To Bot or Not To Bot

To Bot or Not To Bot
The Appropriateness and Effectiveness of ICIM’s Electronic Networks
By Wendy Chappell, Executive Director

A doctor sits down to his email early in the morning. Fifteen messages are there, as usual from the International College of Integrative Medicine, “Someone has viewed your listing on www.icimed.com.”
“Great,” he thinks, “when will the phone start ringing with all these new patients this damn website is promising me?” He idley clicks on one of the announcements and browses his listing, tossing off a quick email to Wendy changing a few details about his office. Sometimes he just clicks return and tells her the weather. At least he knows she’s always there behind those obnoxious emails, ready to answer any questions he has at the moment about what ICIM is up to.
This scenario happens in over one hundred locations across the country almost daily. Our bots tell our doctors when they’ve got a hit. To some of them this is a sign of life and hope that they will be found in the gobbly-gook of cyberspace. To some it is a meaningless waste of email space. After all, it’s just a bot, not a patient. “Give us names and addresses so we can do something about the inquiry,” they plea. But we have nothing but an anonymous click to give. The bots don’t discuss things with the potential patients, and they certainly don’t give in to the doctor’s questions. They quietly do what they were built to do; they follow the rules and nothing more. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid write in The Social Life of Information (2002, p. 54)), “bots, in contrast to humans, live a wretchedly impoverished social existence.”
Those bots didn’t come from nowhere. They were built by their godfather Antonio, who is also our webmaster at ICM. In The Social Life of Information the authors argue that technology will not make organizations flatter, as once was thought (p. 28). I would agree with that, however, in ICIM, the hierarchy takes an interesting turn, because on a practical level it is arranged according to technological power. Though I am Antonio’s boss and the ICIM Board of Directors employs me, Antonio is at the top of most of our daily interactions. It is Antonio, our IT department that links me into most of ICIM’s communications, and he also has the power to change major and minor details of how we interact with the world. If he were to quit, ICIM would not be able to carry on until a replacement “Antonio” who had similar intellectual abilities and experience could be hired. I have some abilities to adapt the website and enter data, and members rely on me to update their listings and membership status, etc., so I am next in line on the power scale. Members of our group have only limited abilities to control their profile, so they are the lowest in the hierarchy, relying on me, and ultimately Antonio, to “present” them and represent them in an attractive way to society at large. Hierarchy is alive and well, and based on IT.
What does our electronic office provide? It is a library where members can download forms, power points, schedules, papers, and links to other friendly organizations (http://www.icimed.com/links.php). We post drafts of documents, which are meant to foster discussion and elicit comments and corrections from member doctors. Faxed documents all come by email and can be posted directly to our website. In some ways it would seem quite useful and efficient, but it is static for the most part, with few interactive possibilities. Our one attempt at interacting is a members-only section, and we find most of our members incapable of remembering the password. On page 70 of Wikinomics; How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006), authors Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams explain why people participate in voluntary production and building of collective websites such as Wikipedia. They claim that the people who are peer producers love participating and feel a sense of pleasure at doing it. Most are also involved professionally in some aspect of their voluntary participation. ICIM has failed to make electronic participation a pleasurable, easy experience for our members.
One exception to this was a project where I wanted to define our specialties as a group. I tried sending out a blanket email and got no response. I tried giving individuals a paper with lines and one word on it, encouraging them to write a definition with no response. Finally, when I was processing membership information and I noticed that a member had a specific specialty, I sent that member a personal email asking for a bite sized definition of his/her specific specialty. I got almost 100% response. Here is a link to view this special page, the only place on our website that has a participatory flavor:http://www.icimed.com/specialty_list.php
Some of the most effective aspects of our website are the bots that find a practitioner based on a person’s zip code, searching in a complete circle around the target area (http://www.icimed.com/member_search.php). The public are looking for alternatives in medicine, and our website is recommended in several popular health newsletters as a place to do just that. This service seems very personalized; the public can even search according to specializations, however, just as described in The Social Life of Information on p. 46 (2002, Brown and Duguid), that is somewhat misleading. There is nothing personal about our bots and they are only as good as the information we feed them, which is not always updated. Though we are a small group and I put a lot of effort into data entry, the public still has higher hopes than web that is a “vast, disorderly and very fast-changing information repository with enormous quantities of overlapping and duplicate information…all its catalogues are incomplete and out of date” (p.44).
In conclusion, I would say that ICIM is in its infancy in using electronic networks effectively. Next week I will enjoy giving some vision for what our networks could be like, but for now, I will end with one small point. When the doctor I described at the beginning of this paper clicks “return” and chats with me in a friendly email, we may be engaging in one of the most powerful potential forces of IT; the old fashioned social aspect of organizations that has held us together from the beginning of time (2002, The Social Life of Information, Brown and Duguid, p. 103)
References:
The Social Life of Information:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1578517087/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-7900473-2055206#reader-link
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/1591841380/sr=1-1/qid=1173621335/ref=dp_image_0/002-7900473-2055206?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books&qid=1173621335&sr=1-1