Pieces of me on community... : transparency

Where's Brian redux

b2ix — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:23:00 GMT

A few months ago I posted about ways of finding me in between blog posts:

First off is my del.icio.us account. This is where I tag a lot of things that relate to community and tech. Apologies in advance for the random political things that pop in now and again.

Second is my list of shared items from Google Reader. These are a lot of the items that I find noteworthy from the feeds of most interest to me.

Third is my Amazon wish list. I don't really do a good job of removing the ones I've read so it's both things I will be reading and things I have read.

(Note -- friendfeed has all of my del.icio.us, Reader and Amazon stuff all in one place)

Last but not least, I blog in a variety of places:
here -- work
here -- community in general (work and personal)
here -- running (personal)
here -- games (personal, not updated much)
Internally at work

Just a quick update. I've since been using Twitter a lot more, and I realized I didn't list Facebook as an option. So there you have it. More than enough ways to find out what I'm up to with community stuff. See y'all soon.

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)

The Space Between -- Where's Brian?

b2ix — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:07:00 GMT

I am trying to get back on the blogging bandwagon but after repeated attempts of fits and starts, I've come to realize it's something that takes a lot of work from me. Don't get me wrong, I *will* keep blogging. I do want to be clear though that there are other ways in I intend on (hopefully) providing value to you and others interested in the intersection of community and technology.

First off is my del.icio.us account. This is where I tag a lot of things that relate to community and tech. Apologies in advance for the random political things that pop in now and again.

Second is my list of shared items from Google Reader. These are a lot of the items that I find noteworthy from the feeds of most interest to me.

Third is my Amazon wish list. I don't really do a good job of removing the ones I've read so it's both things I will be reading and things I have read.

(Note -- friendfeed has all of my del.icio.us, Reader and Amazon stuff all in one place)

Last but not least, I blog in a variety of places:
here -- work
here -- community in general (work and personal)
here -- running (personal)
here -- games (personal, not updated much)
Internally at work

Thanks to Commoncraft,* Josh and DMB for the inspiration in writing this.

*while I also have a Twitter account, I don't really use it so don't bother looking for me there. Should this change, I'll let folks know.

Blogging as transformational

b2ix — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:49:00 GMT

Gerald Kanapathy's recent post on successful blogging points towards Microsoft as one company that has been transformed by blogging. Specifically he talks about how blogs "opened up Microsoft" and goes on to say how "it's now amazingly open and responsive."

While great as that sounds, I'd have to agree with Yag in that the most interesting part is when Kanaphathy writes:

What did Microsoft do? I don't know if they had it before, but it takes certain organizational cultural values. It's not about process, or rules. In fact, it requires acceptance of uncertainty and ambiguity, tolerance of risk, openness to criticism, and a degree of confidence. These are not things that can be proceduralized, but instead come from how the organization is, uh, organized, and simply the underlying values.

To me, this is key. At the end of the day, blogs are a means by which people communicate. It is a means, not an end. So for all those wanting to start a blog because everyone else is, ultimately it comes down to something more intangible. How open and willing is your group or company to change? To uncertainty? To risk? To criticism? To engage with people in an open an ongoing conversation?

<aside>

At this point, all the marketing types and measurment gurus are probably screaming as this underlying value cannot be adequately captured by a simple measurement such as web views nor time online. There are some intriguing indexes in the works to better capture this space, and there are other ways of measuring the impact however...what is ultimately settled on, if there is such a thing, remains to be seen.

</aside>

While this may come across to some as staying away from blogging if the underlying values are not there, it's not meant to be. I just wanted to call this out by illustrating that blogs are not an end to itself. It's part of a much larger picture, and ultimately it's success (or failure) depends upon so much more than what we can traditionally measure at this time. Should a company, organization or person for that matter get into blogging, I hope they do so with their eyes open to the whole process.

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)

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)