shared links

Blogging Elsewhere

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.
portland

Portland MeeGo Meetup on January 17

The next Portland MeeGo Network Meetup will be Monday, January 17  at 6:30pm at Kells. We will also be meeting at Kells on the third Monday of every month starting in March, but we’re skipping February to celebrate Presidents Day.

Our featured speaker this month is Quim Gil from Nokia, and we invite anyone who wants to learn more about MeeGo to come hang out and talk about the project.

Agenda
6:30 – 7:00: Hang out and talk to other people interested in MeeGo.
7:00 – 7:15: Introductions
7:15 – 7:45: Quim Gil – MeeGo on Nokia Device Demo
7:45 – 8:30: Open Agenda item or Q & A

Logistics
Date: January 17
Time: 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Location: Kells Private Room Upstairs at 112 SW 2nd Ave.

It would be great if you could RSVP on Upcoming to let us know how many snacks we should have available.

If you want to get notifications about future meetings, you can join the Portland MeeGo Network Google Group.

Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Recognition and Thanks

2 Comments

Community managers tend to be busy people, especially when you have an active community with many contributors, and it’s easy to forget to thank people for being really helpful in the community. I am as guilty of forgetting to thank people as anyone else, maybe more guilty of it. We need to remember that these people are contributing their valuable time to do something nice for us, and they deserve to be recognized for it in some way.

Here are a few ways to recognize your contributors:

  • Contact them and say “Thank You” for a specific contribution.
  • Make recognition a big part of your monthly metrics reports.
  • Hold special events, like Yelp does for their elite members.
  • Seek input on tough problems from your frequent contributors.
  • Do something nice for them.

Recommended Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Photo by William Arthur Fine Stationery used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

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

1 Comment

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

2 Comments

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

3 Comments

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.

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.