employed.

Now contrast this to Cornell’s policy: 

“Cornell University is very proud of its policy against monitoring the network for content as a practice. That policy has put the university in good light not merely as a response to content industries that have requested that we monitor in order to enforce their intellectual property rights, but more important as a statement about its role in higher education as research university. Because Cornell is a private not for profit entity, it is not required to observe the First Amendment on free speech. No bother, because as research institution it prizes free inquiry, and free speech is a prerequisite to that exercise. Thus, for Cornell University, free speech is a part of our values as an important center for research, teaching and outreach internationally.”

My personal opinion is that monitoring should not be part of an organization’s practice. That said, if an organization’s leadership finds that monitoring is necessary for business or operational reasons, then it is incumbent on them to be transparent about such practices and provide clear policy statements explaining both their rationale and application.

The use of social technologies in the workplace provides several organizational conundrums that deserve careful consideration. Today’s most innovative companies are using social technologies as a major part of their business strategy — both for internal communication as well as a key interface with customers and other external stakeholders. Additionally, many employees enter the workforce quite fluent in these technologies. However, there is a culture clash between an individual’s early experiences with these technologies as a socially focused media and how their employer views these same technologies.

The socially responsible organizations recognize these differences in use and help guide employees on how to make the transition from social use to work application. Here are a couple of sample guidelines:

First, organizations should provide a clear statement on how they view employee privacy rights. In reviewing Cornell’s IT policy memo on social technologies, one is struck by its empathy for the various constituents.

“People make the technology, not only in the fundamental sense of discovery and invention, but also in the sense that they make it happen and that they contour it in ways that reflect our basic humanity. Our basic humanity is for better or for worse, however. It is vulnerable to context, circumstance and interpretation. And so it is important to remember that Facebook is malleable and creates as many obligations as it does opportunities for expression.”

The policy memo goes on to provide guidance to all that may choose to use these technologies, providing encouragement to use such technologies but with respect. 

Second, corporations must communicate clear and transparent policies on content monitoring. If there are business or operational reasons for such activity, then employees should understand the reasons for monitoring. For example HP provides its employees with guidance regarding the use of blogs with its Standards of Business Conduct. The guidelines are written to encourage blogging, but make clear that the company will monitor blogs are correct erroneous information:

“We will correct inaccurate or misleading postings in a timely manner. We will not delete posts unless they violate our polices. Most changes will be made by adding to posts and we mark any additions clearly.”

Clearly, they are encouraging the expression of various employee viewpoints, but make it clear that content is monitored and revisions applied as appropriate.

There will always be disagreements about policy, but being transparent about social technology strategies and practices is a policy that is good for everyone. 

Social Entrepreneurship and Citizenship: Planning A New CTICE Initiative

Originally posted March 31, 2009.

Introduction

CTICE’s Social Entrepreneurship and Citizenship (SEC) is a new initiative, in the planning phase, for corporations and non-profit organizations looking to enhance their environmental, social, and governance performance. Global business and non-profit leaders are increasingly realizing that social responsibility is a critical performance driver associated with reputation, sustainable competitive advantage, and financial results. Today, most major companies and non-profits are reviewing policies and practices in terms of their impact on local community, employees, partners, vendors, customers as well as the environment and society, at large. Models for socially responsible programs must remain nimble as the economic landscape continues to change and evolve. 

The intended SEC mission is to help organizations design and implement socially responsible objectives and strategies aligned with business and program service goals. SEC programs facilitate the assessment of current citizenship programs and supports the design, execution, and outcome assessment of new socially responsible initiatives. SEC specializes in designing corporate partnerships and activities with local community organizations and small businesses, fostering strong ties to the community. 

Research and Consulting Services

SEC is equipped to provide customized research and consulting services to corporations and non-profits interested in developing a realistic social responsibility program vision and strategy for their organization. SEC staff, faculty, and interns can facilitate initial screening for various environmental, social, and governance practices to help identify potential strategic focus areas. After an initial review, SEC can facilitate strategic planning, program design, and outcome assessment processes in support of socially responsible policies and programs. 

Educational Programs

SEC plans to offer business and non-profit leaders seminars and workshops on the latest trends in corporate social responsibility, social innovation & entrepreneurship, and socially responsible investing. Through CTICE community-based learning program, SEC will offer courses through Columbia’s Video Network in areas of Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Entrepreneurship. Future plans include a four-course certificate program. Business executives and non-profit leaders will be able to take these courses via internet-based technologies to support their citizenship programs. 

Membership Fees

For firms and non-profits, most programs and services will be provided as part of membership fees or other contractual agreements. Annual membership rates will be based on annual revenue level or organizational size. For example, companies that generate revenues less than $500 million pay lower annual fees than firms at higher levels. Membership provides access to SEC staff, faculty, and interns to support research and consulting services as well as registrations for seminars, workshops, and conferences. 

As part of SEC’s commitment to socially responsible citizenship, a major percentage (to be determined) of net fees will be allocated to direct services and programs provided to our local community of Harlem. As part of an organization’s membership, participants choose from select services & programs where half of the membership fee will be allocated. Select services and programs may include: scholarships to local residents for green jobs education, stipends to local students for summer internships or K-12 programs, equipment or materials for local non-profits based on CTICE service learning projects, SEC direct services for a local non-profit of your choice, and micro-finance funds for fledgling social entrepreneurs.

An Application of the CTICE Community-Based, Service Learning Model

Originally posted March 27, 2009.

On Wednesday 3/25, we completed a major phase of a service learning project in CTICE’s Science, Technology, and Society class at Columbia University. The focus, this semester, has been on working with the University’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ACSRI) to draft shareholder resolution proxy voting guidelines for subsequent use by the Committee. The process for drafting the proxy guidelines provides a prime example on how the CTICE community-based service learning model can be applied to different community contexts and issues.

CTICE-supported community-based learning courses and programs offers unparalleled opportunities for Columbia University students to develop and support community-based initiatives. The size of the program—800 students working on more than 100 projects—means that students consistently play a major role in research and implementation efforts, not only in designing products, processes, and systems for local community clients but also in completing interdisciplinary research and advancement projects that advance the knowledge of the focus area. CTICE connects students with the local community, as well as supporting community engagement at the institutional level. All projects start with the community, and CTICE measures success by the tangible results it achieves for community clients.

Students are major players in all CTICE programs, and student interest and involvement are major drivers for which projects are eventually integrated into CTICE classes and programs. And with this socially responsible investing class, this is clearly the case.

In the Fall 2008, the ACSRI held its annual town hall meeting, inviting the Columbia Community, at large, to submit proposals about any concerns related to corporate behavior on social issues. Proposals can be directly related to public companies held in the University’s endowment or more general issues as environmental sustainability or human rights. During the town hall session, proposing community members present the key elements of their concerns to the ACSRI members with time for clarifying questions. After the submitted proposals are presented, there is some additional time for open dialogue with the members and the community. Post town hall, the Committee reviews each proposal in detail and generates an action plan to respond to the community. These initial responses can range from a request for a more detailed proposal with further research and information gathering to the formulation of an immediate recommendation. Once the Committee has reviewed the proposals and conducted appropriate due diligence, it recommends a course of action to the Trustee Sub-Committee for Social Responsibility (TSSR). The TSSR facilitates the discussions with the full Trustees’ body, as appropriate, and advises the central administration on any major decisions. Once final decisions are reached, the ACSRI communicates with the proposers on decisions and any resulting actions.

During this Fall’s town hall session, student groups requested that the committee consider creating proxy voting guidelines to “confirm the basic views of the committee and ensure that these views are consistent with the core values and mission of the University”. Additionally, these non-binding guidelines would allow for consistency in voting decisions from one year to the next. The proposal rightfully suggested that publishing the guidelines would provide greater transparency enabling the Columbia Community, at large, to understand the rationale of such decisions. Finally, the proposal advocated that the process of developing these guidelines involve participation of the Columbia Community.

Once the ACSRI agreed to move forward with the proposal and create proxy voting guidelines, it was decided to dedicate one of the CTICE service learning classes to the project. The Science, Technology, and Society class was the natural choice due to its interdisciplinary, policy focused curriculum. This class has served on several occasions as a research vehicle for community related concerns and projects. For example, in Spring 2008, the class focused on the opportunities and challenges of creating new entrepreneurial ventures in low-income, urban areas. The research and community engagement outcomes of the class led to several initiatives in Harlem, including the opening of the Columbia-Harlem Small Business Development Center.

For the 2009 offering, this service learning class has focused on the role that socially responsible investing (SRI) has on corporate governance and behavior. Team projects focus on issues of community investment and social venturing, shareholder resolution processes and corporate engagement strategies. One of the core projects of the class is the design of the community-proposed proxy voting guidelines. A number of steps were taken to prepare students for the project. Throughout the first several weeks of the class, various speakers and experts in socially responsible investment, corporate social responsibility, and shareholder activism guided the students through shareholder processes and actions. Additionally, students were exposed to some of the key environmental and social concerns areas that would typically be the focus of the ACSRI. Students were divided into teams across nine major social concern areas; animal welfare, banking, charitable donations, environmental sustainability, equal employment, executive pay, health and safety, military and security, and political contributions. To help prepare students for the task at hand, each team was provided with reading resources within their focus area. Additionally, each student member selected a book, associated with their specific SRI concern, to read and critique. Finally, teams were given numerous examples of proxy voting guidelines from other universities, pension plans, and investment firms.

All of this brings us back to this past Wednesday. The teams, as a result of all their preparation, were able to draft guidelines for each of the nine social areas during the class period. As the student teams worked, ACSRI members and representatives from the Responsible Endowment Coalition walked around providing support to the teams. The finalized draft guidelines were provided electronically to the instructor at the end of class, the first deliverable completed and ready to be sent to the community client.

The project will continue beyond this week. CTICE remains active until the proxy guidelines have been finalized and published. This is an important part of CTICE’s model for community-based, service learning programs. Tangible results are mandatory and CTICE staff develops adequate transition plans to ensure that projects continue past a specific class or activity. For example, regarding this project, one of the students from the class will continue on the proxy voting guideline project through a CTICE summer internship, working with the ACSRI and the CTICE team.

Microblogging: Five Easy Steps to Improve Internal Communications

Over the past couple of posts, I have focused on the use of social technologies to improve organizational capacity. The social technology information matrix illustrates four specific information-sharing relationships that can be facilitated through strategic use of new social media tools. Each quadrant focuses on a specific relationship among internal and external players in your organization’s ecosystem. For example, in Quadrant 1, the direction of information flow is internal to internal or within the organization. Internal to the organization can be further defined as within the core team or a specific department, business unit or the firm as a whole. You can explore the use of specific social technology strategies to enhance information sharing and collaboration within each of these defined relationships. 

As mentioned in an earlier post, one of CTICE’s four operational goals is to enhance internal communication and collaboration among the core team and colleagues. We have been exploring several strategic ways to use social technologies for this purpose. One of our early experiments involves applying Twitter or micro-blogging to ensure team members are knowledgeable of the many events and activities occurring across our program areas – college level service learning classes and projects, K- 12, workforce development, small business development and engaged entrepreneurship programs. 

Here is our simple process to initiate the path towards better internal communications. 1. Set up a home page such as an organization-specific website, Facebook page, or blog, dedicated to displaying important organizational news updates. 2. Establish an organization specific Twitter account, 3. Each team member establishes an individual twitter account, setting up to follow the organization’s tweets, 4. Team members set their individual twitter accounts to alert via SMS to cell phone and/or display as an RSS feed on a browser’s home page; TwitterGadget works on iGoogle, for example). 5. The tweets contain links bringing the members back to the organization’s homepage, thus providing detailed information about the news event. 

Since CTICE has a small team, we plan to further promote each member to follow other members’ tweets as well. By adding this aspect to the process, it facilitates increased information sharing among team members. There are several advantages to this form of social media communication. First, the messages are brief (140 characters), making them easier to browse and digest. . Secondly, tweets can be immediate with a real time flow of comments from team members. This feature works particularly well when in meetings and one needs pertinent information from members not in attendance. A third advantage, promoting internal information sharing, is the ability to select the team members and colleagues to follow, thus allowing information to be more targeted and less random than what is in your email inbox. Finally, the tweets are searchable. So by agreeing to the use of common keywords, you can search by topic or team member, for example. 

Many organizations are finding that microblogging enhances communications within and across internal teams. Zappos (http://twitter.com/zappos), for example, is a well-known avid user of Twitter for internal communications (Quadrant 1) as well as listening and communicating with their customers (Quadrants 2 & 3). I will explore these types of customer interactions via microblogging in future posts.

Originally published on March 22, 2009.

Increasing Organizational Capacity While Minimizing Transaction Costs

After finishing Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, I was struck by his adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Ronald Coase’s theory on transactional costs based on his influential essay The Nature of the Firm (1937). The Coase theorem provides an interesting platform to view the potential benefit of social technologies, especially to small organizations with resource constraints. Coase’s initial analysis focused on the relationship between transaction costs and allocation of legal property rights. According to Coase, in the absence of transaction costs, the market ultimately decides on the fairest allocation of rights. In a world without transaction costs, individuals would negotiate to produce the most efficient distribution of resources. Of course, there are always transaction costs, so one needs to look at the varying degree of such costs and the associated impact on market forces and growth of firms.

From a business perspective, Coase’s theorem has been applied to the rise and fall of market transaction costs: the costs associated with structures and resources needed to connect buyers and sellers and complete the business in question. The higher the transaction costs, the more structure is needed to manage the buyer-seller process, thus requiring firm creation and growth. But when transactions costs are low, less structure is required to manage the business process. In this case, it may make sense for individuals to directly market to each other (think eBay) as opposed to a more structured firm facilitating the transaction.

Shirky adds a third category; large-scale co-ordination can be accomplished when transactions costs are extremely low. His contention is that social technologies allow informally coordinated groups to achieve complex collective tasks without a formal organizational structure – they in effect, as he suggests, lay below the Coasean floor. Social technologies applied effectively can help minimize transaction costs such as information sharing, cooperation, and collective action. Therefore loosely structured, ad hoc groups can accomplish tangible outcomes without managerial direction and outside market and profit motives. According to the author, Wikipedia is a prime example of this phenomenon. Shirky offers several examples to demonstrate how these technologies are changing the way people share information and coordinate collective actions – from disruptive business applications to flash mobs in the service of societal activism.

In a prior post, the “Social Technology Information Matrix” (see figure), I alluded to the idea that by actively facilitating peer-to-peer support and collaboration among external constituents (interactions in quadrant 4), business and non-profit organizations can lower transaction costs. This potential to lower such costs can have a significant influence on how organizations are structured and managed. This is especially important for smaller organizations with limited resources. The potential to expand organizational capacity without commensurate resources, by promoting and facilitating peer-to-peer interaction among the customer base, is vast.

CTICE has several potential areas where peer-to-peer interaction can provide support for external constituents beyond what can be accomplished by internal resources. For one constituency group, students enrolled in project-based, service learning classes, there is a great need for information sharing and learning across various sub-groups. In these project-based classes, student teams are designing solutions for community organizations. In a typical semester, we have over 250 students working in 50 teams on as many projects. Numerous projects deal with similar community problems and associated requirements for solutions. Therefore, opportunities exist to share knowledge across project groups as well as within the client community organizations.

The ability to share knowledge in this situation has two important outcomes, the increased potential for effective and innovative solutions as well as overall efficiency of resources. From the perspective of facilitating knowledge sharing, organizations have two choices. First, an organizational structure can be created so advisors and/or instructors serve as intermediaries across project teams; the primary task to ensure commonalities across projects are made explicit to relevant student teams. This structure increases transactional costs by adding instructional resources. The alternative approach is to have a system where the student teams interact directly to share knowledge. This is where social technologies can support knowledge sharing by facilitating direct team interaction without the need for intermediaries.

The above scenario is not without its challenges, as anyone who has moderated online forums with minimal engagement surely knows. In the most successful cases of social technology usage leading to collaboration and collective action, the common ingredient is the motivation of the external constituencies to actively participate in the network. When the external groups are passionate about the organization, product, or activity, the act of collaboration is mostly intrinsically motivated. Creating the passion and motivation to actively participate in information sharing, collaboration and collective action is key to successful implementation of peer-to-peer networks. Organizations, such as CTICE, have to develop clear strategies and goals to create this passion within these external constituencies in order to increase capacity while minimizing transactional costs.

Originally published on March 19, 2009.

The Social Technology Information Matrix

Over the past few months, CTICE as been methodically integrating social technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and Linkedin, into our operations. Thanks to the guidance of Rebecca, a power user in her own right, we are learning how to best use these technologies as part of our overall communications and collaborative strategies. In a very short period, we have derived immediate benefits. First, the CU-CTICE Facebook Page has provided a central place for CTICE team members, colleagues, community partners, and students to discover up-to-date information about important events and activities. As of today, we have 107 dedicated fans on the site. While FB pages will not replace the need for our website, it has an important place especially in providing a mechanism for direct interaction, participation, and feedback by its followers. Secondly, we have used Facebook and Twitter to market several events including the Pitchfest, Tech Demo, and our Living Peace evening with the Burmese Monks. All three of these events had excellent attendance, in no small part, due to marketing through these technologies. Thirdly, we are beginning to see targeted CTICE constituents use these technologies to support each other’s goals by sharing information about interrelated community projects. This type of social networking behavior has an important outcome for CTICE, the more our customers support each other through reciprocal information sharing, the lower our transaction costs. This change in transactional effort allows us to focus our resources on other activities.

I look forward to continuing our experiments with these technologies to enhance CTICE’s capabilities to communicate and collaborate internally within our core team and externally, working with our many colleagues, partners, and customers. The effective use of these technologies should support the following goals:

1. Enhance internal CTICE communication and collaboration among the core team and colleagues,
2. Improve marketing of CTICE (mission, goals, strategies, programs and events) to targeted partners, customers and broader community members,
3. Encourage external partners and customers to be actively involved in CTICE program and service development, and,
4. Facilitate customers’ capacity to use these technologies to support each other’s goals, peer to peer, thus lowering our transactional efforts and increasing resource utilization.

These four goals can be viewed as part of what I call the Social Technology Information Matrix. The matrix looks at the interactions between internal versus external information providers and recipients. For example, social technologies used by internal providers targeting internal recipients focus on organizational communication and collaboration. The focus is on product and service development and feedback when external providers apply these technologies to internal information recipients. Our strategies for social technology deployment will need to take into account the importance of each of these goals as they relate to our overall mission.

Originally published on March 15, 2009.

CTICE Strategic Planning on the Green Agenda, Part One

As the CTICE team prepares for our second formal strategic planning session this week, I thought that a discussion of our preliminary thinking and experiences to date would be advantageous. 

The CTICE team started a strategic planning process a few weeks ago driven by the desire to integrate a “green agenda” into our existing program offerings. For our growing team, this is the first time we have embraced a formal process to discuss topics like vision, goals, strengths, opportunities, threats, weaknesses and outcomes. Like most small organizations, we have struggled to find the time to think forward, being too preoccupied with current work activities. Most members of the current CTICE team have business and entrepreneurial experience, so strategic planning and implementation are familiar activities. Our past experiences with strategic planning vary; we have come from different organizations, each following a certain strategic planning model and process that worked within the culture of the respective institution. Now we must develop our own planning model and process, one that works for CTICE, an organization nested within the Engineering School, a School that fits within the larger University.

Based on our collective experience, we have made several wise upfront decisions on how to best move the strategic planning forward, including the use of an external facilitator, the participation of representatives from our customer base, the creation of a living strategic planning document (view current version), and a focus on our “green agenda” as a unifying theme. It is this last element that has had the most influence on our thinking about CTICE, providing a review of our currently stated purpose and goals, as well as a renewed look at these critical organizational elements through the lens of this new green focus area. 

Our strategic process formally started with a two-hour session, conducting an environmental scan of the our “green” landscape. We brainstormed a list of green programs and activities at Columbia, identifying the program leaders, stated outcomes, strengths and weaknesses, and open questions. The list was long, the process messy, but several important issues emerged during the session. First, we realized that our overall green vision was not clear to all participants and that more clarification necessary. Secondly, there was a perceived disconnect between CTICE’s community-focused objectives and the faculty’s (one of our constituent groups) inherent research priorities. Finally, we recognized that Columbia’s extensive green programs would need to identified and prioritized into initiatives integral to our vision and mission versus those that exist as part of the broader landscape. 

Since this first formal planning session, we have conducted several informal conversations as a team as well as in various ad hoc sub groupings. In addition, we have had opportunities, in both formal and informal settings, to present our initial ideas on the “green agenda” and receive feedback from the targeted audience. These opportunities have helped us to hone our vision statement as well as focus our short term program plans. In addition, these discussions have identified several issues that need to be addressed in the near future. One of these open issues pertains to CTICE’s philosophy regarding collaboration versus competitive positioning. This will be a focus of a future blog, but the issue of competitive advantage and its critical relationship to organization’s sustainability needs to be viewed though the lens of the non-profit environment.

Originally posted March 14, 2009.

CTICE’s “Living Peace” Initiative Evolving

Initially, CTICE’s Living Peace initiative was focused on interfaith engagement within the Harlem and Upper Manhattan community. The main goal was to find connections with various faith-based organizations as another mechanism to identify community needs and implement projects to help meet those needs. The strategy paid off immediately as we started to work with various faith-based institutions in Harlem, working on various projects ranging from accessibility issues to social venture incubators. As with other CTICE activities, the main driver is always about active engagement with the community. We look to pro-actively solicit input on asset development; how we can leverage our resources and that of Columbia’s to support capacity building throughout Upper Manhattan. As this work continues, we are becoming more active in the areas of social justice and human rights. Living Peace has become our vehicle to address issues of accessibility and inclusiveness; the mechanism to create awareness and open dialogue among all community members.

Originally posted March 13, 2009.