community, ignite portland, portland

Did You Remember to Submit Your Ignite Portland Presentation Proposal?

We have some really amazing proposals for Ignite Portland so far, but we are looking for more!

I just submitted my proposal for Ignite Portland: What Would Dr. Seuss Say About Online Communities? Have you submitted yours?

If you had five minutes to talk to Portland what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Launch a web site? Teach a hack? Talk about recent learnings, successes, failures? Fill out our presentation submission form to submit your talk. We are looking for talks that will inspire and teach, not recruiting or product pitches.

Related Fast Wonder Blog Posts:

community, dawn foster, portland

Portland on Fire: Meet other cool Portlanders

Raven Zachary just launched a really cool new project yesterday, Portland on Fire: a daily discovery of PDX people. The idea is to profile one interesting person a day from Portland (not just techies, either) with information about how to connect with that person. I was lucky enough to be the second profile featured on the site.

If you are interested in participating, you can fill out the form and answer a few simple questions about yourself. You even get to choose some of the questions!

So, if you ever wanted to know what I was like as child, what my personal interests are, or what I like most about Portland, you should take a look at my profile on Portland on Fire!

community, dawn foster

2007: Non-Stop Excitement … what about 2008?

I thought it would be good to do a year in the life of Dawn for 2007. What the hell, everyone else is doing one, so I will jump on the trend.

As I think about 2007, I can’t help but be a bit surprised by how much fun and excitement I was able to cram into a single year!

2007: Non-Stop Excitement:

Now what? How in the hell am I going to top that in 2008?

  • Achieve 501(c)(3) status for Legion of Tech?
  • Get O’Reilly Art of Community book published?
  • Help organize a bunch of other community events in Portland?
  • Improve Jivespace to make it a really kick-ass developer community?
  • Ultimately, I want to do something spectacular enough that it prompts someone to write a Wikipedia article for me. 🙂

Have a Happy New Year!

community, podcast, portland

Fast Wonder Community Podcast: Approaches to Online Community Structure

I released the third Fast Wonder Community Podcast today, Approaches to Online Community Structure. In this podcast, we talk about how to best structure a new community and how to evolve the structure over time as the community evolves. I started by discussing the pros and cons of three approaches: emergent, highly structured, and adaptive. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

If you have any suggestions for people you would like to see interviewed on a future podcast, please let me know!

You can also subscribe to the Fast Wonder Community Podcast via RSS or iTunes.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

FastWonderPodcast, podcast

Episode 3: Approaches to Online Community Structure

This episode contains the third of four recordings made during a recent discussion I led at the December Portland Web Innovators meeting. In this podcast, we talk about how to best structure a new community and how to evolve the structure over time as the community evolves. I started by discussing the pros and cons of three approaches: emergent, highly structured, and adaptive.

Downloads:

After these initial four podcasts, I am planning to switch to an interview format (via skype most likely), so if you are doing something really cool with your online community, please let me know! I am open to suggestions for potential interviews.

You can also subscribe to the Fast Wonder Community Podcast via iTunes.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

community

Defining Online Community

There is an interesting discussion forming on Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy Blog about the best way to define community, which started in Twitter as he was formulating the initial ideas resulting in a blog post.

Jeremiah proposes this definition:

An online community is: Where a group of people with similar goals or interests connect and exchange information using web tools.

He also points to a definition originating from Jake McKee:

A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons.

I actually like elements of both, but am not entirely happy with either definition. Jake’s definition highlights a couple of things I see missing from Jeremiah’s definition. Most notably “shared experiences” and “relationships”, which are more important to me than information. All websites have information in some form or another, but a community takes it one step farther than just sharing information.

Dawn’s Definition of Online Community

I would go with something more like this, which really is just Jeremiah’s definition with a few tweaks based on ideas from Jake’s definition:

An online community is: Where a group of people with similar goals or interests share experiences and build relationships using web tools.

What do you think?

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

community, jive software, podcast

How to Structure a Community

Last week, I posted a piece on the Jive Talks blog with ideas for how to structure a community:

If you want a community (internal or external) where social productivity can be optimized, you need to put quite a bit of thought into how the community will be structured. In addition to productivity concerns, this initial structure can also impact the adoption of your new community. The challenges include how much or how little structure should be provided and then what kind of promotion/coaching/training should follow the initial implementation. The amount of structure falls into three main categories: emergent, highly structured, and adaptive.

In the post, I go into more detail about the pros and cons of each of the three types of structures (emergent, highly structured, and adaptive). I thought some of the Fast Wonder readers might also be interested in reading it. The full content of the post is on the Jive Talks blog.

I also have a Fast Wonder podcast on the topic of community structure that should go out sometime this weekend.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

General

Off the Grid

I will be mostly off the grid as of this evening and not returning to the wired world until the 27th. Instead, I will be hanging out with family in a very rural area of Ohio for the holidays.

My internet access will be limited to what I can get on my cell phone.

If you need something related to Legion of Tech, Ignite, or other community tech event stuff, Todd will be around during the holidays.  When he isn’t visiting his family here in Portland, he’ll probably be spending time watching violent (non-Dawn approved) movies and eating lots of meat 🙂

community, ignite, ignite portland, legion of tech, portland

Ready for Ignite Portland on Feb 5?

Our last Ignite Portland was so awesome that we decided to do another one on Tuesday, February 5th!

If you missed the last event, take a look at the videos and presentations on the Ignite Portland site. After seeing them, you WILL want to attend this event!

Want to Attend?
Tuesday, February 5th
Time: 6:00 – 9:00pm
Bagdad Theater 3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd. Portland, OR 97214
Admission is always FREE
RSVP on Upcoming

Want to Sponsor?
We had ~300 people at the last event, and we hope to have more at this one. Ignite Portland is only as good as our sponsors – our ability to provide food, beverages, etc. is only possible because of the generous sponsorships of local companies! If you are interested in sponsoring, contact Todd Kenefsky (kenefsky at gmail).

Want to Present?
We will have the presentation idea submission form up soon, but for now, start thinking about an awesome presentation that will wow the audience in 5 minutes with 20 slides that auto advance every 15 seconds!

Related Fast Wonder Blog Posts:

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