Monthly Archives: March 2008

barcamp austin

Online Ethnography at BarCampAustinIII

When you have loyal community members, they frequently take a big part in managing the community by policing other members, transmitting the culture, and helping with other management tasks. A community manager for Second Life who manages the Orange community, and they gave some community members management responsibilities within the community and so far has been running very smoothly. They also have 3 full-time managers, but this small community within the larger community to help to police the community.

One person here manages African American and Latino communities, which tends to bring in some people who constantly invoke the free speech card when they are being obnoxious asses. In his case, the community has a social contract and a core community where people help enforce it. In general, censorship is OK to maintain the health of the community.

Talked more about community management instead of ethnography.

barcamp austin

Cubeless – Corporate Communities at BarCampAustin

This BarCampAustinIII session was led by some people at Sabre talking about Cubeless, a corporate community platform. You can mark people or content as “shady” to report abuse, and they seem to have a pretty sophisticated reputation system based on a karma number. The karma points are calculated in a complicated way that fluctuates based on what is happening in the community, thus making it difficult to figure out how they work to game them. Also has most of the typical stuff: profiles, tag clouds, post-its (like wall on Facebooks), etc.

Cubeless powers the Sabre Town community. You can pull in your Sabre itinerary and share it with other people at your company and share only the details that your want to share. The platform is internal, corporate focused and travel focused, rather than being a general purpose collaboration platform; however, they are looking at making it work for external communities. They seem to want to keep in travel focused and have been resisting requests to make it more broad.

Cote started an interesting discussion about gaming reputation systems, and the difficulty of tying rewards into reputation systems like this karma point system.  Management likes to have metrics to measure knowledge worker performance, but this can create all sorts of issues. We’ve noticed this internally at Jive, too where certain job types tend to get more points in our internal Clearspace instance based on the amount / type of content. More points doesn’t necessarily mean better performance.

Overall, the product was kind of cool, but this session was a little too pitchy for me. All questions seemed to point back to their product.

General

Don't Miss Any Important sxsw Tweets this week!

I was a little bored sitting in the airport at 5am, so I thought that it would be fun to use Yahoo Pipes to help make sure that I didn’t miss any important sxsw tweets during my trip. I thought that other people might be interested in using it, too, so I built my Twitter Filter for sxsw using a user input field. You just enter your “with friends” Twitter feed URL, grab the RSS feed output, and put the feed in your favorite mobile RSS reader. Now you can make sure you don’t miss anything!

How it works:

  • You enter your Twitter “with friends” feed (it defaults to mine).
  • It searches the feed for these 2 keywords “sxsw” and “austin”
  • It outputs only the tweets with one of those keywords

Keep in mind that you can clone this pipe and add some extra keywords. Good candidates might be “party” or “werewolf” 🙂

For those sxsw’ers on Twitter, a bunch of us are writing similar filters, so you might want to make sure you include the text or hash tag “sxsw” in your Tweets.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

sxsw

sxsw & BarCampAustin Bound

For the next few days, I’ll be heading to sxsw and BarCampAustin. I’m trying very hard not to overplan before I get there, but I do have a few things on the agenda:

  • BarCampAustin: On Saturday, I’ll be splitting my time between sxsw and BarCampAustin. I also plan to lead some kind of session about Community Management during BarCamp. After we build the agenda, I’ll tweet the time for anyone interested in joining me in the discussion.
  • PDX Web Innovators Breakfast: Sunday morning
  • Geeks Love Bowling: On Sunday night, I’ll be sharing the lanes with a few amazing women like Erica O’Grady, Tara Hunt, and others on the “Hot Babes of Open Source” team 🙂
  • Austin Werewolf: The Portland Werewolf group (we meet monthly to play here in awesome pdx) will be hosting a Monday night werewolf game. I am NOT a werewolf!

That’s it! No more plans!

If you want to get in touch at sxsw, the best way is by sending me a direct message on Twitter. While I’m not planning things, I’m definitely open to the idea of spontaneous lunches, dinners, etc.

jive software

Jive Software Moving to Club Fed

Jive finally signed the lease to take over several floors in the Federal Reserve building on 9th and Stark with a move in date happening sometime this summer. The new building has already been nicknamed Club Fed by my fellow Jivers. Right now, we are sitting on top of each other in the current space. We have people at tables pushed up against walls and windows wherever we can find enough space for a computer & chair, so we are really looking forward to having some more room.

The article in the Daily Journal of Commerce had a pretty interesting description of what Jive Software is all about:

The Portland-based company specializes in flexible-source and web-forum software – programs that users can tweak and manipulate to suit their needs, and which are easy to configure with existing operating systems like Firefox. The company’s Clearspace software, for example, helps companies manage the flow of information between members of a team, in much the same way as a wiki.

Despite the minor faux pas of calling Firefox an operating system, the details of the move look good. And you can even see the top of my head in the second cubicle in the tiny picture at the top of the article 🙂

barcamp

A Great Time at Beaver BarCamp

Those of you following me on Twitter know that I spent Friday night and Saturday in Corvallis at Beaver BarCamp, and I had a great time. I met a bunch of interesting people from Corvallis and had time to visit with a handful of pdxers also attending.

We were using Google Sites for some of the notes, the schedule, and other day of event information. This sounded like a great idea, but it turns out that Google Sites is really buggy right now. About half of the time, I could get to the site, and the other half of the time, I kept getting stuck in a strange login loop. We did get a few of the notes posted to the site.

One of the highlights of the event for me was a tour of the Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) where they host the servers for some key open source projects: kernel.org, Apache, Drupal, and many more. The lab also does quite a bit of work with the OLPC (XO) laptops, and is currently working on improvements to the media player.

I also learned about Wagn, had an interesting discussion about the future of software development, and participated in a discussion about investing led by Steve Morris.

I led a couple of sessions during the BarCamp. I went to Beaver BarCamp planning to host a discussion about managing online communities. I’ve done this at a number of BarCamps, but because it is a facilitated discussion and not a presentation, I am always surprised and interested by the direction that it takes. At the last minute, John Sechrest also asked me to talk about Ignite, since they were planning to hold an Ignite Portland as part of the Saturday evening festivities. We talked about the format, and how to to organize an Ignite event. I also learned that a couple of people from Eugene are thinking about starting a Eugene Ignite event. Unfortunately, I had to leave before they started the evening Ignite event to make the long drive back to Portland.

I hope this will turn into an annual event. I am guessing that a little over a hundred people attended, which is a great showing for the first Beaver BarCamp. Tim Budd or John Sechrest (co-organizers) may have a better count. I also wanted to thank Tim and John, all of the sponsors, and the volunteers for making Beaver BarCamp a great experience for those of us who attended!

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

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