Pieces of me on community... : forums

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)

xClaims in beta blogs and forums

b2ix — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:18:00 GMT

You've heard Korby talk a lot about xClaims and how they help not only authors like myself determine the lenses through which people evaluate my content contributions, but also how xClaims help readers like you determine the credibility of folks like me.

Well, enough talk. Let's start putting all of this into action. With this latest refresh of Microsoft beta communities are tied in with blogs and forums. What do you do with them?

Make a claim
Vote on a claim
Evaluate someone's credibility
See your claims
See the claims of others

Making a claim

If you had a chance to create a new thread or a response, you may have noticed this little section below the post editor that says something about adding a new claim or an existing claim. It's really as simple as that. In the space provided, you can enter in a claim such as "this is technically accurate" and it will appear along with your message.

Voting on a claim
Why add a claim? Basically to have people vote on it. Beyond that, you are able to essentially get lots of people to agree (or disagree) with what you have to say. Why might you wish to open yourself up for that? Well, whether or not you apply this to every post you make is up to you but for certain topics, it may be beneficial for you to gain credibility in topics that matter to you. What do I mean by this? Well, let's say I'm an avid forums user, posting on any number of topics from XNA to SQL. While I may know my stuff in XNA (an example really -- lol) I only know basic queries in SQL. As such, I would want a tailored claim saying "I know my XNA" and people can then vote on it. For SQL, I would not apply a comparable claim, because I would not want to be known for my skills (or lack thereof) in that topic.

Evaluating someone's credibility
This is done through voting, seeing the votes of others, and seeing all of the claims of another person. We have some of this now, and more on the way. Specifically, after voting (and commenting if you want) you are able to see the vote tallies of other people. This becomes of value when you compare the content of multiple people that "seem" to be correct. Through a closer look at how others agreed (or not) with that claim, you can better determine how credible that person is with regards to that topic.

Credibility also comes into play when you look at all of the claims of other people. While right now this is limited to a person explicitly making it visible (such as my claims here), we will have the ability to easily discover the claims that others made visible to others.

See your claims
We touched upon this briefly. Basically, if you can see it, others can too. To see your claims, click on your display name (in the upper right corner of your screen) and you will be directed to the profile page. At the bottom of the page, there is a link that says, "View Claims." Clicking on this link will result in your claims being exposed. You can see how folks voted, in addition to any comments they may have left for you. If you share this link out with others, they can then see your claims and can then get a better sense of who you are, what you know, and the like….

See the claims of others
As discussed, this is still a work in progress. The only way to see the claims of others (in total) is if they exposed that link to you by clicking on their profile, viewing their claims, and sharing that link. We will work to make this easier in future versions of our beta communities.

So that in a nutshell is what you can do today with xClaims in blogs and forums. I hope you now understand how xClaims are incredible tools for you to gain recognition on your terms while also determining the credibility of online resources.

(xposted)

Mini-refresh for Microsoft Beta Communities

b2ix — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:14:00 GMT

Woohoo! We just finished up a mini refresh of the beta community offerings including blogs, forums, tagspace and now claimspace. Way to go everyone!

In terms of the specifics of what's new…

New features in the June 2007 refresh of Beta Blogs

xClaim integration
Preview a blog post before posting
Preview changes to how your blog looks
Updated user badges
Improved look and feel
Multiple page support

New features in the June 2007 refresh of Beta Forums

Locked thread
Sticky thread
xClaim integration
Updated user badges
Improved look and feel
Multiple page support

I pointed to a little teaser the other day, and now you get to play around with this some more. We'd love to get your feedback craves, raves, or other…what do you think?

Oh, and if you're wondering about all of the feedback given thus far regarding oh, the posting wizard in forums or the features desired in blogs, we hear you. We are still working off of the today/tomorrow list. I believe I've mentioned that we would be working from that while also working from the feedback from the community. It is indeed a fine balance with getting the new stuff out there while also addressing the concerns voiced by many so far. I appreciate your willingness to take the time to read this, while previewing our community offerings and posting your thoughts. Many thanks!

(xposted)

Looking ahead to a beta communities refresh

b2ix — Tue, 29 May 2007 19:16:00 GMT

A little over a month ago, we pulled the curtain away and invited you to take a look at the work beng done on the next version of Microsoft blogs and forums. Additionally, we showed off a revamped version of tagspace, our social bookmarking and tagging solution. We received a good deal of feedback over the last month, and we are beginning to make an measurable impact.

As we approach June, we are nearing an update to our beta community offerings. Not only that, but we will be unveiling a new piece to this community solution -- claimspace.

I'll let Korby and others talk more about the upcoming new pieces of tagspace and claimspace. As for me, I want to give a little preview of what to expect.

For both blogs and forums, there will be a new user interface that should make it easier to navigate, discover new features, etc. Additionally, we are adding xClaims into both blogs and forums. Getting to the specific solutions...

One of the new features to look for in the updated blogs is the ability to preview any CSS changes you wish to apply to the blog, before you actually save it. If you're anything like me and know little of CSS, this is a great thing to have.

From the forums side of things, one of the features in the June refresh is creation of "sticky threads." For those not familiar with the term, this refers to having one (or several) threads appear a the top of the thread list in the forums view such that it is easy to find later. As we get more and more messages posted in the beta forums, I expect this to be helpful for people visiting the site.

There are plenty of other features in the June refresh, but to learn what those are...you'll just have to wait for my announcement post ;-)

(xposted in beta)

Recent Numbers from Beta Blogs and Forums

b2ix — Tue, 29 May 2007 19:10:00 GMT

This is just a quickie post about some updated numbers (as of May 22, 2007):

56 beta blogs
66 beta blog posts
436 beta forum messages

Way to go team! Live blogs, live forums, live content! Yay :-)

I realize when compared to all the blogs and forum messages out there, this is but a small drop in the bucket. No matter, we have the beginnings of a great social software solution that ultimately helps people create, share and connect.

Oh, and if anyone is curious, I pulled some totals from existing blogs from members of the team. In the past month or so, members of the community team made a total of 23 blog posts about the beta that resulted in at least 73 comments. Way to go!

(xposted on my beta blog)

Forums Posting Wizard Feedback?

b2ix — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:39:00 GMT

Have you been to our forums yet? There's some great feedback so far. I've summarized and outlined the current thinking on the posting wizard in forums here. For simplicity, specific links are below. Let us know what you think!

step 1 -- title and message body

step 2 -- select a forum

step 3 -- add tags

step 4 -- preview

posting wizard length

(xposted on my beta blog)

Beta Blogs and Forums -- post launch notes 070420

b2ix — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 02:14:00 GMT

Just a quick little update on where we stand a few days following our announcement of the beta.

1) beta means different things to different people. this probably goes without saying, but suffice to say, the "beta" messaging has caused confusion

exhibit a
user response -- that's it? what about feature x, y, z? [paraphrased for simplicity]

exhibit b
people are posting questions on the beta forums in manners consistent with those looking for answers in our current communities

as a result, you will soon see gradual (and in some cases sudden) changes in the experience to clearly state the intent of us announcing the existence of these services. in a nutshell, we wanted to show our progress on these services so far, while also beginning to dialogue openly with everyone on the types of experiences they would like to see in the future. while we know where we'd like to go tomorrow, to what extent does that match what you are thinking?

2) there are some random quirks throughout the system. one of my favorites at the moment is that everything on the blog or the forum is sorted by the last active date. so in effect, me commenting on a blog post from five days ago would bump that to to the top. while this may make sense in a forum, it doesn't seem to be as appropriate for a blog.

the development team is working on resolving this and some other quirks, while adding some new features for the next refresh.

3) there is a lot of great discussion about features, bugs, and overall roadmap type things. this is great! this is exactly what we are trying to foster in this grand experiment with this feedback driven development experiment (formerly known as "beta")

i'll be posting these sorts of notes periodically so stay tuned!

(xposted with my beta blog)

What exactly do we mean by "beta"?

b2ix — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 02:43:00 GMT

In light of some of the responses I've been seeing on the forums, I wanted to clarify what exactly we mean by "beta." Admittedly, it is a loaded term.

Depending on your perspective, "beta" might refer to something that is pretty polished but needs some testing to identify basic bugs and such (this bar also seems to be rising by my own personal observation). Another way of looking at beta is something that is not done. How we are using "beta" speaks more to the latter definition -- something not done.

Perhaps though, it may be more appropriate to describe the "beta" forums and other community solutions as collaborative workspaces. That is, we're bringing folks in early with the intention of collaborating with you on what all should be in the various solutions.

Prior to this, we've taken exisiting feedback to help shape the baseline stuff you see today. There are some more baseline scenarios and features to address, but beyond that, what do *you* think should be in here?

Now we have this new collaborative workspace, based in part on what we've heard so far, we ask that you to check it out...play with it, poke at it, kick the tires and all. Most of all, we're interested in how would like to see this shaped in the future. In short, this is only the begininning of what we intend on being a collaborative workspace for shaping the next version of community solutions.

For a slightly more granular look at our features, take a look at today/tomorrow

Introducing beta Microsoft blogs and forums

b2ix — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 01:20:00 GMT

Last night, we announced the beta of several Microsoft community solutions. Thanks to everyone who's helped make this possible!

For information on the new blogging solution:
here's a text overview
here's what's ahead
here's a little tutorial on commenting to a blog post (wvx, soapbox)

As for forums...
a text overview
a screencast overview (wvx, soapbox)
what's ahead
intro to posting a question (wvx, soapbox)
intro to posting a reply (wvx, soapbox)

btw, you can get the rss for my beta pieces of me as well :-)

Milestones for forums

b2ix — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 19:49:00 GMT

Recently, Joe Morel in the Developer Division called out some wonderful stats for forums on MSDN -- we reached our 1,000,000th post :-) Forums on TechNet and other branded sites also continue to do well.

We also deployed a recent update to forums.microsoft.com (this includes all forums on MSDN, TechNet and other properties). Aside from regular fixes, perhaps one of the most exciting things is the introduction of a new "code snippet" (thanks, Joe and team!) tool that helps with inserting code with the proper formatting.

Support forums via video?

b2ix — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 22:42:00 GMT

Alex Barnett has a post pointing to Chris Prillo's video tech support experiment and wonders if this is the beginning of an online video-based technical support network. Given the amount of interest in UGC, videos, and all of the various home improvement / DIY shows, this is a natural fit. Indeed, there are variations on this theme already.

There's a recent site I ran across (via Ypulse and PopCandy) that is created for people to not only post their questions / problems, but then others post video responses as possible solutions. While this is not technical support forum, it does provide an interesting model for peer-to-peer assistance. Honestly I don't know too much about the details of how this works, but it would appear to provide plenty of opportunities for the community to decide upon the problem to be solved, in addition to the best video clip solution.

In addition to peer-to-peer assistance, I see the model put forth by howdoisaythis.com as a boon to those looking to perfect their skills at video editing and the like. With something like this, who needs reality tv shows like On The Lot?

RE: Democracy for Online Communities

b2ix — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:57:00 GMT

Over the past few months as the product manager for blogs and forums, I've had the pleasure of meeting some incredibly talented and passionate folks. Joe Morel, over in the Developer Division is one of them. He recently wrote a post that is near and dear to my heart -- forums -- and I can't help but chime in here.

Before I offer some thoughts to his post, it will be helpful to provide a little bit of background. Prior to joining the Communities Technologies Team, I was working with the MSN Games community. Specifically, I helped design and run a "hyper-affiliate" program for MSN Games. Think of it as part moderator, part welcoming committee, and part gaming expert. Prior to that, I worked with online communities for AT&T WorldNet and CareerPath.com (now CareerBuilder). I'm also quite active in the (offline) community as a volunteer with various civic and issue specific organizations. Needless to say, community is something of particular interest to me.

So it is in that light that I offer up some thoughts spurred by Joe's recent post.

Creating a new forum -- I like the concept, and frankly I would take this a step further. That is, rather than having these hard and fixed definitions of what is or is not a forum, what about having a forum with permeable sides? That is, instead of forcing content to fit into one pre-determined (either by moderators, site owners or the like) how about making sure that content currently found in forums can be surfaced through any number of contexts? It might be in the context of one forum, or it might be in the context of another. Regardless of where it is surfaced though, it exists as one solitary "object" behind the scenes. In short, the specific view of a forum can be defined by anyone.

Monitoring Answer Rates -- Sharing of data is a good thing in my book. My only caution here is that communities really live or die by those who "own" it. As much as I like the notion of empowering the community as a whole, I strongly believe that there is no substitute for active participation on the part of the owners of a particular community. Can we make their lives easier? Certainly...but that seems to be a slightly different conversation

Adding new moderators -- From prior experience, I caution against the friend of a friend (FOAF) recommendation. While more than likely the folks suggested are cool folks, there is something to be said about ensuring a broad and diverse community. Rather than a popularity contest of sorts, I'd rather see moderation type things better distributed. What if things like flagging a message for abuse or movement is opened up to all users?

Removing moderation rights -- Beyond moderation, as with any system there will be some who chose to abuse the system. Having the necessary checks and balances is important to have. What Joe proposes is interesting and I'll have to bear it more thought. Just to throw out for discussion...in what ways could this be abused? What's to prevent a small group of moderators from ganging up on others they deem unfit for whatever reason?

Banning a spamming user -- There are two sides to this from my perspective. One is that of people who would see said spam. The other is the system from a pure performance standpoint. I think having a global ignore messages from said user helps combat this from the user standpoint. Better filtering of languages and client customizable key words also help. Simply put, if you don't want to see spam (or other bad content) you shouldn't have to, period. From the system performance side of things, that's a bit different as ignoring it won't make it go away. Instead, a holistic system that helps remove the user, the content, etc needs to be in place. While there will be forums specific implementations, I anticipate there to be lots of shared learnings between different products that deal with spam.

Nominate a user for commendation -- awards can be a tricky thing that should not be taken lightly. I love the intent of public acknowledgement and recognition of community members, however it can also be disruptive to a community. There is a fine balance between a grassroots award, and a popularity contest. Related, perhaps it might be more appropriate to have individuals define their own characteristics where they wished to be recognized or acknowledged? In other words, while Joe might get recognized by some as being a great basketball player, that's not something I would ever want to be acknowledged on. Instead, I might want to be recognized as a "good party host" or something. Why should we all fit into the same box upon which to be evaluated / perceived?

Anyway, that's all for now. I'd be curious as to what others think about all of this.

Forums and Forum Views

b2ix — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:54:00 GMT

Currently on MSDN and TechNet sites, we have forums organized in a general hierarchy of site, groups, forums, and threads (which contain messages). From an organizational logic standpoint this makes a lot of sense. A particular message belongs to a thread, which belongs to a forum, which belongs to a group, which belongs to a site. The trouble is, what if the message that someone wants to post (or find for that matter) can exist in multiple spots?

Right now, we address this situation through moderation. Threads can be moved, merged and the like such that the content is exposed in the most logical spaces, as determined by the existing hierarchy. The downside of this is that this is not really scalable long term.

Enter, forum views. What exactly is a forum view? Well, essentially it is the lens through which an individual views content traditionally collected in a forum. Uhm, ok...but how exactly does that change the current state of things? It all boils down to tailoring the forum content to your needs. In some ways, this is similar to saying "Show me all forum content, but only things that apply to these particular topics." All of the content would then get displayed much like a current forum. The main difference is that the content there is not always "housed" in the same forum. With a structure like this, the notion of an off-topic post becomes much less of an issue as that post can get displayed in the "correct" context for those who want it. This also opens up a wide range of options regarding forum creation, as well as facilitating public and private views. I'll get more into the how of all of this in a little while, but for now I'd be interested in hearing some thoughts on this.