Pieces of me on community... : community

Five things I love about Microsoft

b2ix — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:03:00 GMT

Giving -- As someone who does a lot in the community, I really appreciate the fact that Microsoft spends a lot of money each year to support those organizations where I volunteer. Whether it's matching my time with money, or matching dollar for dollar, Microsoft's commitment to the community is inspiring. Expand this out to some 90,000 employees and the amount that Microsoft gives to the community is staggering.

Learning -- Pretty much everyone you meet at Microsoft is interested in learning about something. Perhaps this is why they have so many incredible speakers come through. Whether it's authors like Malcolm Gladwell, global innovators like Muhammad Yunus, and former President Bill Clinton, there's always someone fascinating that comes to Microsoft to share their thoughts.

Global perspective -- With offices world wide, and software and services that reach well beyond the geographic footprint of Microsoft, the need to work and play well on a global level is always front and center in planning. Having this global perspective is very beneficial in ensuring the right products, services and messaging is delivered. I personally don't know of many places that really take this to heart.

Diversity -- From my perspective, the diversity at Microsoft is comparable to that which you'd find in New York City. Microsoft works with people from all different backgrounds, experiences, opinions, and the like. Not your typical perspective of a Microsoftie, now is it? One new blog that profiles many different Microsoft perspectives is Microspotting

People -- the company would not be where it is today were it not for the passion and dedication of so many individuals. From contract employees, vendors, interns, partners, and of course the full time employees, Microsoft draws an incredible range of smart, talented, and incredible individuals.

It is with that though, I must bid farewell to a company I dedicated my last eight years to (six as a vendor with MSN Games, and two as a full time employee with the teams responsible for MSDN, TechNet and Expression). It's time for me to move on and pursue new opportunities. To all the people in games, community, and elsewhere at Microsoft who I worked with over the last several years, you have my thanks and admiration!

Microsoft Answers beta

b2ix — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:44:00 GMT

I want to congratulate all of those who worked on getting a beta Microsoft Answers up and running. It's great to see the nice integration of social applications like Forums and Social Bookmarks in a very person centric view. What exactly is Microsoft Answers?

A rich, interactive community experience moderated by dedicated support engineers.
One place for people to easily find Microsoft Vista content from Microsoft and others in the community
A series of experiences meant to welcome, help, and engage people

Here are some other folks talking about this.

Community advisory boards help shape our future

b2ix — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:24:00 GMT

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

Emails sent out to identify prospective participants
Private forum created
Background information for forum posted
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
SkyDrive public share created for possible collateral (ultimately not used due to time)
Welcome message posted to forum
First question posted to forums
Wait a little bit to see if people respond naturally
Emails to specific individuals to spur participation in forums
Direct responses to participants as they posted replies
My replies consisted of any of the following:
Thanking people for participation
Welcoming first time participants
Follow up questions
Second question posted to forum
[repeat 7 - 11]
Third question posted to forum
[repeat 7 - 11]
Create conference call agenda via PowerPoint
Distribute agenda and call in information (via email)
Hold conference call
Take notes
Post notes/key takeaways on forum
Ask others for their key takeaways
Document process
Blog about it :-)
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.

Recognition and Reputation: The Role of Trust

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: discussion reputation)

Web 2.0 Expo New York 2008 highlights

b2ix — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:57:00 GMT

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!

Social Bookmarks v1 released

b2ix — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:11:00 GMT

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 :-)

More than bookmarks are coming to MSDN and TechNet...

b2ix — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:26:00 GMT

John recently wrote about the broader vision we've been working towards here for technical professionals. Rather than rehashing the whole thing, I encourage you to see what John has to say, and to stay tuned for these updates. With my passion around the intersection of community and technology, I'm quite excited about this coming to fruition on sites like TechNet and MSDN.

Sara Ford publishes a book, changes lives

b2ix — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:19:00 GMT

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!

Is love more powerful than the web?

b2ix — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:10:00 GMT

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.

Ray Ozzie on community and Live Mesh

b2ix — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:03:00 GMT

Being a community guy of sorts, I am always quite interested when folks like Ray Ozzie talk about community. Check out Ray Ozzie's memo on our software + services strategy (via the ReadWriteWeb), in addition to announcements regarding Live Mesh. I still need to take a close look at Live Mesh, but it looks quite promising. More links below.

•   Windows Live Developer Blog: Amit Mital Introduces Live Mesh
•   Channel 9 Interview with Ray Ozzie
•   Screenshots: Live Mesh
•   Live Mesh Web site

Business and community evolution

b2ix — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:52:00 GMT

Thanks to Fili for calling out Chris' post discussing Oracle's "Social CRM." This has been on my mind a lot lately -- rationalizing the role of community in the business world.

In many ways, I've been trying to balance this very thing from all my time working with communities in a business environment. While I still think that these are not mutually exclusive, I am coming to realize that we all need to be crisp about what we mean when we say community due to the buzz nature of the term.

Working with communities (as an end to itself) seems to be quite different than working towards a given business goal that involves community. While the latter may sound somewhat opportunistic, is it? Is it different than the "double bottom line" or social enterprises we see sprouting up? Personally, I don't think it's very different at all. Instead, I think the challenge for all of us in these spaces is to to figure out how to best adapt to tackle the big problems and really change the world.

Online Community Roundtable Notes

b2ix — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:40:00 GMT

A few days ago, I attended the Online Community Roundtable where we had some robust discussion about community strategies. Thanks to Bob for stepping up and hosting this session with Forum One. Thanks also to Nancy, Teresa and Bill for posting their notes.

I'll just add a few things that stood out for me:

Nancy White -- when describing some of her work internationally, she mentioned it would take about two years for behaviors to change.

[this reminds me of a recent post by danah boyd where she discusses the changing nature of how actions by youth are manifested rather than the behaviors/motivations of youth changing. No matter what strategies we take with our communities, we all need to be in it for the long haul.]

Frank Jerden -- when talking about the integration of the online TED conference profile with offline interactions, the question of whether or not it matters that event communities are disposable. Sean O'Driscoll brought up a great question on how one would measure the impact of these communities.

[personally, I'm not sure it matters if the online community manifestations are disposable as long as the participants end up deepening those connections through other means.]

Chrystie Hill -- with WebJunction working with communities of librarians. I found it interesting that her problem space is essentially the same as mine -- how do you ensure that folks coming to your experiences find the resources they need quickly to address whatever problem initiated the inquiry in the first place?

As for the key success factors regarding community, the slide/image below is what was discussed. I appreciate any feedback you have on this.

Note -- this is MS scoped, but I think you could find/replace MS with whatever you wanted.

Note -- since the roundtable, this has undergone some more refinement to better incorporate the different community types. More specifically, I believe that a key success factor is the need for a shared understanding of the type of community so all parties involved are ultimately successful at what they are trying to do.

community types revisited...

b2ix — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:57:00 GMT

Josh Bernoff over at Forrester just posted something that relates to community types. There, he gets at the question of why companies want to participate in communities. Unfortunately, I don't think that list is very people focused. Communities are great, but no matter how crisp a company's motivation is, if it's not tapped into the motivations of other people, it's not going to fly imo. To be fair, in other presentations/posts, Forrester does talk about this point of pairing corporate goals and the goals of other people via their POST method. I'm curious if Josh (or others) sees the groundswell objectives as different types of communities or something else.

Community types for technology professionals?

b2ix — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:43:00 GMT

With social media exploding the last several years, it's easy to think that all this emphasis on community is equal from one experience to the next. Wanting to be precise in what we're talking about, I think it will be helpful to describe the communities we work with on a day to day basis.

For the technical professionals that come to experiences like MSDN and TechNet the four types of communities seem to be most pertinent:

support based communities
communities of practice
feedback/development
enthusiast

Support based communities are probably best characterized by the need for an answer now. This is manifested on our forums today. Most technical forums seem to fall into this category.

Communities of practice tend to be those types of communities that draw people in around a shared goal -- learning more about a particular topic for example. In many ways, groups such as Ineta and Culminis appear to fall into this category. Another example, ~~non-tech~~ (edit -- non-Microsoft) would be the online facilitation Yahoo! group.

Feedback/development based communities are those where people interact for the sake of bettering a product or technology while getting early previews as to what's next. Connect seems to be a prime example of this. Dell's IdeaStorm is a (edit -- another) prime example of this.

Enthusiast communities are those where people tend to interact with others to not only connect with those that share their enthusiasm, but also to share their passion around a particular product or technology. Channel 9 (in addition to Channel 8 and On10) do a nice job of this. I'm not an expert on enthusiast or fan-based communities, but Nancy Baym and Henry Jenkins have both written a lot about this.

Of course, there are many more types of communities. I only listed four different ones as they seem to be most pertinent to the work I do. To clarify, in working on a communities team, I am not responsible for all the sites/experiences listed above. Rather, those are just examples to better illustrate what I mean by community types. My role now focuses more narrowly on planning for community from a platform and processes perspective. I am of the notion that the platform and processes needed will vary based on the types of community being discussed.

So that's where my head is at right now. What do you think? Are there other types of communities pertinent to technical professionals in your opinion?

"Ownership" of community?

b2ix — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:18:00 GMT

That was a question I got at TechEd Developers 2007. While I am technically on point for planning community different aspects (along with others) on MSDN and TechNet, I know that I do not "own" it. There are others, for example, focused on community from an audience specific (developers, IT professionals, etc), in addition others who are also working with community in some way, shape or form. To own it would be claiming to own all of the water in the world or something. With so many different aspects to what makes up a community, no one can really be in charge of it. The best I can do is to listen broadly, collaborate with others, and work to surpass the needs of the entire community as it pertains to MSDN and TechNet. Sounds like an interesting challenge, does it not? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this...

Some other related readings…

Bill Johnston on "Who owns community"

The International Online Community Management Association

$425 B personified

b2ix — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:05:00 GMT

There was a recent report out the other week that talked about the value of the Microsoft ecosystem totaling $425 billion.

Just looking at the number, it didn't really register for me (after a certain point, large numbers lose their personal nature for me.) However, being at my first TechEd Developers conference earlier this month, that number is now personified by all of the students, partners, businesses, product teams, MVPs and more here in Barcelona. It really is amazing to see this many people who are part of the ecosystem -- not only just see, but to interact with them on their day to day experiences with MSDN. Thanks to all who dropped by the MSDN booth to say hi and share your questions and thoughts with us:-)