Finding AWWA's Social Media Communities

摘要

The results of a survey undertaken by the Information Management and Technology (IMTech) Research Committee, under the Water Science & Research Division indicate that AWWA committee members appear to be most interested in accessing online collaboration tools for their volunteer work, as opposed to using social media platforms for that purpose. With that in mind, AWWA has differentiated solutions based on the separate goals of supporting task-oriented collaboration-such as cooperative drafting of documents-and supporting primarily social interactions such as general topical discussion and status reminders. According to the survey results, the top three types of functionality committee members would like are file sharing, real-time document collaboration, and video conferencing. All are available to AWWA volunteers (or will shortly be available) through various applications. SharePointis one of the most popular tools among survey respondents for file sharing and document collaboration functions and is the basis of Facebook Docs and Microsoft's public online collaboration project SkyDrive.