All posts by Dawn

dawn foster

2010 in Review: Change is Good!

Every year, I like to write some kind of year in review blog post. I started writing these in 2007 as  a way for people that I don’t talk to very often to keep up with what I’ve been doing, but I’ve found that it helps me see what I’ve accomplished (or not accomplished) that I can use to reflect on what I want to do in the next year. You can find the 2007, 2008 and 2009 editions if you want to see how this year compares with previous years.

2010 in review

First, the big changes:

While all three of these were really hard decisions to make, I’m happy about each of them. I was really burned out in the first few months of 2010, and I’m just now starting to feel re-energized. The goal of each of these big changes was to free up more time for myself and more time to work on fun little projects that I’m passionate about doing.

Progress Toward my Goals for 2010:

If you go back to my 2009 post and look at my goals for 2010, I feel pretty happy about what I’ve accomplished. Here are those goals and my progress on each one.

  • Continue to do interesting work on fun projects where I can collaborate with cool people: My work on MeeGo fits this goal pretty well.
  • Start a few more websites: Well, maybe not a few, but I did start one: Rednecks in the Wild.
  • Stay healthy by continuing to work out and eat healthy food: I’ve been doing a lot of running this year, and even did my first 5K. I’ve also been making a real effort to eat more real food and less crap.
  • Spend more time reading a combination of fiction and business / technology books: I have read at least 45 books that I’ve counted, mostly science fiction / fantasy, which is about a book a week.
  • Take more beach vacations! Todd and I had a lovely Thanksgiving vacation in Hawaii this year.

Other Interesting Things I Did in 2010:

What I Want to Accomplish in 2011

  • Finish that cookbook that I’ve been threatening to write for the past 15 years. I started working on it over the holiday and am making pretty good progress.
  • Get back into doing some light programming for fun projects. I’ve been dabbling a bit over the last year, but mostly with things like shell scripts and awk that aren’t really programming, so I’d like to do more with PHP and APIs.
  • Work on a couple of side projects or random websites with the goal of helping to build more programming skills.
  • Be even healthier in 2011 to build endurance and strength with longer runs and more regularly hitting the gym to lift weights.
  • Continue to read regularly and take another beach vacation.
Rednecks in the Wild

Launching Rednecks in the Wild

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I like to occasionally launch random websites, so here’s my latest: Rednecks in the Wild. Rednecks in the Wild is a website where anyone can submit pictures of homo redneckus aka “rednecks” in their natural habitats.

Here’s how you can participate:

Here are a few of my favorite pictures so far:

Some of you may be wondering how Rednecks in the Wild got started. I grew up in rural Ohio, and I know that there are plenty of funny redneck pictures out there, so I bought this domain over a year ago with the idea of building this website. Shortly before the holidays, I started looking at all of the domains that I own and decided to start working on this one. I started building Rednecks in the Wild a couple of weeks before my vacation with the goal of launching it toward the end of the holidays. Some of you may have noticed a couple of posts on Twitter and Facebook with links to the website, but I’ve been relatively quiet about it to give me time to build up a good base of content before launching it. This is just a fun little project with no huge grand ambitions, but the hope is that at least a few people will get some enjoyment out of it.

Do you have a funny redneck picture to submit to Rednecks in the Wild?

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

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

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

MeeGo.com*

Rednecks in the Wild*

*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.
  • Rednecks in the Wild: This is a Fast Wonder LLC venture.
community

MeeGo Community and Metrics Presentation Videos

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I just realized that while I was frantically catching up from my much needed Thanksgiving vacation right after the MeeGo Conference that I completely forgot to post the videos and presentation materials from my sessions at the conference. I presented two sessions:

State of the Community


Presentation Materials (PDF) and More Info

An Inside Look into the MeeGo Metrics


Presentation Materials (PDF) and More Info

You can also watch videos of all of the other sessions at the MeeGo Conference. For those of you interested in online communities, you should definitely watch Dave Neary’s Community Anti-Patterns presentation.

Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Make Time for Strategy and Planning

It can be all too easy for community managers to fall into the day to day routines of managing your community without spending time on planning and strategy to make sure that you are heading in the right direction. All of those daily responsibilities and urgent requests are usually a full time job, which leaves little to no time for reflecting on what works well (or doesn’t), planning improvements, thinking strategically about where the community should be heading and coming up with a plan for how to get there. Many communities tend to slow down during the holidays, so now might be a good time to start!

A few suggestions to get you started:

  • Take some time right now to look at what works / what doesn’t, and ask the community what they think.
  • Schedule some time on your calendar when the community tends to be less active (for me this is later afternoon after European community members are in bed), and spend a couple hours of focused time devoted to strategy and planning every week until you get a basic plan together.
  • Share your objectives and plans with the community and get feedback on them.
  • Put some time on your calendar every month or so to take a another look at your strategy and plans to make sure that you are making progress and make any adjustments as appropriate.

Additional Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Photo by Levente Fulop used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Community Building with Werewolves

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I don’t play werewolf just because I love it. I play it because it builds community.

I played many games of Werewolf at the recent MeeGo Conference, and I talked about it in my conference wrap up post, but I wanted to also repackage it into a community manager tip because I think people underestimate the importance of games as community building tools.

Werewolf is one of those games that I really like to bring to conferences because it gives people a chance to get to know each other. It gives the quiet guy who doesn’t really know anyone something to do and an excuse to meet new people, and it puts people on a level playing field where the company executive, the university student and the internet famous are all equal as werewolves and villagers. It gives people something in common to start a conversation while they learn enough about each other to find other things in common. Many of us tend to talk to the people we already know, which keeps us in our own little friend bubbles that can seem cliquey even when not intended to be. Werewolf is an excuse to talk to people that we don’t know and otherwise might not have met. Unlike those other team building and conference games, people really seem to enjoy werewolf.

A few tips to get you started:

  • Start a game the first or second night of the event.
  • Print up special cards for the event and make extra decks to give away. This allows anyone to start a game later in the week.
  • Encourage new moderators to spread the load and introduce new variations of the game.

Additional Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

community

MeeGo Conference: Geeks in Dublin

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Wow.

I really had a fantastic time at the MeeGo Conference in Dublin last week. Over the past 9 months in the MeeGo Community, I have spent a lot of time getting to know people over IRC, email, forums, and other online tools. You can get to know people pretty well online, but there is just no substitute for face to face interactions and getting to know people in real life. I got to know people better and met so many new and interesting people that I can now keep up with online in the community.

I was one of several organizers for this conference, and from an organizer’s standpoint, the conference wildly exceeded all of our expectations. While we were initially hoping we could find 600 people who would attend, we ended up with almost 1100 attendees from 51 countries. Amy Leeland, our lead organizer for the event, proved to be a complete rock star; almost everything went according to plan and the few things that didn’t, she handled with a professional get it fixed attitude. We also worked with Portland design company Quango on many of the design and event logistics, and they were honestly one of the best vendors I have ever worked with.

In this post, here on my personal blog, I’m not going to do a full report-out on the conference (we’ll save that for the MeeGo blog), so I’ll focus the rest of this post on the community aspects and my personal experiences.

The community was very engaged in the event: organizing early bird sessions, volunteering to help out whenever we needed it, and working and playing together in the hacker lounge until the wee hours of the morning. I also led the unconference day, and I’m always nervous about scheduling an unconference at the end of an event when people are tired and have been watching presentations all week. I’ve seen too many unconference days become the time when people leave early or spend the time in a corner catching up on email. In this case, I was very pleased that the unconference day was a success with attendees presenting in every available space (more than 45 sessions) and staying engaged throughout the day.

One of the keys to getting good community participation and getting attendees to hang out together is to have evening events that are more interesting and fun than what most people would decide to do on their own. Add free food and drinks to the mix, and you really can keep everyone together well into the evening. The Guinness tour and the football game, for example, drew large crowds, and people really did seem to have a lot of fun.

The best part of the conference from a community building perspective was the 24 hour hacker lounge where people gathered after the evening events ended to work on projects, hang out and play games. We used this space to play many, many games of werewolf often lasting past 3am. Werewolf is one of those games that I really like to bring to conferences because it gives people a chance to get to know each other. It gives the quiet guy who doesn’t really know anyone something to do and an excuse to meet new people, and it puts people on a level playing field where the company executive, the university student and the internet famous are all equal as werewolves and villagers. It gives people something in common to start the conversations while they learn enough about each other to find other things in common. Many of us tend to talk to the people we already know, which keeps us in our own little friend bubbles that can seem cliquey even when not intended to be. Werewolf is an excuse to talk to people that we don’t know and otherwise might not have met. Unlike those other team building and conference games, people really seem to enjoy werewolf. I don’t play werewolf just because I love it. I play it because it builds community.

Other interesting personal notes from the conference and Dublin:

  • Organizers are too busy to eat – I made too many meals out of wine and peanuts in the hacker lounge.
  • Jetlag worked to my advantage allowing me to play werewolf until after 3am, and I didn’t really crash until the plane ride home, so the timing was perfect.
  • In Dublin, like many cities in Europe, you have to look hard for street signs. In this case, they are blue and nailed to a random building or fence somewhere near the intersection.
  • You can find good vegan hippie food in Dublin – as always, look for it near a university.

Thanks again to all of the new friends I met and the old friends that I had time to hang out with. I’m already looking forward to the next MeeGo Conference in May!

Photo credits:

legion of tech, portland

Why I'm Leaving the Legion of Tech Board

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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?

  • I still plan to help organize and volunteer for events like Ignite Portland, but I will probably start to move into more of a supporting role rather than a leadership role for these events.
  • It will free up my time to work on other projects. I have a few side projects that I would like to work on, and I plan to brush up on my very rusty coding skills and spend more time hacking on API data as part of my work on these other projects.

What does this mean for you?

  • Do you want to see Legion of Tech do something a little different? Start thinking about what you would like to see change.
  • My leaving frees up space on the board for more people who want to make a difference in the Portland technology community. You can read our blog post about the election process to learn more or run for the 2011 board.

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.