Pieces of me on community... : today/tomorrow

A closer look at recognition

b2ix — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:40:00 GMT

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

Thoughts?

strange currencies (or, community measurements re-imagined)

b2ix — Fri, 04 May 2007 01:21:00 GMT

"You know with love come strange currencies"
R.E.M -- Strange Currencies
(since thinking about this post, I've had this song stuck in my head :S)

In going through the responses following the announcement of our feedback driven development process, I've been documenting the suggestions, bugs and the like to not only help out the test team, but also to help us determine what all we need to be doing. Along the way, I've also been gathering some raw stats about our various sites/services.

1,879 tagged items
342 messages posted in forums
53 new blogs created

While gathering these stats though, I realized that this may appear to run counter to what I posted just the other day in response to Sean O'Driscoll's notion of thin contributors. Indeed, in some ways it is contradictory in that the features around reporting in the new services are still being baked. At the same time though, we have the foundation in place to readily surface key currencies in our new ecosystem. Some draft manifestations of this include:

Key content -- items (blogs, forums, blog posts, forum posts, kb articles, etc) being tagged. What do folks find interesting?

Weighting of key content -- frequency of a specific item (blogs, forums, blog posts, forum posts, kb articles, etc) being tagged. What do people find most interesting?

Influentials -- identifying the individuals tagging those items (blogs, forums, blog posts, forum posts, kb articles, etc). Additional identification of those individuals validating answers, questions, or bugs. Who is playing a big role in our ecosystem?

Message/meme tracking -- identifying links to a particular item. How far does a particular message spread?

Relative credibility of influentials -- does the history of an influential's actions make sense? How do others perceive this individual?

Answer validation -- how many other agree that an answer really addresses the problem at hand?

Question / bug validation -- how many others encountered a particular question or bug as stated?

Notice how discussion above does not mention anything about visitors or page views? While those data points still have their place, to more accurately measure the impact of community activity, we are building a series of solutions and services to capture that information.

I realize that there isn't too much precedent for this sort of tracking. Indeed, a recent study of community professionals by Forum One Communications (publishers of the Online Community Report), 62% of respondents said they did not collect content tagging metrics. Given that the online community space has changed rapidly in just the last couple of years, I suppose this is understandable. With tagging and other social services taking root though, it's about time that our reporting and stats caught up to all of the changes.

(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