All posts by Dawn

community, ignite, ignite portland, portland, technology

The Joy and Peril of Organizing Community Events

OK, I’m a bit of a geek as most people know. Yes, I organize tech events for fun in my “spare” time. 🙂

We are organizing the first Ignite Portland event next Thursday. Initially, we thought we would have 150 people – maybe 200 if we got lucky. We picked a nice, roomy space for the event (Wieden+Kennedy) holding 297 people. We did mostly word of mouth marketing: blogs, a couple of mailing lists, the pdxMindshare newsletter, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Nothing fancy, we just spread the word organically.

Well, we reached 300 people on the RSVP list on upcoming this afternoon. We faced similar issues with Barcamp Portland, but we only had about 250 people register for that event. In the week leading up to BarCamp, we went from about 150 people to 250 on the wiki. Yesterday morning around 9am, we hit 200 … today we crossed the 300 mark. Seriously?? 100 new RSVPs in a little more than 1 day!?!

While we are thrilled and amazed by the response to our simple event, we are faced with the unpleasant task of capping the RSVPs at 325 on upcoming. We also know that we will need to count people as they register, and if we end up hitting the 297 limit, we will have the even more unpleasant task of turning people away at the door.

On the one hand, Wow! look what we accomplished. On the other hand, we might have to turn people away (not exactly in the spirit of a community event).

Portland is a great place for technology enthusiasts, and we have an amazing tech community. Realistically, I think we will be fine. Assuming we get 325 RSVPs on Upcoming, a few people will have last minute conflicts, and we should be OK.

Similar Posts:

clearspace, clearspace x, collaboration, jive software, jivespace

Want to Play with Clearspace & Win up to $5000 or an iPhone?

Have you been looking for an excuse to play around with Clearspace? Now is your chance!

You can download Clearspace and get a free 5 user evaluation license to use to develop a kick-ass plugin by Oct. 25th to win all sorts of cool stuff including:

  • iPhone
  • Cash prizes up to $5000
  • Free 25 user license of Clearspace
  • Jivespace T-shirt

More information about the contest is available on Jivespace.

community, ignite, ignite portland, portland

Attend or Present at Ignite Portland!

Our first Ignite Portland is rapidly approaching!
Thursday, October 25th, 6-9pm
Wieden+Kennedy
224 NW 13th Ave, Portland, OR
FREE
Please RSVP at Upcoming

Interested in sponsoring Ignite Portland? We are looking for additional sponsors to help with the costs of refreshments and signage. 100% of sponsorships go towards costs directly, no middleman. Contact Raven Zachary if you are interested.

Want to present at Ignite Portland on 10/25? If you are interested in presenting, please submit your ideas before 10/16! All you have to do is pack an idea/pitch into our format – 20 slides, shown for 15 seconds each, auto-advanced, and make your idea sound more exciting than the others! We’ve had a great response to our call for presenters. So much so that we have more ideas than presentation slots; however, keep them coming! We’ll just have to pick the best ones. Keep in mind that we expect these to be regular events, so if you do not get to present at this one, you will have other opportunities.

Please tell your friends, blog about it, and post the Ignite badge on your website if you want to help us promote this Portland community event held for the Portland community by the Portland community … yes we do this just for fun 🙂

We hope to see you at Ignite Portland!

community

Hot Topics in Communities: Reputation Systems

This is the first post in what I hope will be a short series of posts about hot topics in community management.

When I talk about reputation systems (or a reputation engine), I am referring to ways to award points or some other status measure to community members as a “reward” for participating. Jive’s Clearspace and Forums products have a reputation system built into the application awarding points for posting discussions, blogs, wiki documents, and correctly answering questions. The points accumulated by users show up on the users’ profiles and in “Top Members” boxes for specific communities throughout the site. I use this only as an example, since it is the reputation system that I have the most experience using.

The Good:

People like getting points and being recognized for their contributions within a community. It encourages participation and keeps people motivated to participate in the community. Community managers can use the reputations to highlight and reward key members with additional access (moderation access, etc.) or with other rewards like t-shirts.

The Bad:

People will figure out how your system works, and they will find creative ways to game it. Maybe they respond to posts with trivial answers or post discussions with content of little value solely to gain points. This is especially true in technical communities where people will game it just for the challenge. This leads many people to claim that reputation systems are worthless and should never be used.

The Practical:

I’m not an “all or nothing” kind of girl. I think that there is a middle ground where carefully configured reputation systems can be useful.

I suggest putting the responsibility on other community members to award points to their peers for quality posts. One way to accomplish this is by configuring your reputation system to put a heavy weight on correct / helpful answers with little or no points awarded for quantity of posts.

Do not be afraid to adjust the weights over time when you see abuses! You can start out with points awarded for starting discussions, but if you see users posting just to get points, reconfigure it and be clear with your community that you reconfigured it and why. Sometimes communities can be good at self-policing members with bad behavior.

Also make sure that people can easily scan the posts of other users. If I see a user with a bunch of points, I should be able to go to the profile and see whether they have good, quality answers or just meaningless quantity. Community members are smart, and they will be able to tell which community members are participating in meaningful ways as long as you give them the tools to do it.

I also advise against automating rewards based on points. I might be willing to do it for something small like a t-shirt, but not for anything meaningful like moderation permissions, commit rights in open source, or anything else of value.

This is just a start. I know that other community managers probably have horror stories or great ideas about how they have made reputation systems work well. I would love to hear them here in the comments. I am also interested in hearing from people who manage different types of communities to how their perspective differs from mine (I have mostly managed developer / open source communities).

Related posts:

alliance of technology and women, dawn foster, O'Reilly, technology, women, women in technology

Women in Technology (The Book)

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.

clearspace, clearspace x, collaboration, jive software, lunarr, portland

LUNARR Launch

I attended the LUNARR dinner last evening where they launched the alpha version of their product. It is always nice to see another Portland tech company launch a product!

The answer to the question on everyone’s mind: “Do they compete with Jive Software” is No. We have a large, open collaboration platform, while LUNARR is laser focused on document collaboration, but with a different spin. In Clearspace, people collaborate on documents openly with everyone viewing everyone else’s comments. The LUNARR model is to make the document available to select people, but the discussions / comments on the document are more private (like an email back channel for every document.) What they have is pretty cool, but it is a very different model.

I was talking about them with Selena over lunch, and she thought it would be great for the education market. Because you control the document and the email back channel associated with it, I could see students and teachers using it for assignments. For example, a student completes the first draft of a paper, uploads it to LUNARR, gets feedback from the teacher, makes revisions, gets more feedback and eventually a grade. Later, the students can share the final paper with the rest of the class while the back channel with the teacher feedback / grades stays private.

I also think this is a great solution as a light weight way to share a few documents with friends, co-workers, contractors, etc. If you do not want discussions, blogs, and other features that come with a full collaboration platform (like Clearspace), the LUNARR solution would be an easy way to collaborate on documents.

You can learn more about them on their site or in this article

I also have a few invites – drop a comment here with your email address if you want an invite to play with their application.

clearspace, mozy

Why You Should Avoid Mozy Backups

Note: Update from 9/20/07 with resolution to this issue can now be found at the end of this post.

————————–

Ugh. I rarely use my blog to rant, but here it goes.

<rant>
I started using Mozy to backup my MacBook a couple of months ago. In keeping with my sys admin background, I dutifully made my first backup and then did a test restore of a few files – worked beautifully. Simple, online, and free backups for my Mac. I have been doing backups every couple of nights since then. About once a week, I even checked to make sure that the data was being backed up.

Last Thursday, my Mac crashed and refused to reboot. Chris (Jive IT guy extraordinaire) attempted to save the data, but eventually the hard drive had to be reformatted. Total data loss. Oh well, it is a pain to reinstall everything, but I take regular backups, so no problem.

Sigh.

On Monday, I kicked off a full restore on the Mozy web site. This is what I ended up with:

You have 1 restore currently building. In the restore requested about 2 hours ago, 0 out of 11025 files are finished building. You will receive an email when the restore is complete.

At this point, I contact Mozy support to get an idea of how long these typically take. This was prior to 1:00 pm Pacific Time. I received an auto response stating that they would get back to me sometime the following day. Hmmm, maybe a less ambitious approach would be warranted? Yesterday around this time, I decided to try for the 11 files that I wanted right away. Still not working.

I got this email at 9am this morning:

That’s weird your restore is taking so long. Obviously something is wrong and it isn’t restoring correctly. I would try again.

You also have the option to restore from your virtual drive. If you click on your Mozy icon on the menu bar (the four square icon) and choose restore files you’ll be able to view and restore your files from there. This is typically the best option for a smaller amount of files like you are trying to download.

Let us know how it goes.

Sigh, yeah I already tried all of this (and they should have been able to tell that I already tried again), so no help here.

As I was writing this blog entry, I got an email requesting a copy of mozy.log. Interesting, I was performing a web restore, so there won’t be anything in the logs.

My current Mozy status:

You have 1 restore currently building.

In the restore requested 1 day ago, 0 out of 11 files are finished building. You will receive an email when the restore is complete. Click here to view all your restores.

A quick Google of “mozy restore” will show that this is not an isolated issue.

You may be asking yourself, “what kind of moron uses beta backup software?” ahem. OK, I am a bit lucky. The vast majority of my data is stored in other online services (Gmail, Jive’s Zimbra server, Clearspace collaboration platform), so hard drive backups are less critical for me than for most people. However, I still do not like losing data, and other people who rely more heavily on hard drive files could get seriously burned using Mozy.

My advice to you? Run away from Mozy as fast as you can!
</rant>

UPDATE 9/20/07: Woo hoo! I have my data back. Mozy’s COO contacted me yesterday in response to this blog post. After a short email exchange, my backup of 11 files completed fairly quickly. I submitted a restore of the rest of my data ~800MB, which completed and was ready to download in an afternoon. The download went well, and I have verified that the files look good. Despite the rocky start, they were able to get my data to me. I have learned my lesson about using beta software for backups, and I will most likely still switch to a more reliable service (E3 from Amazon most likely); however, I really appreciate the responsiveness that Mozy displayed.

career, O'Reilly, technology, women

Advice on Careers in Technology for Geeky (and not so Geeky) Women

My article in the O’Reilly Women in Technology series was published today. In this article, I admit to always being a little geeky (big surprise), and I talk about the evolution of my technology career along with a bit of career advice for other women in technology.

Keep an eye on this series. More articles from some very successful women are still in the queue to be released throughout the month!

barcamp, barcampportland, jive software, portland, portland barcamp meetup

BarCamp Portland Informal Tech Meetup

Want to hang out with other Portland techies? Join us at the BarCamp Portland Informal Tech Meetup.

Thursday, September 27, 2007
5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
At Jive Software

The Portland meetups are intended to be a little less intense and more frequent than a full BarCamp Portland event. The intent is to get a group of cool people interested in technology together to chat over drinks on the fourth Thursday of every month. Anyone working in high-tech is welcome to attend. Conversations usually range from wikis to open source to blogs to who knows what!

Note: We have moved the signups for this event from the wiki to upcoming. Please RSVP on Upcoming to help us get a count for the event.

You can visit http://barcamp.org/BarCampPortlandMeetups for more information.

Also, Please add yourself to the Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/barcampportland so that we can let you know if there are any last minute changes (we will send a note to the Google Group along with posting an update here).

collaboration, jive software, lunarr, portland

LUNARR Coming out of Stealth Mode on September 17

Another local Portland collaboration company, LUNARR, is coming out of stealth mode with a product demo / networking event on September 17th at CubeSpace. The Japanese founders have promised to have Japanese food and drinks at this free event. If you want to attend, you can RSVP on Upcoming.

I hear you asking the question, “Hmmmm, another Portland collaboration company; wouldn’t they compete with Jive?” To be honest, I’m not sure yet, but I think that the competition between the two companies is minimal, since we seem to be focused on slightly different aspects of collaboration. From the minimal pre-launch information on the Lunarr website, they seem to be focused on document collaboration and projects, while Jive’s focus is on providing a broad collaboration suite with forums / discussions, wikis, and blogs along with our realtime collaboration (XMPP-based instant messaging) platform. While Jive provides a broad collaboration suite, LUNARR seems to be laser focused on serving a specific niche, and I suspect that there is plenty of room in this market for both solutions!

Please keep in mind that I am working with limited information, so most or all of the above could be incorrect. Anyway, I will be there on the 17th to learn more!