w00t! Jive Software’s Clearspace X just won the Best Community Platform award from InfoWorld! You can read their full review on the InfoWorld site. This is no surprise to me. We power the 2 communities that I manage, Jivespace and Ignite Realtime, on Clearspace X.
Did you know that you can get a free license for Clearspace X if you are a non-commercial open source project or developer group? This is one of the cool parts of my of my job … I get to give people free software 🙂
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:
More information about the contest is available on Jivespace.
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.
Jive is releasing a new version of Clearspace with what we think are some really cool improvements on September 13th. We thought it might be fun to invite the Portland blogging, podcasting, and influencer community in for a sneak peak on Tuesday, September 11th. Everyone is welcome to attend!
The Details:
Date: Tuesday, Sept. 11
Time: 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Where: Jive Software 317 SW Alder St Suite 500 (5th floor)
You can RSVP on Upcoming if you are interested in attending.
Jive’s Agenda:
What You Get:
How to Get Here:
The Jive Software Office is on SW Alder between 3rd & 4th. Parking is available in a nearby parking garage, and it is short walk from the Max / bus lines (Directions).
Wondering what I’ve been doing in my first 2+ months at Jive Software?
Answer: Launching our new developer community, Jivespace.
The best part? We used our own Clearspace X product to build the collaborative elements of the community (discussions, wiki docs, blogs, etc.)
Don’t forget that I can also give away free copies of Clearspace for open source projects and developer user groups!
How cool is it that part of my job is giving away free copies of Clearspace X and Jive Forums to open source projects and developer user groups (like JUGs, etc.)? We’ve been giving away free licenses for a while, but last week I streamlined the application process with fewer questions and a simple web form to apply. Interested open source projects and user groups can get all of the details by reading my Ignite Realtime blog post on the topic.
Since we had a bunch of people coming into San Francisco for OSBC, and quite a few community managers already living in the Bay Area, I thought that a meetup of community leaders would be a fun idea for the evening prior to OSBC. Initially, I thought we’d have maybe 10 people hanging out in the hotel bar, but we ended up with 20-25 people, and The 451 generously offered their space to host my get together.
It was a nice opportunity to network with other people in similar roles while having some very interesting discussions about various aspects of community management. It got me thinking about a few things. Kingsley from Salesforce.com does an incredible amount of personal outreach including searches on MySpace and Facebook for people listing Salesforce as interests. I need to think about ways that I can encourage people to participate as I build Jive Software’s developer community around products like Clearspace. Getting a few influential, community savvy, early adopters during the initial stages of the new community can also help build momentum.
Whurley also made a really good point about how each community competes with other similar communities for developers. New communities have to be interesting, compelling, and highly relevant if you want developers to take time away from other communities to spend time interacting in your community.
I definitely need to keep doing these types of events. We can learn so much from each other when we take the time to talk and share ideas about building communities. We’ll do another one of these around OSCON in Portland!
I wanted to let everyone know that I will be at OSBC May 21st (evening) through Wed., May 23rd. Please look me up if you want to chat about community building or if you want to talk about Jive Software’s community collaboration tools (Clearspace). I can also give these tools away for free for non-commercial (open source) software development usage – talk to me for details.
It would also be great to see some familiar faces attending my panel on Wednesday from 2pm – 3pm on Community Development: Business Development for the 21st Century.
Other places you can find me this week:
Yesterday, we issued a press release about Jive Software’s new Clearspace X product. Clearspace X is:
a special edition of Clearspace for companies interested in creating productive and engaging online communities for their customers and partners. In the past, companies have had to “glue together” separate applications for blogs, wikis, documents and forums, resulting in disconnected people and content, and low participation rates. Clearspace X unifies these collaboration tools into one system, bringing them together through a clean, user-friendly interface and integrated incentive system.
Using Clearspace X, companies can quickly and easily create compelling public-facing communities, enabling users to share information and ideas with each other via discussions, structured wiki documents, moderated blogs and even files (like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF). Users can keep abreast of recent activity in the community through email notifications, instant message alerts and RSS feeds. (quoted from the Press Release)
We use Clearspace internally to manage our company as a community with constant interactions using discussion forums, document sharing, wiki editing of documents, internal blogging, tagging, and much more. This software is the main reason that I was able to be so productive my first week on the job. Clearspace X is similar to our Clearspace product, but tailored to the needs of an external community.
An added benefit of my role as Director of Developer Relations at Jive is that I get to give the product away for free to non-commercial developer teams. This includes open source projects, student coding projects, and other non-commercial teams of software developers. I’ll have a simple web form for requests available on the Jive Software website in the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, drop me an email if you qualify for a free license of Clearspace X: myfirstname at Jivesoftware dot com.
My first week at Jive has been a whirlwind of activity, and I think that I have been super productive for the first 5 days on the job. I’ve completed a first draft of how we might build Jive’s new developer community on our newly released Clearspace X infrastructure. I am re-working the process for how we give away free licenses of Jive’s Clearspace and Forum products to open source projects. I’ve put together a new demo script for our CEO to use at BarCamp – customized for what I think will be the audience at BarCamp. I was also able to get confirmed speaking engagements at Defrag and OSCON this week. All this while being constantly distracted with last minute BarCamp details as the co-organizer of the BarCamp Portland event this weekend (note to self: next year, do NOT start a new job the week that you are holding BarCamp!)
How was I able to get all of this done while getting up to speed in a new company? It comes down to dogfood, specifically, to eating our own dogfood at Jive. We use the current Clearspace beta product for all of our documents, to hold discussions, for blogging, and more. Most of the information that I needed was already in Clearspace. For new information, I just started discussions in Clearspace where I asked other Jive employees about things like what to name the new developer community, how to promote our new developer community, and more. I posted all of my work as wiki documents in Clearspace, and because everyone uses it, I was able to get feedback and information from across the company.
We are also avid users of our Openfire / Spark IM solution with every Jive employee already populated in our buddy lists from day 1 on the job. I worked with an employee in Canada over IM to help him reproduce an issue that I was seeing in our beta product, discussed our Ignite community with our CTO, negotiated with our web developer on resources to get some web forms completed, and much more.
I have to say that Jive seems to be a great fit for me. I’m working with people who are just insanely smart, who live web 2.0 technologies, and we’re working on some really cool collaboration software. Did I mention that we are hiring?