BIGWIG badge from ALA
At the recent annual meeting of the American Library Association (ALA) I attended the BIGWIG meeting. BIGWIG (Blogs, Interactive Groupware Wikis Interest Group) is an interest group in the division of ALA called Library and Information Technology Association, and was most recently headed by Jason Griffey. After ALA I corresponded with him about the impetus for BIGWIG and asked him about its progress so far. Here’s how he responded.
MK: Jason, how did BIGWIG come about?
JG: In 2004, Karen Schneider and Clara Ruttenberg thought there was a need to press LITA on the fact that blogs and wikis were increasingly important communications tools, and formed the Interest Group to explore the possibilities. After Karen S. roped Karen Coombs and myself into doing a presentation on blogs and blogging at ALA Annual 2005, the two of us and Michelle Boule stepped into leadership roles in BIGWIG, and decided that blogs and wikis, while interesting, were moving from exciting to understood pretty quickly. We’ve worked over the last 3 years, with the help of Jonathan Blackburn and Tiffany Smith, to expand the coverage of BIGWIG to be more of a general purpose technology incubator for LITA.
MK: Talk about the reasoning behind the BIGWIG URL being outside the ALA domain.
JG: The URL you are talking about is our website YourBIGWIG, at www.yourbigwig.com. That came about largely from discussions that Karen, Michelle and I had regarding the byzantine nature of the ALA and LITA, and how the insistence on face to face meetings really killed the possibility for virtual participation. We were all interested as well in increasing the transparency of the operations of the organization, and moving BIGWIG towards having more voices involved in the overall decision making parts of the IG. We felt that increasing transparency by attempting to utilize what was, at the time, a very poor Content Management System (nothing against ALA, just that Serena is not exactly intuitive) wasn’t going to make us more effective, but less. Moving to a platform that is open and has the ability to grow without the overhead of bureaucracy holding it back had its appeal. So we bought a domain, asked Blake at LISHost.net if he would host us, and put up a Drupal based site to help us organize things.
This gives us the freedom to do things quickly, try new technologies, integrate the larger information community, and generally experiment…something that is hard to do under the auspices of a larger organization.
MK: Did BIGWIG exist before it was part of LITA, or did LITA create BIGWIG?
JG: You know, it’s fair to say that LITA created BIGWIG as it exists today. But that’s not exactly a compliment, since the onus for creation was a dissatisfaction with the existing structures and use of technology. We’ve tried, during our existence, to model modern technologies and digital norms in hopes that LITA will see the benefit and absorb some of those as a better way of doing business. Our first attempts at this were installing and using the LITABlog and LITAWiki for division business, and once that was well established we moved on to reinventing the conference session by holding the Social Software Showcase in 2007.
MK: What’s been your biggest challenge so far?
JG: The biggest challenge for BIGWIG has been mobilizing those interested in what we’re doing. That was another driver for YourBIGWIG, to try and put together someplace for people to become active and help us push the envelope.
MK: What’s the mission of BIGWIG?
JG: In three words: “Do Cool Stuff.” A bit longer mission statement would involve some of the things I said above about modeling appropriate digital information and communication behaviors for groups that are still, to some degree, stuck in the last century. To put it in the terms Clay Shirkey uses in Here Comes Everybody, we’re trying to take things that are beneath the Coasean floor and find a way to see if they are useful inside the organization as well.
MK: Other than the technology showcase, what do you hope to accomplish via this group?
JG: Taking over the worl^h^h^h^h…I mean, BIGWIG is moving into a role within LITA as a technology incubator, where we’re the skunkworks for the larger organization. I personally hope that BIGWIG becomes the place within LITA that the most edgy technologies are being explored and pushed, and where we’re willing to bleed just a little in order to be on the edge. I hope that we can find people that are doing innovative things with technology that translate into doing showing others how to do cool things with technology. I hope that we can innovate and educate.
MK: Does BIGWIG aspire to being more than an interest group (IG)?
JG: I’m not sure what BIGWIG aspires to be. We definitely aren’t the typical IG. IG’s, in the LITA world, are designed to be very rough, possibly transient discussion groups that can put on programs at conferences. The real work of the division is done by committees. The problem with this model is that while committees are appointed positions, IG’s are meritocracies….they spring into being because of pure interest, and are driven, again as Clay Shirkey puts it, by love. So in some ways BIGWIG wants to work towards a new model of organization, one driven by the love of the technology.
MK: Does BIGWIG serve sections other than LITA?
JG: I’m not sure how much we “serve” LITA, even. We kind of sprang into existence within LITA, but we are talking with other groups about how our models might help them as well….the hope isn’t that we are a service-organization, but instead that we are a guide or consultative group. We’ve already worked our way through some of the areas that other divisions are just coming upon, and we certainly have in our membership people who understand not only the technology but the social mores and norms of the new online world. We’re always available for consultation.
(this interview is being simultaneously published at http://sns.mlanet.org/blog)
