Category Archives: conference

Ignite Portland Recap

We had a fantastic time at Ignite Portland, and the event exceeded all of our expectations. What we initially thought would be an event with 150 people became an event of nearly 300. We were concerned that we would hit the 297 person fire code limit and need to turn people away at the door, but in the end everyone was admitted to the event, and we hit the fire code limit nearly exactly (277 people registered in our system + ~20 people from Wieden+Kennedy = 297)

The presentations were amazing; it wasn’t too crowded; and I got to meet a bunch of new people!

Key learnings for the next event:

  • Less white wine, more beer and water
  • More time for networking (maybe 14 presentations, instead of 18 to free up some time)
  • Need a larger space (something holding closer to 500) to minimize the risk of turning people away

I think these are all fairly minor issues for our first Ignite Portland event. A huge thanks to co-organizers Todd Kenefsky, Raven Zachary, and Josh Bancroft, and thanks to all of the many volunteers and sponsors for the event. We look forward to doing another one in Jan / Feb! We will be posting more information about future events on the Ignite Portland site along with video and presentations from this event.

There are nearly 200 pictures posted to Flickr already under the igniteportland tag. For complete coverage of the event with links to many other blogs discussing the event, visit Silicon Florist. Rick has done an amazing job of aggregating the event news!

Related Fast Wonder posts:

Want to see me speak at SXSW?

SXSW has released their annual panel picker application. I submitted 2 sessions:

If either of these sessions sound interesting to you, please cast your vote for them.

If you plan on attending sxsw, I encourage you to vote for the sessions that you find interesting. I love conferences that give us, as participants, the ability to participate in the selection process.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I will also be part of the “Hottest Babes in Open Source” panel with Silona Bonewald, Tara Hunt & Erica O’Grady (if it makes it through the panel picking process!)

Art of Community Video

For anyone who missed the Art of Community panel at OSCON, we were able to get the entire session on video. I’ve posted it to the Jivespace Developer Podcasts and Video Blog.

“Danese Cooper and I put together a community panel at OSCON discussing the art of building and maintaining successful communities. The panel included (from left to right): Danese Cooper (Moderating), Jimmy Wales, Dawn Foster, Sulamita Garcia, Whurley, Karl Fogel, and Brian Behlendorf.” (Quoted from: Jivespace Blog)

OSCON Report

I had a great time at OSCON this year. A few highlights:

As usual, the real value was in the hallway conversations, shared meals, and other informal discussions with really smart people.

I will be posting video of our Art of Community panel (thanks to Drew Scott for wielding the camera!) and some footage from Beeforge on the Jivespace Video Podcast blog over the next week or 2.

Having Fun at OSCON (Beer, Community, and More!)

I wanted to let people know about a few fun activities during the week of OSCON.

Beer Forge

This is a great after party sponsored by Jive Software (my employer) and POSSE (I’m a member) along with OSL, OpenSourcery, and OTBC.

When: Thursday, July 26, 2007, 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM

Where: Thirsty Lion Pub, 71 SW 2nd Avenue, Portland, OR 97209 (just a couple stops on the MAX Light Rail from the Oregon Convention Center)

How: Please RSVP to rsvp@jivesoftware.com to receive a copy of the invitation or download the invite. I’ll also try to carry around a little stash of invites during OSCON, so let me know if you need one.

Technology Community Leader Meetup

We had so much fun at the Technology Community Leader Meetup in SF before OSBC that I thought we should have another one around OSCON / Ubuntu Live in PDX on July 24th from 6-7:30pm.

Anyone currently leading, managing, or otherwise involved in technology communities (open source, web 2.0, wikis, etc.) is welcome to attend. Feel free to forward this invite on to others. It should be fun!

Location is TBD until I have an idea of how many people plan to attend. It will be somewhere in or near the Portland Convention center. If you would like to attend, please RSVP on upcoming.

Art of Community Session

Danese Cooper and I put together a community panel at OSCON on Thursday from 4:30 – 5:15 (right before BeerForge). We’ll have a great group of people on the panel including:

Jimmy Wales
Karl Fogel
Geir Magnussen
Sulamita Garcia
Whurley

Werewolf

The Portland Werewolf group plans to organize some werewolf games during OSCON (date /time still TBD).

Catch Me on a sxsw Podcast about Open Source

Our sxsw podcast from March: Non-Developers to Open Source Acolytes: Tell Me Why I Care was just released as a podcast.

Open source and standards are like religion to some in tech, but many non-developer technology consumers wonder: why should we care? Check out this debate between open source advocates and devil’s advocate, figure out if you care.

Elisa Camahort Pres of Events & Mktg, BlogHer
Dawn Foster Dir of Community & Partner Programs, Compiere
Annalee Newitz Freelance Writer,
Erica Rios Internet Project Mgr, Anita Borg Institute For Women and Technology

Technology Community Leader Meetup

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!

At OSBC This Week

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:

  • Organizing a meetup for community managers (Mon. 8-10pm)
  • At The 451 VIP Open Source Reception (Tues. 7-9pm)
  • Community Panel (Wed. 2-3pm)
  • On Twitter
  • Attending various panels, hanging out in the hallways, and sneaking off to Chinatown for good food!

BarCamp Portland was Awesome

OK, as an organizer of the event, I am probably not the most neutral party; however, I do think the we managed to pull of a great BarCamp here in Portland. First of all, a huge thank you to Eva, David, and the rest of the crew at CubeSpace who generously gave us the run of the facility, were an amazing help, let us stay until 11pm both nights, and were extremely flexible when the registrations soared out of control the 3 days leading up to the event from our expected attendance of 125 to a final count of about 250 attendees. Also a huge thank you to Raven Zachary, co-organizer and partner in crime for the event, and the rest of the planning team: Carl Johnson, LaVonne Reimer, Audrey Eschright, Patrick Sullivan, Sioux Fleming, Kelly Mackin, and Rashid Ahmed. Each person on this list was a tremendous help. Todd was also an enormous help: staying up late to help draw the grid; bringing me bubble tea; getting last minute materials cut at Kinkos, putting up with my crap as my grouchiness escalated during final preparations, and much more.

During the initial planning of BarCamp Portland, we thought that would be really cool if we could get maybe 75-100 people at Portland’s first BarCamp. As people began signing up, we thought that 125 was a pretty realistic number (this is what we budgeted for). A week or two before the event, we had 125-150 people signed up, and we felt really good about that number. As we moved closer to the Friday start of BarCamp, the numbers escalated rapidly to 274. Based on signups at the registration desks, we think we had about 250 people physically present at the event. Our sponsors were very generous in making last minute increases in sponsorship funding to provide additional food for the extra people.

A few neat things about BarCamp Portland:

Thanks to everyone who attended. A BarCamp event is only successful if the people who attend make it successful. We had an amazing, geeky, smart, and fun crowd leading to an amazing, geeky, smart, and fun event!

Dogfood: aka Week 1 at Jive Software

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?