Tag Archives: open source

Online Community Presentations

I’ve been doing a few presentations about online communities recently, and I finally got around to uploading a few of them to SlideShare. I thought people might be interested in seeing them.

I will continue to upload more presentations to my SlideShare account as I deliver them. You can also contact me via email (dawn@fastwonder.com) if you would like to have me deliver a similar presentation or more extensive online community or social media training for your organization.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

When Companies Sponsor Communities

Here are my notes from the Art of Community lightning talk that I delivered at OSCON yesterday. Some of this advice is geared toward open source and developer communities, but most of it applies to building corporate communities in general. We also used a 3 minute lightning talk format, so the advice below contains only my top few tips that could fit into this fast-paced format.

We’ve all seen times where companies try to sponsor communities. Sometimes they do it successfully, but other times all you can do is watch while the whole thing backfires. Here are a few tips to help companies approach community building in the right way to build successful communities and hopefully avoid the disasters that some companies face.

Tip #1 Think about Ownership:

  • The company does not “own” the community. The community “owns” the community, and the people participating own their contributions (whether it is ideas, advice, documentation or code).
  • A company who starts a community:
    • owns the infrastructure
    • facilitates the discussions
    • moderates and keeps people in check
  • It can be difficult for companies to think of a community in this way. However, if the company doesn’t play nice with the community, the community will take their discussions elsewhere and fork the community and the project.

Tip #2 Keep Sales and Marketing in Check:

  • This applies to all communities, but is especially true for developer communities.
  • Developers want detailed information without the fluff. Get rid of the marketing speak and make it easy to find the key pieces of information
  • Don’t use the community to sell anything. You don’t need to pimp your products and services within the community. If someone is already participating in the community, then chances are they can find out how to get in touch with you if they need something.

Tip #3 Make Someone Responsible for Community Management:

  • This person can make sure that everything is running smoothly in the community and work to resolve issues before they get out of control.
  • The community manager isn’t responsible for doing all of the work within the community, but they can pull the right people into discussions and make sure that the right people are participating.
  • For open source and developer communities, this person should report into the technical side of the company (not marketing)

Companies can have successful communities, but only if they take the time to do the right things and truly participate in the community.

Mark Shuttleworth in Portland for Legion of Talk on July 21

Mark ShuttleworthAre you going to be in Portland on July 21st (the Monday of OSCON)? If so, you won’t want to miss Mark Shuttleworth speaking as part of the Legion of Talk series brought to you by Legion of Tech. This is the second in the Legion of Talk series (Gary Vaynerchuk spoke to us last week). Mark will be talking about 2 things: Ubuntu and his experiences traveling in space. I am in geeky heaven with that combo 🙂

The Details:

July 21, 2008
McMenamins Mission Theater
1624 NW Glisan St
Portland, OR 97209
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Doors open 5:30pm (come early, have dinner & hang out with us before the talk)
RSVP on Upcoming, but also get a ticket on the Legion of Tech site

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Clearspace 2.0, Acquisition of Jotlet, Openfire Enterprise Goes Open Source and more

This weekend, we announced a bunch of changes at Jive.

We released Clearspace 2.0, including a renaming of Clearspace X to Clearspace Community. We also upgraded Jivespace to Clearspace Community 2.0 with an update to the look and feel, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time yesterday and today doing lots of testing and some tweaking.

Jive announced our acquisition of Jotlet. While I love to see Jive acquiring cool technology, I am even more excited that Adam Wulf relocated from Texas to Portland as part of the acquisition. Make sure you give @adamwulf a big Portland tech community welcome.

While Openfire has been open source for a long time, Openfire Enterprise had been a proprietary add-on to the open source version … until now. Openfire Enterprise is also being released under an opn source license.

The press has also been writing about the changes (search Google News if you don’t believe me). I won’t go into too much detail here, since the blog posts linked above have a bunch of details, but I am excited about the changes!

Why I Love Open Source (Google Android Uses Jive Code)

OK, there are lots of things to love about Open Source Software. Here’s one reason: because if the code is good, companies like Google will pick it up and incorporate it in cool projects like Android 🙂

We recently learned that Google’s Android code uses our XMPP Smack library, and I think this really cool. We are honored to part of this – even if it is in an indirect way.