YWAM Information Technology

Below is a text version of a blog that I wrote at: http://donovanpalmer.com/2008/06/07/contact-overload/

I’m not sure of the origin of the term “contact overload”, but when I heard it recently, it articulated something I was thinking about when I started to play with Twitter. Contact overload is similar to information overload. The effects of contact overload is that you have so many contacts on a social networking or collaboration platform that it is no longer useful. For example, there are people on Twitter that have thousands of other users that they are following. The end result is that their twitter feed is enormous and inhuman to follow. I would dare say just a useless tide of information.

In an international organisation such as YWAM, creating this dynamic is very possible as well because we make friends all over the world. For example, on facebook I have 355 friends. To be honest, I have no ability to really keep up with what all these friends are doing on a frequent basis. I like though, because if I do want to find a friend, it allows me to look them up and contact them. However, as a collaboration tool, it is virtually useless unless I focus. It becomes kind of like an email box of which you get hundreds of emails every day. You can’t read it all.

So the concept that I have been thinking about is the need to focus on which groups you want to add to a collaborative or social platform. In the case of Twitter, if it is going to be really useful, these are the categories of people that would be useful for me to follow in this manner for my work:

* Strategic relationships (mentors, friends who give you input, etc.)
* Line Leaders who I report to
* Other leaders on my leadership team
* Fellow team members

This is not to say that other relationships are not important. Its just that technology gives me the ability to connect up with more people than I can humanly track. So when it comes to a collaboration tool, I need to think through what I want to achieve with it and focus appropriately. If I just want a general contact platform like facebook, then I should seek to connect up with as many people as possible. If I want to use it in my work, then I need to think of what information would be useful for me to have from what people.

It’s either this, or I get on overload and can’t get anywhere with the information being pushed at me. Kind of like the picture above!