Pieces of me on community... : reputation

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!

Recognition / Reputation one more time

b2ix — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:56:00 GMT

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!

Design patterns for reputation? Or is that recognition?

b2ix — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:04:00 GMT

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?