I just wanted to let people know that I will be speaking at Defrag on Monday. Stop by and catch my panel about Social Networking in the Enterprise if you happen to be in Denver!
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:
Backups: Amazon S3 + Jungle Disk = Awesomeness
As a follow-up to my earlier post, Why You Should Avoid Mozy Backups, I wanted to blog about the backup solution that I am using now and absolutely love. I’ve had several people ask what I am currently using for a backup solution after the Mozy debacle, so I thought this would be the easiest way to share the information.
Amazon S3 + Jungle Disk = awesomeness.
After my drive reformat last month (thus the need for my Mozy backup), I had a complete hard drive failure (expected, since I knew a reformat wouldn’t “solve” the issue with the physical drive). I restored all of my data from Amazon S3 using Jungle Disk quickly and easily.
Amazon S3 is a really fast, stable, and inexpensive storage solution. I’ve been using it for more than a month and have spent less than $5 so far. The catch is that Amazon S3 can only be accessed via web services; there is no direct consumer interface. So for those of you with mad coding skills and some spare time, you could probably swing it without Jungle Disk.
Jungle Disk provides a simple interface to Amazon S3 along with the ability to do automatic backups at various time intervals. This is a really simple interface – it simply backs up your current data, but does not provide incremental backups, which means that you can only retrieve the most recent copy of a file and not previous versions. After a short free trial, you can buy the software for $20.
Most of my data (maybe 95%) is stored in Clearspace, Zimbra, svn, various online apps, etc., so the number of files backed up is pretty small. An online backup solution like Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk is perfect for me.
Related post:
The Joy and Peril of Organizing Community Events
OK, I’m a bit of a geek as most people know. Yes, I organize tech events for fun in my “spare” time. 🙂
We are organizing the first Ignite Portland event next Thursday. Initially, we thought we would have 150 people – maybe 200 if we got lucky. We picked a nice, roomy space for the event (Wieden+Kennedy) holding 297 people. We did mostly word of mouth marketing: blogs, a couple of mailing lists, the pdxMindshare newsletter, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Nothing fancy, we just spread the word organically.
Well, we reached 300 people on the RSVP list on upcoming this afternoon. We faced similar issues with Barcamp Portland, but we only had about 250 people register for that event. In the week leading up to BarCamp, we went from about 150 people to 250 on the wiki. Yesterday morning around 9am, we hit 200 … today we crossed the 300 mark. Seriously?? 100 new RSVPs in a little more than 1 day!?!
While we are thrilled and amazed by the response to our simple event, we are faced with the unpleasant task of capping the RSVPs at 325 on upcoming. We also know that we will need to count people as they register, and if we end up hitting the 297 limit, we will have the even more unpleasant task of turning people away at the door.
On the one hand, Wow! look what we accomplished. On the other hand, we might have to turn people away (not exactly in the spirit of a community event).
Portland is a great place for technology enthusiasts, and we have an amazing tech community. Realistically, I think we will be fine. Assuming we get 325 RSVPs on Upcoming, a few people will have last minute conflicts, and we should be OK.
Similar Posts:
Want to Play with Clearspace & Win up to $5000 or an iPhone?
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:
- iPhone
- Cash prizes up to $5000
- Free 25 user license of Clearspace
- Jivespace T-shirt
More information about the contest is available on Jivespace.
Attend or Present at Ignite Portland!
Our first Ignite Portland is rapidly approaching!
Thursday, October 25th, 6-9pm
Wieden+Kennedy
224 NW 13th Ave, Portland, OR
FREE
Please RSVP at Upcoming
Interested in sponsoring Ignite Portland? We are looking for additional sponsors to help with the costs of refreshments and signage. 100% of sponsorships go towards costs directly, no middleman. Contact Raven Zachary if you are interested.
Want to present at Ignite Portland on 10/25? If you are interested in presenting, please submit your ideas before 10/16! All you have to do is pack an idea/pitch into our format – 20 slides, shown for 15 seconds each, auto-advanced, and make your idea sound more exciting than the others! We’ve had a great response to our call for presenters. So much so that we have more ideas than presentation slots; however, keep them coming! We’ll just have to pick the best ones. Keep in mind that we expect these to be regular events, so if you do not get to present at this one, you will have other opportunities.
Please tell your friends, blog about it, and post the Ignite badge on your website if you want to help us promote this Portland community event held for the Portland community by the Portland community … yes we do this just for fun 🙂
We hope to see you at Ignite Portland!
Hot Topics in Communities: Reputation Systems
This is the first post in what I hope will be a short series of posts about hot topics in community management.
When I talk about reputation systems (or a reputation engine), I am referring to ways to award points or some other status measure to community members as a “reward” for participating. Jive’s Clearspace and Forums products have a reputation system built into the application awarding points for posting discussions, blogs, wiki documents, and correctly answering questions. The points accumulated by users show up on the users’ profiles and in “Top Members” boxes for specific communities throughout the site. I use this only as an example, since it is the reputation system that I have the most experience using.
The Good:
People like getting points and being recognized for their contributions within a community. It encourages participation and keeps people motivated to participate in the community. Community managers can use the reputations to highlight and reward key members with additional access (moderation access, etc.) or with other rewards like t-shirts.
The Bad:
People will figure out how your system works, and they will find creative ways to game it. Maybe they respond to posts with trivial answers or post discussions with content of little value solely to gain points. This is especially true in technical communities where people will game it just for the challenge. This leads many people to claim that reputation systems are worthless and should never be used.
The Practical:
I’m not an “all or nothing” kind of girl. I think that there is a middle ground where carefully configured reputation systems can be useful.
I suggest putting the responsibility on other community members to award points to their peers for quality posts. One way to accomplish this is by configuring your reputation system to put a heavy weight on correct / helpful answers with little or no points awarded for quantity of posts.
Do not be afraid to adjust the weights over time when you see abuses! You can start out with points awarded for starting discussions, but if you see users posting just to get points, reconfigure it and be clear with your community that you reconfigured it and why. Sometimes communities can be good at self-policing members with bad behavior.
Also make sure that people can easily scan the posts of other users. If I see a user with a bunch of points, I should be able to go to the profile and see whether they have good, quality answers or just meaningless quantity. Community members are smart, and they will be able to tell which community members are participating in meaningful ways as long as you give them the tools to do it.
I also advise against automating rewards based on points. I might be willing to do it for something small like a t-shirt, but not for anything meaningful like moderation permissions, commit rights in open source, or anything else of value.
This is just a start. I know that other community managers probably have horror stories or great ideas about how they have made reputation systems work well. I would love to hear them here in the comments. I am also interested in hearing from people who manage different types of communities to how their perspective differs from mine (I have mostly managed developer / open source communities).
Related posts:
Women in Technology (The Book)
All of the articles written for O’Reilly’s Women in Technology series, including my article about careers in technology, will be included in a book scheduled for publication in October.
All of the proceeds from Women in Technology will be donated to the Alliance of Technology & Women (ATW), a non-profit organization providing scholarships and other encouragement for women and girls preparing for careers in technology. I also just learned that we have a chapter of ATW right here in Portland!
You should pre-order now and buy a copy (or two). 🙂 It’s a great book supporting a great cause.
LUNARR Launch
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.
Why You Should Avoid Mozy Backups
Note: Update from 9/20/07 with resolution to this issue can now be found at the end of this post.
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Ugh. I rarely use my blog to rant, but here it goes.
<rant>
I started using Mozy to backup my MacBook a couple of months ago. In keeping with my sys admin background, I dutifully made my first backup and then did a test restore of a few files – worked beautifully. Simple, online, and free backups for my Mac. I have been doing backups every couple of nights since then. About once a week, I even checked to make sure that the data was being backed up.
Last Thursday, my Mac crashed and refused to reboot. Chris (Jive IT guy extraordinaire) attempted to save the data, but eventually the hard drive had to be reformatted. Total data loss. Oh well, it is a pain to reinstall everything, but I take regular backups, so no problem.
Sigh.
On Monday, I kicked off a full restore on the Mozy web site. This is what I ended up with:
You have 1 restore currently building. In the restore requested about 2 hours ago, 0 out of 11025 files are finished building. You will receive an email when the restore is complete.
At this point, I contact Mozy support to get an idea of how long these typically take. This was prior to 1:00 pm Pacific Time. I received an auto response stating that they would get back to me sometime the following day. Hmmm, maybe a less ambitious approach would be warranted? Yesterday around this time, I decided to try for the 11 files that I wanted right away. Still not working.
I got this email at 9am this morning:
That’s weird your restore is taking so long. Obviously something is wrong and it isn’t restoring correctly. I would try again.
You also have the option to restore from your virtual drive. If you click on your Mozy icon on the menu bar (the four square icon) and choose restore files you’ll be able to view and restore your files from there. This is typically the best option for a smaller amount of files like you are trying to download.
Let us know how it goes.
Sigh, yeah I already tried all of this (and they should have been able to tell that I already tried again), so no help here.
As I was writing this blog entry, I got an email requesting a copy of mozy.log. Interesting, I was performing a web restore, so there won’t be anything in the logs.
My current Mozy status:
You have 1 restore currently building.
In the restore requested 1 day ago, 0 out of 11 files are finished building. You will receive an email when the restore is complete. Click here to view all your restores.
A quick Google of “mozy restore” will show that this is not an isolated issue.
You may be asking yourself, “what kind of moron uses beta backup software?” ahem. OK, I am a bit lucky. The vast majority of my data is stored in other online services (Gmail, Jive’s Zimbra server, Clearspace collaboration platform), so hard drive backups are less critical for me than for most people. However, I still do not like losing data, and other people who rely more heavily on hard drive files could get seriously burned using Mozy.
My advice to you? Run away from Mozy as fast as you can!
</rant>
UPDATE 9/20/07: Woo hoo! I have my data back. Mozy’s COO contacted me yesterday in response to this blog post. After a short email exchange, my backup of 11 files completed fairly quickly. I submitted a restore of the rest of my data ~800MB, which completed and was ready to download in an afternoon. The download went well, and I have verified that the files look good. Despite the rocky start, they were able to get my data to me. I have learned my lesson about using beta software for backups, and I will most likely still switch to a more reliable service (E3 from Amazon most likely); however, I really appreciate the responsiveness that Mozy displayed.