Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks.
GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*
MeeGo.com*
*Disclaimers:
Before I get into why I’ve decided to step down from the Legion of Tech Board, I want to provide a little bit of history and background. In 2006, I attended Foo Camp, the unconference event that was catalyst for the global BarCamp phenomenon, and I was blown away by the experience. The vibe of a conference organized by attendees was like nothing I had experienced before, and you get a group of very passionate and smart geeks – the type of people willing to give up a weekend to pursue various geeky endeavors. When I got back to Portland, I was craving more of that type of event. I started thinking about all of the smart and amazing people we have here, and I wished that we had unconferences and similar events. At some point, I realized that I should just start something and see what happened. I got in touch with Raven Zachary who was also interested in planning a BarCamp Portland, and I started a monthly BarCamp Meetup that helped us kick off the planning efforts for our first BarCamp Portland in 2007.
At that time, in 2006 and 2007, Portland had a vibrant technology community, but the community organized events were a bit siloed and the general purpose events were too corporate for my tastes. We had user groups for almost every programming language organized by communities of people or passionate individuals, and we had corporate events run by various organizations. BarCamp Portland and Ignite Portland filled this gap – larger events cutting across multiple technologies that were organized by the community for the community. However, we found that the logistics of organizing large events without some type of organization to handle things like paying vendors, getting event insurance, etc. was difficult. For BarCamp, we had sponsors pay vendors directly to purchase food, supplies and everything else we needed, but this was a logistical nightmare. We decided that a non profit organization would be a good way for us to have our events and be able to handle the event logistics more easily.
Viola! Legion of Tech was formed in December of 2007, and I am still very proud of the role that I’ve played in this organization over the past 3+ years. I’ve served as Chair, Secretary and board member of Legion of Tech, and I was one (of the many) driving forces behind the organization. Legion of Tech is my baby, but it’s time to push that baby out of the nest. 🙂
In the past 3 years, I feel like we’ve made great progress toward solving the problem that I wanted to solve – have more large, community organized events in Portland that cut across technologies and help to unify the Portland technology community. I actually think that maybe we’ve swung too far in the other direction with so many of these events. Attendees, sponsors and organizers are starting to get burned out with so many events, and I’m burned out from organizing events. As most of you know, organizing events is a lot of work, and running a non profit organization is also a significant amount of work. The work that I once found invigorating has become exhausting because I’m not as excited about organizing events as I once was. I’m not as passionate about organizing events, and at the same time, I think that Legion of Tech has to undergo some changes in order to continue to best serve the Portland technology community. There are other people currently sitting on the board (and I’m guessing others in the community) who are passionate about making whatever changes are needed and who are ready to step up with a new vision for Legion of Tech.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love Legion of Tech, and I am confident that it will continue to live on for many years and evolve along with the Portland Tech Community. I am just ready to hand the reins over to other people to drive it in a new direction.
What does this mean for me?
What does this mean for you?
I’ll be stepping down on December 31 when the new board members take office, so I’ll be involved in the elections for the 2011 board. Feel free to track me down at Beer and Blog if you have any questions about Legion of Tech or the election process.
Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks.
GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*
MeeGo.com*
*Disclaimers:
This is one of those things that can be hard to make the time for, and it is more technically challenging than many other community management tasks, but over the longer term it can really pay off in time savings. Think about those repetitive tasks that you do over and over – monthly community metrics come to mind as one of the most common examples. I started really looking at the time it was taking me to compile my monthly metrics, and I vowed to start automating as much of it as I can. Right now, I’m getting close to having most things at least partially automated.
Here are a few ways to automate your community tasks:
Additional Reading
Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.
Image by hobvias sudoneighm used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Community managers get asked the same questions over and over and over, so being able to quickly and easily reuse your work can save a lot of time and help maintain your sanity. The second time I’ve dug through my email archives to reuse a piece of a previous email to answer a repeat question, I usually realize that it’s time to formalize that answer and make it easy to reuse it.
Here are a few ways that you can reuse your work:
Additional Reading
Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.
Image by Flickr user andriux-uk used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks.
GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*
*Disclaimers:
The good community managers can maintain professional communications when faced with the most belligerent trolls on the internet without letting themselves be goaded into unprofessional behavior. As a community manager, you are often the face of your company to the outside world and everything you do in the community reflects on the organization that you represent. If your interactions are unprofessional, the company looks unprofessional, not just in front of current and potential customers, but also potentially the media and industry analysts. Staying professional at all times can be harder than it sounds, especially when someone catches you on a really bad day or when you are being bombarded by negative comments. The Earth Class Mail example in the image below provides an example of what can go wrong.
Here are a few tips to help you stay professional.
Additional Reading
Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.
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.
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:
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:
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.