Archive for the 'dawn foster' Category

Hippies, Atari, and Tequila aka 8 Things You May Not Know About Dawn

Published
by
Dawn
on January 16, 2008
in dawn foster
. 1 Comment

I was just tagged by Fred on the 8 things you may not know about me meme. Hmmmm, I live most of my life online, but I’ll try to come up with a few things you may not know.

  1. I was raised by hippie parents (Hi Mom!) and grew up in rural Ohio on a tiny organic farm with chickens, ducks, rabbits, goats, a variety of other animals, and lots of organic vegetables. We even had a goat named Sausage for a few years, but that’s a long story :-)
  2. In college, I got pretty good at playing pool and even won a few tournaments. I still have my own pool cue (a Meucci), but I haven’t used it in many years.
  3. I played the clarinet from 5th grade all the way through high school in various capacities, including marching bands and various wind ensembles. I even played a the flute and classical guitar very badly and for very short periods of time.
  4. I love to cook vegan food (stir fry, pizza with homemade cornmeal crust, pasta, etc.), but I never make dessert. I can make a decent apple crisp, but beyond that I’m better off buying something from a vegan bakery, like Sweet Pea.
  5. My first computer was an Atari 400 (later Atari 800XL), and I loved writing stupid little programs in Basic that did something cool, but had no practical use whatsoever.
  6. In college (many, many years ago), I carried a flask of tequila and a lime in my pocket most of the time and knew where all of my friends kept their knives and salt shakers.
  7. I have a real weakness for questionable music. My most recently played iTunes list includes Rammstein, Godsmack, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Madonna, The Go-Go’s, Rob Zombie, Blondie, The Offspring, INXS, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kajagoogoo, David Bowie, Rancid, the Kinks, the Prodigy, and more.
  8. At the end of my senior year in high school, I held the records for the 100m and 300m hurdles.

Now the hard part … tagging another 8 people: Todd Kenefsky, Justin Kistner, Paul Biggs, Adam Duvander, Scott Kveton, Josh Bancroft, Selena Deckleman, and Aaron Hockley.

Portland on Fire: Meet other cool Portlanders

Published
by
Dawn
on January 2, 2008
in community, dawn foster and portland
. 0 Comments

Raven Zachary just launched a really cool new project yesterday, Portland on Fire: a daily discovery of PDX people. The idea is to profile one interesting person a day from Portland (not just techies, either) with information about how to connect with that person. I was lucky enough to be the second profile featured on the site.

If you are interested in participating, you can fill out the form and answer a few simple questions about yourself. You even get to choose some of the questions!

So, if you ever wanted to know what I was like as child, what my personal interests are, or what I like most about Portland, you should take a look at my profile on Portland on Fire!

2007: Non-Stop Excitement … what about 2008?

Published
by
Dawn
on December 31, 2007
in community and dawn foster
. 4 Comments

I thought it would be good to do a year in the life of Dawn for 2007. What the hell, everyone else is doing one, so I will jump on the trend.

As I think about 2007, I can’t help but be a bit surprised by how much fun and excitement I was able to cram into a single year!

2007: Non-Stop Excitement:

Now what? How in the hell am I going to top that in 2008?

  • Achieve 501(c)(3) status for Legion of Tech?
  • Get O’Reilly Art of Community book published?
  • Help organize a bunch of other community events in Portland?
  • Improve Jivespace to make it a really kick-ass developer community?
  • Ultimately, I want to do something spectacular enough that it prompts someone to write a Wikipedia article for me. :-)

Have a Happy New Year!

Speaking at Defrag

Published
by
Dawn
on November 3, 2007
in dawn foster, social networking and speaking
. 0 Comments

I just wanted to let people know that I will be speaking at Defrag on Monday. Stop by and catch my panel about Social Networking in the Enterprise if you happen to be in Denver!

Women in Technology (The Book)

Published
by
Dawn
on September 29, 2007
in O'Reilly, alliance of technology and women, dawn foster, technology, women and women in technology
. 0 Comments

All of the articles written for O’Reilly’s Women in Technology series, including my article about careers in technology, will be included in a book scheduled for publication in October.

All of the proceeds from Women in Technology will be donated to the Alliance of Technology & Women (ATW), a non-profit organization providing scholarships and other encouragement for women and girls preparing for careers in technology. I also just learned that we have a chapter of ATW right here in Portland!

You should pre-order now and buy a copy (or two). :-) It’s a great book supporting a great cause.

O’Reilly Women in Technology

Published
by
Dawn
on September 4, 2007
in O'Reilly, dawn foster, technology and women
. 2 Comments

O’Reilly just started a series of articles on Women in Technology with an article every day for the month of September. I will be appearing somewhere in this series along with Anna Martelli, Audrey Eschright, CJ Rayhill, Dru Lavigne, Gabrielle Roth, Jeni Tennison, Jill Dyche, Juliet Kemp, Julia Lerman, Kaliya Hamlin, Kirsten Jones, Lauren Wood, Leslie Hawthorn, Selena Deckelmann, and Shelley Powers.

“This series is comprised of articles written by women on the topic of “Women in Technology,” which will run through September. My hope is that the myriad of experiences you read about here will showcase how valuable it is to hear from different women at all stages of their careers and lives. Whether you believe that there is gender inequality within the tech community that we should all work to improve or if you think that there are no issues at all, one underlying truth is that we should support each other as individuals.”

(Quoted from Tatiana Apandi, the Women in Technology series creator and associate editor at O’Reilly Media Inc., on Women in Technology)

Want to see me speak at SXSW?

Published
by
Dawn
on August 20, 2007
in collaboration, community, conference, dawn foster and sxsw
. 0 Comments

SXSW has released their annual panel picker application. I submitted 2 sessions:

If either of these sessions sound interesting to you, please cast your vote for them.

If you plan on attending sxsw, I encourage you to vote for the sessions that you find interesting. I love conferences that give us, as participants, the ability to participate in the selection process.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I will also be part of the “Hottest Babes in Open Source” panel with Silona Bonewald, Tara Hunt & Erica O’Grady (if it makes it through the panel picking process!)

Reflections on Community Management: AKA “What Do You Do”

Published
by
Dawn
on August 5, 2007
in art of community, community, dawn foster, jive software and jivespace
. 11 Comments

With the launch of Jivespace, I have been thinking more about what it really means to be an online community manager. With the launch of any new product, it always feels like time to step back and enjoy the lull before starting the next new project; however, this is the time when the community manager role accelerates rather than slowing.

Seth Godin recently called the Online Community Organizer role a Job of the Future. This brings me to the most common question: “What exactly do you do?” I see the online community manager role as having several key elements: ongoing facilitation, content creation, evangelism, and community evolution. There are certainly many more tasks, but I suspect that 90% of the work falls into one of these four very broad categories.

  • Ongoing Facilitation: This is probably the activity that most people think of first. A community manager is an active participant within the community to answer questions, deal with trolls or other abuses, explain how things work, monitor the content closely, and much more. It also involves a lot of cat herding. On Jivespace, I frequently pull Jive engineers into the discussion to answer questions in an area where additional technical expertise is needed. It can also mean walking a very fine line between the community and the company by representing the company in community discussions and representing the needs of the community when working inside the company.
  • Content Creation: In any community, content needs to stay fresh and current regardless of whether you are talking about code releases or other content. People will wander away from a community that looks stale or inactive. I have been focused on recording new podcasts (which are now in iTunes) and blogging regularly in addition to making sure that questions get answered (also part of facilitation). This also involves working with others to create content by encouraging them to blog about their areas of expertise relevant to the developer community.
  • Evangelism: Getting the word out about your community can take a number of forms depending on the type of community. In general this can be served by talking to people (customers and other interested parties), blogging, speaking at conferences, and being actively involved in related communities.
  • Community Evolution: This may be the most overlooked area for many communities. It is important to continue to keep the community engaged by evolving along with the technology. New features, contests, group activities and more should be planned from the beginning. With Jivespace, I plan to implement improvements about every 3 weeks including upgrades to the latest Clearspace X release, which come out every 3 weeks. For example, a few things in the works include some bug fixes, improvements to the developer beta program, and a developer event of some type.

As a community manager, you should be thinking about how to make sure that all four of these items get an appropriate amount of attention. Responding to questions and writing an occasional blog may by not enough if you want your community to flourish. Community management can be a tough job, but I am enjoying it more than any other job so far.

The next logical discussion is about the skills required to be a community manager, but this post is already pretty long, so … this will be part one in a series of posts. The next one will be about the skills required to do this job.

Art of Community Video

Published
by
Dawn
on August 2, 2007
in O'Reilly, OSCON, art of community, community, conference, dawn foster, jive software, jivespace and podcast
. 1 Comment

For anyone who missed the Art of Community panel at OSCON, we were able to get the entire session on video. I’ve posted it to the Jivespace Developer Podcasts and Video Blog.

“Danese Cooper and I put together a community panel at OSCON discussing the art of building and maintaining successful communities. The panel included (from left to right): Danese Cooper (Moderating), Jimmy Wales, Dawn Foster, Sulamita Garcia, Whurley, Karl Fogel, and Brian Behlendorf.” (Quoted from: Jivespace Blog)

OSCON Report

Published
by
Dawn
on July 27, 2007
in O'Reilly, OSCON, art of community, community, conference, dawn foster, jive software, open source, oregon, podcast, portland and speaking
. 0 Comments

I had a great time at OSCON this year. A few highlights:

As usual, the real value was in the hallway conversations, shared meals, and other informal discussions with really smart people.

I will be posting video of our Art of Community panel (thanks to Drew Scott for wielding the camera!) and some footage from Beeforge on the Jivespace Video Podcast blog over the next week or 2.