Monthly Archives: September 2010

portland

Portland MeeGo Network Monthly Meetings

I thought it would be fun to start to organize a monthly (or so) Portland MeeGo Meetup … because that’s what community managers do. 🙂

As Intel’s Community Manager for MeeGo, it’s about time for me to start some type of meetup here in my adopted hometown of Portland. I’ll be kicking off these meetings, but I would love to have some help in organizing the meetings and finding presenters, so let me know if you are interested.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with MeeGo, it is an open source operating system for small form factor devices (netbook, handset, in-vehicle, tablet, connected TV, etc.) You can get all of the details about MeeGo and learn more about it at meego.com.

I checked Calagator and the third Monday of every month is looking fairly open, which would put our first meeting on October 18.

Some logistics
When: October 18 from 6pm – 8pm
Where: Lucky Lab 1945 NW Quimby St in Portland
RSVP: On Upcoming to help us plan

Agenda for October 18
6:00pm – Introductions
6:15pm – MeeGo Overview & Demos
7:15pm – Discuss potential topics for next month

You can also join our new Portland MeeGo Network Google Group to receive updates for every meeting and any additional information.

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks.

US Airways Magazine

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

MeeGo.com*

*Disclaimers:

  • GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
  • MeeGo: I am a full-time employee at Intel and contributing to MeeGo is part of my job.
Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Have Great Documentation

2 Comments

One of the biggest challenges for any community manager is to find ways to get new members integrated into your existing community with all of its established norms and ways of working. This can be particularly difficult if many of the things that define your community aren’t clearly documented. For any community, having great documentation can solve so many potential issues and make it easy for both new and existing members to get the information that they need quickly and easily. Ideally, you can put all of this documentation in a wiki and enlist the help of other community members. In the MeeGo community that I manage, getting all of our processes, guidelines and frequently asked questions documented has been a big focus for me lately.

Here are a few things that should be clearly documented:

  • FAQ: Always have a good frequently asked questions document. We have a main FAQ for MeeGo, which also links off to several other FAQs for specific topics. This is on my short list of things that still need a lot of additional work.
  • Processes: Document as many of your processes as you can to help members learn how to participate. Nothing is more frustrating for a new member than trying to participate, not getting it right and having to start over.
  • Community Guidelines: Have clear guidelines about what members are expected to do (or not do) that you can point people to for more information. I try to avoid guidelines that look like lists of rules, and instead, focus on encouraging people to make the right choices.

Additional Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Photo by Flickr user mind on fire under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.