A few months ago, I was at the Norman Rockwell Museum and I ran across his "Four Freedoms" series again.  I always enjoyed his work and am in awe of his ability to capture humanity in such a poignant manner.  As such, in light of our recent community advisory board meeting, I thought the "Freedom of Speech" image was an appropriate image to represent this blog post about the community advisory board.  What is our community advisory board?  In September, we kicked off this initiative  to hear how a cross-section of our audiences use certain features, functionality, and content on our sites.  Additionally we want to determine and how we might go about improving those to enhance the overall experience help people be more successful performing their key tasks. 

All in all, the whole event went very well, and I wanted to share our strategies as to how we did it.  I realize that there are many ways of doing this, and I do not purport what we did is the best way.  Rather, it's just the way we chose (and it worked!).  Any feedback, suggestions and the like that you have is greatly appreciated.

Identifying key participants

My team spans across many different segments of technical professionals.  This is most evident in our MSDN (for developers), TechNet (for IT professionals) and Expression (for designers.) site experiences.  Ensuring that we have representatives across these audiences is key in understanding how basic social issues such as trust and reputation factor into decision making.  In addition to getting a cross section of different audiences, ensuring that we have a representative  sample across company size and location is something we sought from participants.  The specific individuals were contacted through our own extended social networks (at least two or three degrees of separation), so the ask was more personalized.

Determining  goals

Given our current schedule, we knew we wanted to talk about reputation, broadly defined.  More specifically, we wanted to identify key indicators of trust and to get some sense of the priority of them for the participants.  On a more tactical level, we wondered if the current way in which reputation is manifested in our forums is the best way we surface this.  These items for discovery became the key goals we set for ourselves with the first attempt at a community advisory board.

Selecting the right tools

As our participants are scattered geographically, an asynchronous means of connecting people became a key requirement for this initiative.  Looking at our existing resources, using a private forum became a natural choice.  The privacy options in our forums helped ensure that only the participants are in the discussion.  The threaded nature of the forum helped us "contain" discussions on a particular question on a given thread; I would pose one question (related to our goals) and the discussion would follow.  

In addition to the forum, we also used an old fashioned conference call for a real time discussion.  As good as asynchronous discussions can be, there's nothing quite like a real time conversation for surfacing additional ideas.

To facilitate most of this, email played a crucial role in our tool kit.  Email was used to identify prospective participants, in addition to getting them set up with the tools.

Documents/collateral.  To help spur discussion, I also pulled together a quick PowerPoint to frame the agenda for the call.

Putting it all together

1. Emails sent out to identify prospective participants
2. Private forum created
3. Background information for forum posted
4. Background information consists of:
   Biographies of participants (collected via email)
   Biographies of planning team
   Basic forum guidelines and FAQs
   Background information on the project, reputation an trust
5. SkyDrive public share created for possible collateral (ultimately not used due to time)
6. Welcome message posted to forum
7. First question posted to forums
8. Wait a little bit to see if people respond naturally
9. Emails to specific individuals to spur participation in forums
10. Direct responses to participants as they posted replies
11. My replies consisted of any of the following:
    Thanking people for participation
    Welcoming first time participants
    Follow up questions
12. Second question posted to forum
13. [repeat 7 - 11]
14. Third question posted to forum
15. [repeat 7 - 11]
16. Create conference call agenda via PowerPoint
17. Distribute agenda and call in information (via email)
18. Hold conference call
19. Take notes
20. Post notes/key takeaways on forum
21. Ask others for their key takeaways
22. Document process
23. Blog about it :-)
24. Refine as needed

While it may seem a bit dry when listed out like that, I found the whole experience to be quite engaging.  In many ways, this is similar to what happens when you bring together  small group of people in a Meetup or Conversation Café.  That we opted to do this in an online forum and a call was just the way we did it to help bridge time and space.

Looking back, there are some aspects I would change -- perhaps leveraging a file share like SkyDrive more.  I'm also wondering about the benefit of recording conference calls a la Live Meeting or some other set of recording tools.  While it can be valuable when it's necessary to be in sync with slides of demos, I don’t think that was really needed for our specific agenda.  Those are just some initial thoughts off the top of my head.

Based on the methodology listed above, what would you suggest as changes to explore?

For anyone that's interested, I've embedded a download of the discussion slides in addition to a slideshow of what we talked about during the call.

This past week, I had the honor of going to O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo in New York City.  Overall, it was a great event that allowed me to connect with some of the great minds in the industry in addition to learning a lot.

Some highlights from the conference:

Tim O'Reilly's keynote -- as someone who is passionate about community first and foremost, O'Reilly's call to action for us to focus on what matters really hit home for me.  Community -- not limited to technology, is what brought me to Microsoft.  I think tech has a big role, but ultimately the measure of it's true worth is what does it mean to everyone else?  How does it solve the really big problems of facing the environment, global health, civic participation and so on?  Thank you, Tim for calling attention to what really matters.

Clay Shirky's keynote -- I've always appreciated Shirky's insights in bringing much needed depth and focus to looking at how community affects social interactions.  Looking at the so called information overload problem through the lens of broken filtering methods changes the conversation, in my mind, and helps us all focus on problems to tackle

Genevieve Bell's presentation -- Much like the keynotes by O'Reilly and Shirky, this session (and her abbreviated keynote) brings a different perspective to the Web2.0 space.  As an anthropologist for Intel, Bell brings rich insight and poignant questions for the future direction of how the internet impacts social interactions.  How this physically shapes our environment, and how it changes our experiences with technology and each other present many new challenges and opportunities for all of us.

Avinash Kaushik's presentation -- Focused on the topic of analytics, Kaushik gave a great overview of how we effectively measure and analyze what is really going on with the Web2.0 space.  Kaushik provided great insight, and gave a thoroughly entertaining presentation for a topic that can be quite dry at times.

Joshua Porter -- where to begin?  Porter is great!  A must read in my list of feeds, I appreciated the opportunity to attend both of his sessions, in addition to dialoguing with him on issues of reputation and recognition.  (thanks also to Bryce Glass for the clarification of your definition). 

Other highlights -- connecting with folks from all over.  Whether it was with folks from Etsy, Lithium, Cisco, Chile, or old colleagues it was great.  Additionally, New York has always been my kind of town and it's a great place for something like the Web2.0 expo.  Thanks to everyone involved!

A few months ago we previewed a version of Social Bookmarks that enabled technical professionals to:

• store urls of interest to you
• share them with others
• explore what others share

Now we're ready to open it up even more.  With the new release of Social Bookmarks on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression new scenarios are enabled:

• Follow a person's bookmarks -- follow a bookmark feed of a specific person or a bookmark feed of a person by tag.  Put another way, this is tag drafting
• Bookmark on sites you own -- use our Social Bookmarks widget (English language for now, other languages in the weeks ahead) to make it easier for others to save your page as a bookmark
• Support for 11 new languages -- all to be rolled out in the next several weeks -- Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish
• Import existing links -- from your browser favorites or from Delicious
• Browse other users -- see who else is bookmarking and follow their feed of bookmarks
• Report a bookmark -- if you see a bookmark that you believe to be questionable, report the item to Microsoft for review

We would not be here were it not for your feedback, and for the work of an incredible engineering team.  Thank you!  Congratulations to all involved!  Now get out there and bookmark :-)

One of my colleagues, Sara Ford, just finished her first book on Visual Studio tips and will be donating all author book royalties to create a scholarship fund at the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College for anyone living in her hometown of Waveland, LA MS. Wow!  Not only will the book be an incredible resource for VS developers, the scholarship fund is huge!  Talk about community building... :-)

From Sara's own words:

I am donating 100% of my author book royalties to create a scholarship fund at the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College for anyone living in my hometown of Waveland, Mississippi, which was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. The Save Waveland Scholarship Fund will give preference to math and computer science majors.

USA Today referred to Waveland as The Town That Vanished. After witnessing the devastation first hand six weeks after the storm, I vowed that I would one day do something that would make a difference. With Microsoft matching the donation, I feel that day is today.

Congratulations on this great accomplishment, Sara!

With two high profile product launches being a bit bumpy (here, here) I can't help but wonder if the all of the love for their products (and the spread of love via social networks) is causing strain on the underlying infrastructure.

Course, from a community standpoint, this sounds like a good problem to have.

I don't know if Bill's actual last day will be like the video below, but I'm sure it will be memorable.  Thanks for all the insights, vision and humor all these years.  I look forward to seeing all of the wonderful things that he'll be doing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for years to come. 

I recently ran across a fascinating paper in  MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning by S. Shayam Sundar titled, "The MAIN Model: A Heuristic Approach to Understanding Technolgy Effects on Credibility."  Given the work that we're doing on recognition, this paper on credibility seemed rather appropriate to dig into for more detail.

Early on, Sundar lays the foundation to say that credibility cannot be effectively determined by considering solely the source of the information.  Specifically, Sundar says, "Ultimately though, source, message, and the medium credibility serve as nominal cues -- a given source is perceived as credible or not, a given message element is perceived as credible or not, and likewise a given medium or media vehicle or channel is perceived as credible or not -- that provide mental shortcuts for effortlessly assessing the believability of information being received."

Instead, Sundar goes on to explain the value of using a cues and heuristic model to better understand how technology plays a role in helping people determine the relative credibility of a site, piece of content, person, etc.  The model Sundar proposes is based from ten years of research from The Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State University -- Modality, Agency, Interactivity, and Navigability (MAIN).

I won't go into the rest of the paper, but suffice to say Sundar explores the various aspects of MAIN in more detail.  While I found the framework quite interesting (especially as I think about how that may apply -- or not -- to MSDN, TechNet and Expression), what I get most from reading papers like this is a fresh perspective on issues I deal with day to day.  I also find myself making multiple connections to areas of study or examples in real life I would not have thought of before.  For example, when talking about heuristics ties to Interactivity, Sundar wrote "Users may be likely to evaluate the system's credibility positively, just as they would evaluate a person with whom they hit it off."  While I joke with my colleagues that all of our work with social media is no different than that of a dating site, the image that popped into my head when I read this was that of a chemistry.com commercial.  Thinking more on this, there is something to be said about the chemistry that occurs between people when they meet.  It would seem that based on how a site triggers (or does not trigger) heuristics tied to interactivity, there may or may not be any chemistry with those coming to the site.

Another example of making connections that otherwise would not have existed were it not for reading this research paper is on this notion of being a good conversationalist.  Over the course of a week I've had a series of conversations on the personal skills (or lack thereof) of others.  One situation was when someone commented that this other person only talks about themselves, never asking about others.  The other situation was when a father jokingly talked about how he taught and modeled social skills to his son through a book (it worked!).  Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but when Sundar talks of "the real value of interactivity is that it gives the user the ability to serve as a source, and not just a receiver of communication"...I think of the need to be a good conversationalist.  As someone working on social experiences, how do the experiences we provide, and the sites we publish help or hinder the notion of being a good conversationalist?  How are we having a conversation with those who come to our experiences?  How do we facilitate the ability for others to be good conversationalists with one another?

Anyway, those were some of my take aways from Sundar's paper.  I'd be curious to hear if others had similar thoughts.  If you had different insights, I'd love to hear them as well.

I seem to be on a recognition kick lately.  In addition to running across the reputation patterns the other day, I just ran across a great presentation by Bryce Glass on getting started with reputation systems.

Again, I personally think the notion of reputation being discussed is being blurred a bit by things I would consider to be recognition aspects...but maybe it's a toe-may-toe toe-mah-toe debate.  Regardless, there's some great questions raised in the presentation.  I'm still digging through it, but hope to post a more thoughtful response in the future.  Thanks, Bryce!

Some people have visual memories.  Others say that smell is the strongest stimulation for memory.  For me, I can remember the context in which a particular event occurred.  More specifically, I can often remember what I was doing, where I was, and all of that when I came across a website that was of interest.  In the past, this would lead to an inordinate amount of time trying to re-create my steps rather than doing my job.

Fortunately, with Social Bookmarks, I can now find the key words or phrases associated with a given url saved.  All I have to do is click on a tag, or series of tags and my list of items gets narrowed down to the key pieces of information I need -- ultimately saving time, and letting me tackle the work I need to do at a given moment. 

How does this relate to time travel?  Simple.  I recall that I ran across a website that had interesting information about a particular topic -- say "search."  I am then able to see other search related items and can see where in a timeline I saved them.  Being able to recall when, where, and that whole context in which I encountered the resource...I'm essentially walking back through time :-)

Loosely related, going back through one's bookmarks also helps me prevent the "Shiny Object Syndrome" that many of us face.  It's also a refreshing way to counter what may be a re-wiring of our brains thanks to the afore mentioned Shiny Object Syndrome

Thanks to Bob for the inspiration of this post.

It is great to see Randy Farmer's work on reputation published in Yahoo's Design Pattern Library.  I like the level of detail, and the visualizations help to capture the mutitude of ways of representing this.  As exicted as I am to see this, I'm not sure I would call these "reputation."  Instead, these patterns strike me as different ways in which a system recognizes individuals and the actions they do.  Put another way, these patterns appear to provide feedback for the person doing the action (possibly as a means of facilitating flow.)

If and when reputation comes into play, isn't that what happens when I begin to evaluate the actions of another person based on the information provided?  The difference may seem subtle, but at the end of the day I do not control what you think about me and my actions.  Instead, I control the actions I do, and (ideally) the visibility of those actions; Systems can recognize my actions, but my reputation will vary based on the person evaluating me.  I'd be curious to hear more about why these patterns are or are not reputation.  Is this all a semantic discussion or are there intrinsic differences for what we're all talking about here?

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was not going to discuss recognition.  Well, that was for the context of that post.  As part of my role as a community planner, I am on point for things dealing with recognition on the various Social experiences throughout Expression, TechNet and MSDN.  While this is not fully baked, for the sake of transparency (and I hope, feedback) I thought I'd share some of the current thinking based on feedback from site visits, research and the like.  

So what exactly do I mean by recognition?  Simply put, it's how we recognize the actions of people as they experience our sites.

What does this look like today?  Well, until a few weeks ago recognition was seen in the separate experiences of Forums and annotations to the Library.  Following a recent release, we now have contributions to Library and Forums, in addition to Social Bookmarks all rolled up into one given view.  The profile (or as I like to call it, "the online representation of oneself") is where we display all of the explicit actions taken by people.  Here's an example of the new profile...

I should note, there are aspects of today's system (especially in Forums) that is not really recognition specific, but rather they are reputation specific (such as helpfulness).  Reputation, from my perspective, is what happens when other people see things that I'm recognized for and then they evaluate that piece of information in a way that makes sense to them.  Put another way, it's what happens when you see I've bookmarked and commented on searchandgive.com.  What are the judgments that you make?  How relevant is it to you and your experience? What do you think of my bookmark, and my thoughts of it?  That's reputation.  And your perspective, that's going to be different than someone on my particular team, for example.  We're not going to be talking about reputation just yet ;-)

Getting back to recognition...The display of ones explicit actions is just one way in which we look to recognize people as they experience our sites.  While not fully scoped, we are looking at expanding the notion of points across all Social experiences on MSDN, TechNet and Expression, in addition to adding a net new way of recognizing specific milestones for people -- such as when they do something for the first time, or when they do something during a given time frame.  This latter notion (still to be named) can in some ways be seen as an "achievement" a la Xbox Live, or a badge on MSN Games (full disclosure -- I used to work with MSN Games).

In summary, this is how I'm looking at recognition:

• display of actions
• points for specific actions
• some sort of visual flair

I ran across a great visualization about the social web from Ryan Turner.  While I don't believe it quite captures what he writes, the image does capture a great deal of the complexity around social media and communities in my opinion.

First, what I love...

I'm at the center
Actually, it's not me, it's you and everyone else.  He clearly puts the individual at the center of it all.  Sounds pretty basic, but you'd be amazed at how much of a change this is in priorities of experience design.  With some recent steps towards a more social experience on Expression, TechNet and MSDN we are beginning to get there.

Relationships of people
Friends, people reading my blog, my friends' blogs, communities of practice...all of these are called out as different pieces of the visualization.  What are communities and social networks if not a collection of people and the nature of the relationships?  It's not *just* about me, but (potentially) everyone else.

It's visually exciting
While it may not be evident on my blog, I am a visual person.  There's nothing like a good visualization to present a strong case to folks.

Now for some constructive critiques

Relationship of tech experiences not captured
Blogs, for example are listed separate and distinct from Communities of Practice (CoP).  While not all CoP are blog centric, there is no reason why group of blogs cannot serve as a CoP.

Reputation seems isolated from everything but products
I'm not going to get into the whole reputation and recognition discussion (yet) but reputation is made up of more than what happens in a marketplace.  While it is indeed an important factor to consider in transactions that occur, one's reputation comes into play at multiple points of the Social web

Image does not seem to reflect the text
I think Ryan is spot on when he says communities are about groups:

Communities are different than social networks in that they are built primarily around groups of people, rather than individuals. Another way of saying it is that the group is the point in communities, whereas the individual is the point in social networks.

However, this is not evident in the image.  Indeed, the visualization seems to imply that while tied, communities and social networks are separate and distinct.  If anything, I would suggest that these are intricately connected and layered.  (this may be a limitation of a 2-d representation of something that is more complex)

At any rate, I think this is a great step at visualizing the complexity of the Social web we're weaving -- thanks, Ryan.