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• Why We Should Adopt ALAConnect: A brief review and rumination on ALA’s new online community

  by Emily Ford

  May 13, 2009
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  ALAConnect’s Home Page © ALA

  So ALA has joined the ranks of two point oh. Last month it rolled out ALA­Con­nect, a ser­vice influ­enced by Ning, LinkedIn, Face­book, Google Docs, and other online net­work­ing plat­forms and shared work spaces. Despite the hoopla about the sys­tem I hadn’t even heard of it until one of my work­ing groups was asked to use it. Being an online net­work­ing junkie I was intrigued and decided to log in and, con­se­quently, to write this post. After my first look around the site I was a bit pes­simistic, but after tak­ing a deeper look, I have come to hope that ALA­Con­nect will be able to reach indi­vid­u­als who haven’t been able to attend con­fer­ences and engage with their col­leagues about ALA-centric issues. If ALA­Con­nect can draw this con­stituency to use it, then the tool might mean some real changes for ALA.

  Cur­rently, ALA­Con­nect, which aims “…to engage in ALA busi­ness and net­work with other mem­bers around issues and inter­ests rel­e­vant to the pro­fes­sion” (ALA, 2009) is in Phase 1 of its launch. This means that not all func­tion­al­ity has been imple­mented and future enhance­ments are planned for the site by the end of 2009. These include an advanced search for mem­bers and a men­tor­ing net­work. (Check out the ALA­Con­nect Roadmap for more details.)

  At first glance the sys­tem seems to have tools that we librar­i­ans have been using for a while from many dif­fer­ent places and sys­tems. It offers the abil­ity to cre­ate and mod­ify shared doc­u­ments, host chats, and spon­sor polls and votes all in one space! In many ways this fills a very real need for ALA com­mit­tees that have been strug­gling to work vir­tu­ally. Instead of chat­ting in a Meebo room, on Gchat in your Gmail, AIM, and using Google Docs or e-mailing doc­u­ments back and forth, these groups now have the oppor­tu­nity to con­duct work in one com­mu­nity space.

  Before I begin to dis­cuss the social con­text and impli­ca­tions ALA­Con­nect has on ALA pol­i­tics and the organization’s evo­lu­tion, I’d like to dis­cuss some of the more appar­ent and con­crete issues sur­round­ing this tech­no­log­i­cal implementation.

  Usabil­ity

  As with any sys­tem, some basic usabil­ity prob­lems are appar­ent in ALA­Con­nect. Most of the issues I point out have some­thing to do with the struc­ture of the sys­tem in place, in this case, Dru­pal. Some of these issues will be fixed in time with future Dru­pal releases, but right now they pose some usabil­ity issues.

  One of the first things I attempted to do in ALA­Con­nect was build my social net­work. I quickly dis­cov­ered that it takes too many clicks to add a new friend. After you have found a friend to add and suc­cess­fully add that friend, the sys­tem returns you to your pro­file instead of the “My Net­work” page.

  Next, I tried to do some searches to find rel­e­vant com­mu­ni­ties to join. Being the librar­ian I am, I clicked on “advanced search” but was con­fused that this did not take me directly to the advanced search inter­face. Instead, I had to click a few more times to get there.

  Another seem­ingly sim­ple usabil­ity issue that I noticed is that in the left nav­i­ga­tion tool­bar, the drop-down arrow next to menu items isn’t func­tional. While it does tell you that there are more items to view under that nav­i­ga­tional cat­e­gory, it does not work to drop down the struc­ture. Instead, you have to phys­i­cally click on the link and load a new page to see the sub-navigation levels.

  Again, these prob­lems will likely be addressed as ALA gets more feed­back or as Drupal’s devel­op­ers make fur­ther improve­ments to the soft­ware. Either way, these are basic usabil­ity issues that, in the future, might be improved.

  Pri­vacy

  Pri­vacy seems to be another issue with the sys­tem. In fact, Jes­samyn West was one of the first to com­ment on it. (You’ll notice from the com­ments in that blog post that ALA staff was quick to respond and fix the issue!) I get the feel­ing that they are get­ting a lot of pri­vacy based ques­tions because of the exis­tence of the Pri­vacy FAQ page and the many posts in the forum related to pri­vacy. There are some pretty robust fea­tures for pri­vacy in ALA­Con­nect, but it’s hard to fig­ure out what’s what with­out doing your research. You can choose to keep your mem­ber­ship in com­mu­ni­ties pri­vate, but your offi­cial ALA work will dis­play to mem­bers. You also have options to con­trol your pri­vacy for each com­mu­nity you join. See the FAQ for more infor­ma­tion about these details.

  The first thing I saw on my pro­file, shock­ingly, was my (per­sonal) phone num­ber. Why? Well, the answer is sim­ple. First, my per­sonal phone num­ber is the phone num­ber with which I joined ALA. (Being an unem­ployed librar­ian at that point it was the only num­ber I could give and I haven’t yet updated my infor­ma­tion with ALA.) Sec­ond, this piece of con­tact infor­ma­tion was imported with other mem­ber­ship infor­ma­tion when cre­at­ing ALA­Con­nect. (Why we need a phone num­ber to dis­play in an online social net­work­ing tool is beyond me.) Upon fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion I dis­cov­ered that phone num­bers dis­play only to peo­ple you call con­tacts, but this over­looks two sim­ple ques­tions: Who is going to call me when they could shoot me an email, and why was this piece of data even imported into ALAConnect?

  

  ALAConnect’s Online Now Box ©ALA

  More dis­con­cert­ing to me, how­ever is that ALA­Con­nect dis­plays who recently logged in on its home­page, even to the pub­lic. At first I thought I had the abil­ity to opt out of this, but it turns out I don’t.

  Going into my pro­file I dis­abled the abil­ity for peo­ple see my online sta­tus in my user pref­er­ences, but this sta­tus only relates to IM and chat gad­gets embed­ded in your pro­file, not the entire portal.

  While dis­play­ing whether I’m online might be incon­se­quen­tial, it still gives me the hee­bie jee­bies to know that any­one can find out that I’m at a com­puter logged in to ALA­Con­nect. Fur­ther­more, what util­ity does this func­tion add? How will the infor­ma­tion that I’m online be used by other mem­bers? There is no inter­nal IM func­tion (except for chats in mem­ber com­mu­ni­ties and groups) to which it can link. I’d be more for­giv­ing if there were some util­ity to this part of the inter­face, but there doesn’t appear to be any.

  

  ALA­Con­nect Pri­vacy Options for IM © ALA

  Func­tion­al­ity

  Unlike usabil­ity, func­tion­al­ity is one of those things that is harder to change after a sys­tem has been imple­mented. While I think the func­tion­al­ity of ALA­Con­nect is quite rich, I did have some basic ques­tions and frus­tra­tions about it. For instance, when cre­at­ing my pro­file I wanted to include all of my school­ing, not just one school.

  

  ALA­Con­nect Pro­file Edu­ca­tion Dis­play ©ALA

  I would also like to be able to show that I have two master’s degrees, and I know there are many many peo­ple out there who are in the same boat. More­over, I would like to be able to con­nect with peo­ple who are alums of my same col­lege, which seems to be a log­i­cal way to net­work. For exam­ple, I belong to a group on Face­book called Reedie Librar­i­ans, which is a way for me to con­nect with Reed Col­lege grad­u­ates who are also in the library pro­fes­sion. (This func­tion­al­ity has been marked in the ALA­Con­nect Roadmap as a future improvement.)

  There are some addi­tional items in ALA­Con­nect that might prove to be use­ful. Using tag­ging and being able to “favorite” a post or group is really help­ful, if you use this func­tion­al­ity. Though if you’re any­thing like me, you might never look at your favorites again. ALA­Con­nect also boasts the abil­ity to cre­ate RSS feeds to read con­tent of inter­est. (I did not try to cre­ate an RSS feed so I can­not say if this is easy to do.) Addi­tion­ally, the sys­tem embraces some other, but not all, social net­work­ing sites such as Flickr and Deli­cious. These sites will show up as gad­gets on your pro­file if you include them. The fol­low­ing image is of Aaron Dobbs’s pub­lic profile.

  

  User Pro­file on ALA­Con­nect with Flickr and Deli­cious Gad­gets ©ALA

  Even though users can embed some gad­gets in their pro­files, some might want bet­ter inter­op­er­abil­ity between ALA­Con­nect and their other net­work­ing tools. ItLwtLP blog­ger Derik says,

  “My big issue is that I want inter­op­er­abil­ity with my other social net­works. If ALA Con­nect would con­nect up with Face­book, Twit­ter, Friend­Feed, etc., maybe I could see a use. That inter­op­er­abil­ity is where we get into OpenSo­cial, Face­book Con­nect, and Google Friend Con­nect, all dif­fer­ent ongo­ing projects to make the social net­work portable.”

  I have a feel­ing that many peo­ple agree with Derik. Why would I join another net­work­ing site if isn’t inter­op­er­a­ble with the other things that I’ve been using for online net­work­ing and work? The prob­lem here is that ALA­Con­nect is not sup­posed to be a social net­work­ing site. Rather, it is intended to be a pro­fes­sional net­work­ing site. This is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion to note, but I won­der if it is a dis­tinc­tion that users will make.

  Finally, one of the best fea­tures and func­tional pieces of ALA­Con­nect is its abil­ity to host user-generated con­tent. Users can cre­ate groups, join groups, post com­ments, etc. This kind of con­tent is one that I feel has been lack­ing within the ALA struc­ture, and cre­at­ing this func­tion­al­ity may open the doors to increased orga­ni­za­tional par­tic­i­pa­tion and mean­ing­ful online dis­course about pro­fes­sional issues.

  I’m sure there are other func­tional things within ALA­Con­nect that I haven’t yet been able to explore. If you know of any, please com­ment on this blog post!

  The Social Context

  I’d like to move from the con­crete por­tion of this review to look­ing at the social con­text of ALA­Con­nect. As was ingrained in my brain in grad­u­ate school, no tech­no­log­i­cal imple­men­ta­tion exists in a vac­uum. In fact, the social con­text sur­round­ing a tech­no­log­i­cal imple­men­ta­tion will most likely deter­mine how well the sys­tem is adopted and used. (See Kling, Rosen­baum, and Sawyer’s 2005 book, Under­stand­ing and Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Social Infor­mat­ics for an easy to read summary.)

  ALA­Con­nect might be able to offer ALA mem­bers the net­work­ing and vir­tual space to engage in dis­course and other community-based activ­ity that has been tak­ing place in other vir­tual spaces. There is no doubt that online net­work­ing and use of webapps are part of a com­put­er­i­za­tion move­ment which is par­tic­u­larly use­ful for infor­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als and librar­i­ans. (For more about com­put­er­i­za­tion move­ments, read a piece by Susan Iacono and Rob Kling in Yates and Van Maanen’s 2001 book, Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy and Orga­ni­za­tional Trans­for­ma­tion.) The ques­tion is: for ALA mem­bers who feel dis­en­fran­chised and dis­en­chanted, can ALA­Con­nect be a democ­ra­tiz­ing fac­tor? Can a social move­ment form in this vir­tual space to give ALA mem­bers what they need from the orga­ni­za­tion? I think it’s pos­si­ble, but whether this hap­pens will be deter­mined by the system’s users.

  

  Brows­ing ALA­Con­nect ©ALA

  There are a few things in the ALA­Con­nect inter­face and sys­tem that show its sur­round­ing social con­text. You will notice that ALAConnect’s struc­ture is based on ALA’s scary, unwieldy, and seem­ingly unnav­i­ga­ble polit­i­cal struc­ture. Notice in the fol­low­ing screen­shot that to browse ALA­Con­nect you imme­di­ately have to under­stand the struc­ture of ALA. This is not all that help­ful to those who don’t quite under­stand it. One the one hand, this sys­tem must reflect that struc­ture. On the other hand, this could pre­vent many users from join­ing and using the sys­tem, sim­ply based on its par­ent structure.

  I tried to look at how to cre­ate a group (see the screen­shot below), and was left won­der­ing what the “ALA­Con­nect” sub­ject head­ings had to do with the group I was going to cre­ate. For instance, we are asked right away to place our user-generated con­tent into an orga­ni­za­tional hier­ar­chy (ALA’s) that is hard to use. How­ever, like any clas­si­fi­ca­tion, this func­tion will help to make groups more find­able. You can also request to add a new sub­ject head­ing, which is a great ser­vice.  (See the Mem­ber Chair FAQ for more details.) This model isn’t ideal, but it seems to address the issue of how dif­fer­ent users might find the groups they’re look­ing for.

  

  Cre­at­ing a Group on ALA­Con­nect ©ALA

  It is impos­si­ble for a sys­tem like ALA­Con­nect to be devoid of social con­text. The real issue here is the ten­sion between the “net­work­ing” part of the sys­tem and the part that is tied to off­cial ALA com­mit­tees and structure.

  The Ver­dict

  Despite some of the crit­i­cisms I’ve dis­cussed in this arti­cle, I think it is a tremen­dous resource with great poten­tial. Con­tent, includ­ing com­mu­ni­ties and dis­cus­sions, can be user-generated. Struc­tures and con­ver­sa­tions can cen­ter around an issue, not around a divi­sion, some­thing that ALA des­per­ately needs in order to be able to involve a larger com­mu­nity, to make the ALA struc­ture more open, and to make the association’s work more rel­e­vant to today’s librar­i­ans. The fact that the sys­tem is part of the ALA struc­ture may dis­suade some users, but there is a grow­ing online com­mu­nity of non-ALA mem­bers who have cre­ated ALA­Con­nect accounts and are using the resource.

  ALA­Con­nect offers every­one in library­land (not just ALA mem­bers) a way to get involved in pro­fes­sional dis­course, to engage in pro­fes­sional net­work­ing, and to cre­ate their own pro­fes­sional com­mu­ni­ties online. What we need to do is to join ALA­Con­nect en masse, cre­ate groups, engage in com­mu­ni­ties, and make ALA what we need it to be. ALA­Con­nect is just a start­ing point, but I hon­estly think that if we start there, the sky is the limit. It’s up to us to make sure we use the sys­tem in a way that is mean­ing­ful to us.

  ---

  Thanks to Aaron Dobbs for his thought­ful com­ments on this post. Addi­tional thanks to Jenny Levine of ALA­Con­nect for answer­ing some last minute ques­tions and pro­vid­ing thoughts and her exper­tise about the sys­tem, and to Derik Bad­man of ItLwtLP for his com­ments.
  

  You might also be inter­ested in:

  • On the ALA Mem­ber­ship Pyramid
  • My (Our) Abu­sive Rela­tion­ship with Google and What We Can Do About It
  • Social net­work­ing with a brain: a crit­i­cal review of aca­d­e­mic sites
  • All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go: A Sur­vey of ALA Emerg­ing Leaders
  • Why isn’t a pic­ture worth a thou­sand words?
  Tags: ALA, ALAConnect, membership

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16 Comments

• Derik Badman says:

  May 13, 2009 at 8:03 am

  Sadly, the ALA­Con­nect Roadmap isn’t work­ing. I get a zero k file.

  In re: the RSS feeds: Get­ting feeds is a bit com­pli­cated. Each user has a key that they need to add to feeds to get them to work. Unfor­tu­nately, that is not clear if you are just click­ing on RSS feed links or try­ing to add them through your browser’s auto-detect func­tion. You have to go into your pro­file to find the key, save it, and then man­u­ally add it to feed urls. Aargh.

  I can under­stand the desire to make feeds pri­vate and there is no con­sis­tently used “secure” feed method, but it’s still a pain.

  Reply
• Jenny Levine says:

  May 13, 2009 at 8:39 am

  Thanks for this in-depth review, Emily. I’m going to take a lit­tle time to read through it again to make sure I cover the bases in my response.

  In the mean­time, though, I wanted to respond to Derik’s com­ment (the one above mine, not the one that’s embed­ded in the post). Derik, can you try down­load­ing the Roadmap again? I had updated the file on the ITTS blog but for­got to change the link on Con­nect itself. I just tested it, and both are work­ing right now.

  Also, regard­ing RSS, there are reg­u­lar RSS feeds of pub­lic con­tent for every group in the sys­tem. Just nav­i­gate to the group’s home page and your browser shoudl auto-discover it. Alter­na­tively, there’s an RSS icon towards the bot­tom of the page.

  So to track *any* group’s pub­lic con­tent in the sys­tem via RSS, you don’t have to jump through any hoops to get the feed and it’s not dif­fer­ent than sub­scrib­ing to any other site. This makes it really easy to track (or re-display) the pub­lic out­put of a spe­cific work­ing group or com­mu­nity in Con­nect, espe­cially if you don’t want to clut­ter up your email with their content.

  The process you men­tion above is strictly for secure feeds for pri­vate con­tent from groups you’re already a mem­ber of. So if your com­mit­tee is post­ing pro­tected con­tent that only com­mit­tee mem­bers can see, you’ll need to go through that “secure RSS” process to get a feed for that con­tent. And of course, you’ll have to use an aggre­ga­tor that sup­ports authen­ti­ca­tion, but as you noted, that’s a prob­lem across the web and it’s out of our control.

  I have a long list of help doc­u­ments to cre­ate, and how to track a secure RSS feed from Con­nect is one of them. As this is an advanced user/early adopter type of fea­ture, though, there are some other ones I need to do first to explain some of the more mun­dane prob­lems (like a few of the usabil­ity issues Emily encountered).

  Derik, if the pub­lic RSS feeds *don’t* work for you just as eas­ily as they do else­where, please let me know right away and we’ll start trou­bleshoot­ing the issue.

  More to come, but thank you to both of you for your comments.

  Jenny

  Reply
• Derik Badman says:

  May 13, 2009 at 10:03 am

  Thanks, Jenny. Roadmap worked this time.

  On the RSS, I guess I was try­ing the wrong feeds.

  Reply
• Ellie says:

  May 13, 2009 at 11:21 am

  Thanks for this review Emily. I was asked a few months ago to set up my account and test things out and I haven’t done much with it since. I hope that my com­mit­tees do use it as a cen­tral stor­age and com­mu­ni­ca­tion locale rather than email.

  My biggest gripe when I signed up was that I couldn’t change my dis­play name except by chang­ing my name within my main ALA mem­ber­ship infor­ma­tion. I’d like to be able to keep my full name in my off­i­cal mem­ber­ship info and have my nick­name dis­play in ALAConnect.

  Reply
• ALA Marginalia » Blog Archive » Increasing Usage of ALA Connect says:

  May 13, 2009 at 11:23 am

  […] other views of Con­nect: ALA Con­nect: The Mother Ship Evolves from School Library Jour­nal and Why We Should Adopt ALA­Con­nect: A brief review and rumi­na­tion on ALA’s new online com­mu­nity from In the Library with the Lead […]

  Reply
• shinylib says:

  May 13, 2009 at 11:32 am

  That pretty much sums up my com­men­tary on ALA Con­nect. I’m really excited about the idea of not need­ing to be an ALA mem­ber to use Con­nect BUT…

  Yes­ter­day I noticed that non-members can­not be added to your net­work. I pre­sume that means they don’t get to cre­ate net­works, period. That seems a bit…odd.

  Reply
• Kim Leeder says:

  May 13, 2009 at 11:48 am

  Emily, thanks for break­ing down ALA Con­nect for those of us who haven’t really explored it yet. I just wanted to add that one of the things I’ve been most sur­prised — and rather impressed — by is the option to cre­ate Mem­ber Com­mu­ni­ties that exist com­pletely out­side of ALA’s orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture. To me this opens up all sorts of oppor­tu­ni­ties that haven’t existed before in ALA where we can make con­nec­tions across sec­tions, divi­sions, etc., based on issues and top­ics instead of by unit. We should be doing that more over­all, and this is a great step forward.

  Reply
• Steve Lawson says:

  May 13, 2009 at 9:58 pm

  Between my own very lim­ited use of ALA Con­nect and this review, I’m think­ing that the site will be very use­ful to peo­ple who are already involved in ALA. Were I active in an ALA Section/Division/Round Table/Whatever, I’d be glad my group had a cen­tral loca­tion all set for our work, and will­ing to give it a good try.

  But I’m hav­ing a hard time rec­on­cil­ing the last para­graph of the post with the rest of the review. From the review, I get the impres­sion that the site mostly works, but is kind of clunky, con­fus­ing, and dupli­cates what we can find in other sites. But the last para­graph encour­ages us to all go adopt it right away. Hap­pily, I don’t think that will hap­pen. I’d pre­fer to see our com­mu­ni­ties grow more organ­i­cally, find­ing the chan­nels and tools that suit them on their own, rather than depend­ing on ALA to deliver every­thing. I can under­stand why ALA offers more ser­vices and func­tions to mem­bers than non-members, but that sim­ple fact will keep most non-members (such as myself) from being very excited about try­ing to build com­mu­ni­ties on ALA’s turf.

  Reply
• Emily Ford says:

  May 15, 2009 at 12:12 am

  @Steve. You’re right. There is very much a ten­sion between the “net­work­ing” part of the site and the func­tion­al­ity and ser­vice to ALA affil­i­ated com­mit­tees and divi­sions. This is where I am a bit trou­bled, but I also can see poten­tial in the site. I think one of the main points I was try­ing to get across is that ALAConnect’s suc­cess is going to depend on how the ser­vice is adopted by users, both ALA mem­bers and non-members. The thing that I do like is that the site doesn’t have com­mer­cial inter­est like many other net­work­ing sites, which is always a good thing. Would you rather have a cor­po­rate news entity own or know your data or a rea­son­ably respon­si­ble pro­fes­sional organization?

  I think that it also pro­vides a ser­vice that is built for library issues, and that cus­tomiza­tion and “per­son­al­iza­tion” towards our pro­fes­sional needs might turn out to be some­thing that we aren’t get­ting some­where else. If you are in the library and infor­ma­tion pro­fes­sion, chances are a large por­tion of your col­leagues do belong to ALA, so even if you aren’t a mem­ber, being able to inter­act with these col­leagues on ALA­Con­nect will be a good thing.

  Gen­er­ally, I would like to encour­age users to try ALA­Con­nect because I think ALA is try­ing to do a ser­vice for its mem­bers and the gen­eral library com­mu­nity. If the orga­ni­za­tion is offer­ing a space in which users can become more involved, even if they aren’t mem­bers, that they might be more apt to join ALA and become involved on that level. Yes, it might seem some­what self sus­tain­ing, but the fact is, ALA pro­vides a lot of advo­cacy work on behalf of libraries and librar­i­ans on a scale that other smaller pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tions aren’t able to accomplish.

  In regards to the “clunk­i­ness” I think that some of these issues are going to be alle­vi­ated by future Dru­pal upgrades. Jenny can address this more in depth. Fur­ther­more, the more use ALA­Con­nect gets, the more impe­tus ALA has to fund it to imple­ment the upgrades and improve­ments that will ben­e­fit the site to make it less clunky and more usable. ALA staff are very respon­sive and with­out the sup­port of ALAConnect’s con­stituents, it can­not grow to become what I think it has the poten­tial to be.

  This all being said, it is hard to rec­on­cile the non-member vs. mem­ber issues, and I think that we need to hear from more non-members about how the site works for them.

  Thanks for com­ment­ing, Steve.

  Reply
• Ellie says:

  May 15, 2009 at 1:27 pm

  Hav­ing just got­ten my 2^nd “friend” request, I’ll add that the net­work­ing choices are awk­ward. Or maybe I’m just awk­ward. But hav­ing to decide whether some­one is my coworker, col­league, fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor, or friend is too many options for me. (There’s also ven­dor, client, class­mate, and con­tact.) And I was hon­estly a lit­tle sad when the first per­son requested me as a “friend” and my sec­ond requested me as a “fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor.” Like I said, maybe I’m just awk­ward, but that adds a layer of social stum­bling blocks I’d rather not deal with.

  I’m test­ing whether I can add them in more than one cat­e­gory, but I can’t select mul­ti­ple at once and I hope it will list both cat­e­gories by one name rather than list the per­son twice…

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• Emily Ford says:

  May 19, 2009 at 6:14 pm

  @Ellie. Yes, I found this very con­fus­ing as well. Aren’t we all col­leagues since we’re all librar­i­ans? It is socially awk­ward to know how to add some­one to your net­work in this con­text. I know you through this blog, I know oth­ers because they have been co-workers. What it comes down to is whose men­tal model does the def­i­n­i­tion of these defined con­tacts reflect? Also, what util­ity will those dis­tinc­tions have in the sys­tem? As far as I can tell, noth­ing, so why not call them all con­tacts and flat­ten the data­base a lit­tle? This would also ease the social awk­ward­ness of try­ing to fig­ure out how to define the con­text of how we know people.

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• Diane Chen says:

  May 27, 2009 at 6:05 pm

  Thanks for post­ing the review. I love the pos­si­bil­i­ties of ALA Con­nect and really appre­ci­ate Jenny’s cre­at­ing this. If a prod­uct was per­fect first round, it would take for­ever to be acti­vated. I like that fact that every­one can con­tribute to mak­ing it bet­ter. Has any­one cre­ated a com­mu­nity called “How we can improve ALA Connect?”

  I want more peo­ple to con­tribute because any social com­mu­nity needs a bal­ance of peo­ple and con­tri­bu­tions. You’ll note that I’ve tried post­ing a few starters and am still wait­ing for responses. I’m not giv­ing up because I know that most mem­bers won’t even grasp what ALA Con­nect is until see­ing and hear­ing about it at ALA Annual.

  As far as mem­bers hav­ing a few more priv­i­leges, I’m not as both­ered because I really want every­one to be a mem­ber of ALA. I espe­cially want rebels and peo­ple like me that want to fix things to join. The way to make it bet­ter is to par­tic­i­pate. Just my 2 cents today.

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• Jenny Levine says:

  June 11, 2009 at 11:43 am

  I’m really sorry it’s taken me so long to jump back in here, so let’s get right to some answers to var­i­ous ques­tions from Emily’s post first.

  Usabil­ity
  — — —

  1. I also have all of those com­plaints on a list (plus a few oth­ers), and I’m hop­ing we can address at least some of them in the forth­com­ing upgrade to Dru­pal 6. If you know Dru­pal at all, you can tell that we’ve already hacked core to address a vari­ety of inter­face prob­lems, so we’re try­ing to find a good bal­ance between hacks (which cost $) and usabil­ity. Keep telling us what isn’t work­ing for you, as those items will get a higher priority.

  PRIVACY
  — — -

  2. I can cer­tainly appre­ci­ate that you don’t call folks much (I don’t either), but if you put your phone num­ber in your ALA pro­file, you thought it had some value at the Asso­ci­a­tion level and it’s been dis­play­ing in the mem­ber direc­tory all along. Con­nect actu­ally gives you a greater level of pri­vacy, because only folks in your net­work see it, not all ALA mem­bers. Plus, it’s an optional field, so you can always remove it.

  Over­all, at the Asso­ci­a­tion level, we don’t dis­crim­i­nate against any con­tact method. What­ever you put in your pro­file is what we dis­play, so we’re try­ing to give you more gran­u­lar con­trol in Connect.

  Also, I want to point out that Con­nect wasn’t built to be a social net­work­ing tool. It’s a *pro­fes­sional* net­work­ing tool designed to help you lever­age ALA to improve your career, so one of our goals is to help you net­work in any medium, not just online. That’s why the future con­fer­ence event plan­ner will help facil­i­tate f2f networking.

  3. We dis­play names of peo­ple who have logged in dur­ing the last half-hour, and even then it’s only a ran­dom selec­tion of 15 of them. This is where it gets dif­fi­cult to bal­ance com­pet­ing inter­ests, because I’ve actu­ally watched peo­ple look at this list, see some­one they know, exclaim with delight, go to the person’s pro­file, and shoot them an email to say hi.

  That said, I’ll add the abil­ity to cloak your­self to the list of poten­tial enhance­ments, although I can’t promise when we’d have the resources to add that fea­ture. We’d prob­a­bly still default it to dis­play pub­licly since no per­sonal infor­ma­tion is dis­played to non-members, but your con­cern is offi­cially noted. Thanks for high­light­ing it.

  FUNCTIONALITY
  — —  —  — -

  4. As you noted, there are plans to add the func­tion­al­ity that’s miss­ing. We’re cod­ing as fast as we can, and we have a lot of big, awe­some things we’re adding to the site.

  INTEROPERABILITY
  — —  —  —  — -

  5. Sev­eral peo­ple have asked the same ques­tions as you and Derik — how will Con­nect inte­grate with exist­ing exter­nal sites. While I under­stand that desire (and that’s why we’ve made sure every­thing has RSS in and out of the sys­tem), I’m not sure what other func­tion­al­ity you’re look­ing for, so I’m hop­ing you can expand on that.

  I have a cou­ple of ideas but over­all, I’m not con­vinced that mem­bers want their social lives mashed up with their pro­fes­sional ones. For exam­ple, if we import Face­book info into Con­nect, I don’t think we can offer a gran­u­lar method for dis­play­ing infor­ma­tion only from your “pro­fes­sional” groups or only your “safe” sta­tus updates. If we were to dis­play that com­plaint you posted about work, a col­league, or your affil­i­a­tion with the “I Love Pop­corn” group on your Con­nect pro­file, how are you going to feel when your col­leagues see that on your pro­fes­sional presence?

  Hon­estly, though, I’d love to be wrong and make Con­nect live every­where and vice-versa. Let’s talk this (and other issues) through. You and Diane inspired me to cre­ate an “Improve ALA Con­nect” com­mu­nity on Con­nect. Go to http://​con​nect​.ala​.org/​n​o​d​e​/​7​5​799 and click on the “join” but­ton in the right-hand side­bar to keep the dis­cus­sion going.

  Thanks again, Emily. Speak­ing up can make a dif­fer­ence, and I hope every­one does give Con­nect a try, because you’re right that there are some new oppor­tu­ni­ties there. If we take advan­tage of them.

  Reply
• Jenny Levine says:

  June 11, 2009 at 11:57 am

  One last reply to the net­work­ing options concern.

  I know it seems awk­ward com­pared to social net­work­ing sites, but I believe we need dis­tinc­tions in a pro­fes­sional net­work­ing tool. I’m will­ing to be wrong about this, and admit­tedly, some of this is based on my own expe­ri­ences (not the boss part! :-p )but here’s my reasoning.

  1. Not every­one wants to call their boss their “friend,” so this gives you a way out of that. “Co-worker” or “col­league” them first, before they can “friend” you.

  2. If you’re at all well-known, peo­ple you don’t really know will “friend” you, and you may want a way to dis­tin­guish them from your real friends.

  3. Because in the future, we’re hop­ing to give you more con­trol over who can see what. For exam­ple, when we imple­ment the new con­fer­ence event plan­ner, I’m hop­ing to give you the option of dis­play­ing where you’ll be when to spe­cific groups. Many folks will want to dis­play this infor­ma­tion only to their friends, not to every­one on their network.

  4. There’s no one good term we’re all going to agree on. We could go with “col­league,” but are you going to want to be able to iden­tify the peo­ple who are more than that? Orig­i­nally we had “con­tact” to cover this cat­e­gory, but some­one requested we add “col­league” because it bet­ter described the folks on her board.

  That said, we may still pare down the options. Maybe we’ll take a vote in the new Con­nect group. :)

  Reply
• Derik Badman says:

  June 11, 2009 at 12:55 pm

  Thanks for all the replies, Jenny.

  In re FB inte­gra­tion, first thing I would ask for is import­ing friends. Like when you join Twit­ter and it lets you import friends from other sites or from email con­tacts. It’d be nice to be able to friend a large bunch of peo­ple at once who are in my “Library” friends list on FB.

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• Jenny Levine says:

  June 11, 2009 at 1:34 pm

  Thanks, Derik. I’ll put that on the list for a future phase. We’re booked solid through 2009 with the upgrade to Dru­pal 6, the men­tor­ing net­work, the oppor­tu­ni­ties exchange, improved search, and the new con­fer­ence event plan­ner, but I’ll watch for an oppor­tu­nity to slip this in. It may also depend on whether there’s a Dru­pal mod­ule avail­able, as we’re already expend­ing major funds to cre­ate new mod­ules for those services.

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