Book clubs and social objects

Recently I had an exchange with Rich Millington about community building.  He made a comment about the need to modernize traditional ways of community building -- book clubs, game nights, etc, and also wondered about a better, modern unifier.  Whether or not community gatherings need to moderinize  is a good discussion to have, but this got me thinking about why people gather and what ultimately comes from it. 

Personally, I think it's less important as to why people gather as it is that they gather in the first place.  In my own experiences, I find that the initial reasons for people connecting may wane but the relationships will remain.  Here are two such examples:

Pub quiz.  When I first moved to Seattle over 10 years ago, my friends and I started going to a pub that held weekly trivia competitions.  We did this religiously for years.  Team members would come and go, but a core group of us remained until the quiz master retired.  The team still gets together often to socialize, but it has been several years since we went to a trivia night together.

Team Works.  This is a program through a local nonprofit geared at team based volunteering.  The premise is that people gather in groups and volunteer in the community once a month.  After each volunteer session, people would typically gather for drinks and food at a local establishment.  I inherited a team from a long time team captain, and I brought on some of my friends to the team, who in turn brought their friends.  The team has now changed ownership multiple times, and I'm not as involved, but several team members still volunteer frequently.  We have been to each other's houses for informal gatherings, in addition to significant milestones in our lives.  Though it did not happen in my team, I know of people who got married as a result of volunteering together.

In both of these examples, the impetus for gathering -- pub quiz and Team Works -- sparked connection between people.  These individuals then chose to continue the relationship outside the initial bounds of the gathering. In many ways, I am reminded of "social objects" as described by Hugh Macleod:

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. 

Objects will come and go, and that's fine.  It's the relationships and connections that make it all worthwhile.

Funding transit yields happiness

Below is my submitted written testimony to the King County Council on sustaining funding for Metro Transit. For more information, please refer to the links below

• Background on Metro Transist Funding
• Submit written testimony online

Thank you for ensuring that public testimony can be submitted online. This is quite helpful for individuals like me who cannot always attend hearings due to work and child care responsibilities. With that, I want to voice my support for sustaining Metro funding through a council vote, rather than turning it to the voters at large.

Like the majority of Metro riders, I depend on it to get to work. While I can drive, I actively make a choice not to do so. Part of this is a financial concern. Another concern is that for the environment. Most of all, I ride Metro for my own happiness. Having driven to work in previous jobs, when I am stuck in traffic, I am stressed. This was not good for interpersonal relationships with family, friends, and even my neighbors. Now, my time on the bus enables me to put aside the stresses of the day, and of traffic. I can choose to engage with my other passengers, read a book, or just relax and look out the window. No matter what I do on the bus, this helps my piece of mind and makes me a better partner, father, neighbor, friend, and resident of our great region.

The proposed cuts to Metro would dramatically limit transportation options for me, and millions of other residents. If just a fraction of them take time on Metro to have a moment of happiness, not funding Metro will lead to an overall decline in the overall well being of hundreds of thousands in the region. I encourage you to represent the residents of King County with your vote to sustain Metro funding and lead us all to a place of greater happiness for us all.

a look back at Participate

Recently, I ran across a re-post by social business analyst, Jerimiah Owyang, about his experiences at a "dot-bomb" company in the 1990s. This post resonated for me on many levels because there are some that think we are in a similar bubble in the industry today, in addition to my own experiences as a dot com survivor. Below are my reflections on that era.

Fresh out of college, I entered the job market in 1999. Armed with my liberal arts degree from Carleton College, I wanted to go into journalism. After pounding the proverbial pavement I eventually landed a gig at MSNBC as a part-time producer. Because of the lack of hours, I also took up a job at a startup called Participate.com.

Participate.com basically built and ran online communities for businesses back in the day. Some of our clients included AT&T Worldnet, Ace Hardware Corp., Cisco Systems, SAP AG and Microsoft. My first role at Participate was that of a chat host for AT&T. Basically this meant I was there to answer questions (like a support desk) and make sure people weren't doing things they weren't supposed to do. In many ways, I thought my experience as a college dormitory resident assistant was the perfect training for the job. Anyway, I did this for a few months, and eventually started managing the community for another account (Careerpath, now CareerBuilder), and then MSN Games. But enough about the job, and let's explore the environement and culture at the time.

Being situated next to the El in a Chicago loft, the environment was interesting. There were rooms where you would not hold meetings for when the train passed, you couldn't hear a thing. Being a loft, the heating and cooling was always a challenge. There were days where it was so cold (hot air rises in a loft) that I would wear gloves to type. Also, the ceiling leaked. There's something to be said about affordable rent, I suppose. For the most part, the office was an open floor plan with desks grouped together in pods, and offices around the edges with no ceilings. As the company grew in size, we added folding tables like you see at picnics, and folks moved downstairs to the basement. We affectionately called these co-workers the "mole people." We eventually outgrew our space in Lincoln Park and moved to the western loop. For reasons beyond me, we also had our name on the building -- but that was what you did back then, I suppose.

As for the culture, I could not have asked for a better group of co-workers and friends. Everyone there was incredibly warm and passionate about life in their own way. Aside from working together, we drank, hung out, and generally had good times together. In many respects, my life at PDC set the bar (no pun intended) for what a work environment should be.

A few times stand out in my head for life at PDC. One was St. Patrick's Day. Being in Chicago, this was a big deal. I remember that we pretty much wrapped up the day after lunch and headed over to the local pub (conveniently, less than a block away.) We spent many an hour there, only to go on to a different bar when it got dark. Another time that sticks out in my mind was the first company holiday where we shut down the bar/restaurant/pool hall. Our VP at the time was passing our $50 bills to people leaving so they could take a cab. Bear in mind, we were next to the El, so taking a cab seemed rather silly. Who was I to argue with the VP though -- I took the money and then got on the El. When we moved downtown, the culture did indeed change, but the people were still great. When it was time for me to move on (literally, to Seattle), Participate offered to move me out to Seattle. It helped that I worked on the MSN Games account and would be in the Redmond, WA region. Still liking the work, how could I say no?

While the company lived on for several more years before being acquired by another company called Outstart, for all intents and purposes my life at a dot com in that era ended when I left for Seattle. Looking back, I am certainly one of the lucky ones. While I didn't become a paper millionaire overnight, I also didn't lose my job. Things were crazy at times, but I'm not sure how much of that was the industry as it was a certain time and place with the right people.

I cannot thank my colleagues from Participate enough. Not only was it a great place to work with wonderful people, it helped me find my passion for community -- online and offline

Does X mark the spot for community?

Richard Millington has a nice overview of what it takes to build an online community. He concisely states what I've discussed in my presentations on blogging and social media. That being said, I now wonder if there's not a better question for all of us to be answering. Specifically, are destination communities relevant? Is there some magical place where we all need to find? Or rather, will a more distributed community model take root?

While I tend to agree with what is said in finding your first community members (or even how to build a user community), I look at this more from the perspective of tapping into the community that already exists. Do we need to bring them back to one central place? A few years ago, I would have said yes in a heartbeat but I am no longer sure that is the case today.

Thinking about my own communities, I engage with others through a variety of different experiences. Email, Twitter, and Facebook are just some online examples. Other examples include phone calls, drinks at a local bar, coffee at a local Starbucks, or purposeful gatherings (for work and/or fun). To build a destination site for one of my communities, well...I'm not sure that would be relevant. Sure, it can be valuable in things like asynchronous communication, outreach, education and the like. Archival, nostalgia and reconnecting are some other scenarios that could also work. But to have one place for the community seems rather limiting, and in my opinion, misses out on how communities work.

Related, I wonder if this is why we are seeing broader community initiatives such as what Nike does with their running clubs, Nike+ website, and Niketown?

Maybe that's really it then...destination communities unto themselves have their place, but really do not speak to the full complexity and needs of communities as a whole. Thoughts?

photo credit -- kierkier

A community building manifesto worth noting

For a few weeks now, I've been intrigued by Richard Millington's FeverBee. While he often has lots of great gems, today he posted a great Online Community Building Manifesto.

In a nutshell, he states:

1) We need to become experts on communities.
2) We need to change how we plan online communities.
3) We need to rethink the role of technology.

I couldn't agree more. Much like much touted POST methodology by Forrester Research, tech should be the last thing on the minds of anyone who works with communities. Focusing on the hows and whys of a community is much more important than the tools that are used. In many ways that is why I find a great deal of my inspiration for community work from nonprofits, community organizers, political campaigns, and games. All of these areas reach out to and mobilize a broad range of people. While I am not as familiar with Jeremy Dean, The Situationist and Of Two Minds, at first glance I see similarities with the wide range of folks I follow like Alinsky, Csikszentmihalyi, and McKnight.

Related, I am currently reading two books that seem to illustrate the points laid out in the manifesto. Community: The Structure of Belonging is one of the more comprehensive books on community I've seen in a long time. And strangely enough, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual also talks about how community building is an effective strategy in well, counterinsurgency.

Thanks, Richard. I look forward to changing this dynamic with you and others in this space.

Community building in times of crisis

I've been meaning to post this for awhile -- with the disasters in Burma and China, it seems even more relevant now...

Through the initiative of some friends of mine from Seattle Works, I am now trained to be a shelter volunteer at the Red Cross for King and Kitsap Counties. What exactly is a shelter volunteer? Think of it as those folks who provide emergency, short term shelter for those displaced for any number of reasons including fires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, wind storms and any number of other disasters that target the Pacific Northwest.

Admittedly, I knew nothing about what I was getting into when I learned about this opportunity. Mostly, I thought that it would be a nice way to give back locally following so many different natural disasters. And given that shelter is one of the most basic of needs, this seemed to be a great place to start.

The training is made up of three different sections to go over how to care for the masses, the basics of sheltering, followed by hands on simulations. Through each of the sessions, we learned about what it actually takes to plan, prepare, run and manage an emergency shelter. While it was great to learn the specifics roles, tasks and skills required for a shelter, I did not expect to learn about community building in times of crisis.

For years, I always defined community as the result of intentional interactions between people with similar experiences, interests, etc over time. Time, in my definition, never really crossed my mind in terms of a short term, temporary situation which is the desired norm for emergency shelters. Yet, despite the relative brevity of the duration of a shelter, a great deal of work and planning goes in to designing opportunities for community to occur. Whether its through organized activities for children in the shelter, or getting a shared sense of ownership from the clients there by involving them in the operations...there is a concerted effort to make it as vibrant of a community as possible.

This, along with the paper plate notion of relationships has me thinking differently about community. I'm not really sure where it will lead me, but the notion of time -- especially for extended periods -- does not seem to be as important as I once thought it to be.

Business and community evolution

(crossposted on TechNet)
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

(cross posted on TechNet)

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 for technical professionals

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?

ABCD's of Social Media

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Yesterday I did a workshop on Social Media with some other folks at KCBS for a leadership conference. This presentation is part of a larger session where we worked with video, audio, non-moving visuals (text, images, etc) and media justice. Hope you enjoy it. Would love your feedback

Hope trumps cynicism @ YouTube?

My friend Dave (link fixed)pointed me towards a great article in The Nation.

Loving the speech myself, i've embedded it here for your viewing pleasure.

WA school funding and property tax cap?

The Washington State Legislature passed a 1% cap on property taxes that has been signed into law. I'm wondering what impact, if any, this may have on school funding in our area?

The reason I ask is that I saw a recent video pulled together by some friends of mine on California school funding.



While we are not California, I recently learned that they too have a 1% cap on property taxes. To help offset potential revenue shortfalls, they also have a minimum $ amount for schools as well.

Things that I do not know (but probably should)…

• How will the property tax cap it impact school funding, if at all?
• Are there safeguards in place to ensure a minimal level of public school funding like the one in California?
• What role if any will Simple Majority and an all mail in ballot have on the likelihood of school levies and the like passing?

(Un)intentional broadening of community?

Bill Johnston has a nice write up on how discussion groups can play a central role of one's overall community strategy.

Although I find many of his points quite salient, the most intriguing takeaway for me is in what is not said. Specifically the following words are not used:

• forum
• message board
• newsgroup

To me, this was immediately noticeable when going to tag this article. "Discussion groups," are often associated with forums, newsgroups or the like and I intended on tagging his post with "forums." Re-reading the article though, it became clear that Johnston did not include forums, etc in this article. I'm not sure if this was purposeful, but I appreciate the broadening of community beyond the tools themselves.

And speaking of broadening, were it not for the inclusion of one or two mentions of "online" community, the points made by Johnston can just as likely apply to community strategy "offline" in face to face discussion groups by way of a neighborhood council, or a local meetup. The principles that guide those, I would suggest, are quite applicable online as well.

Blogging as transformational

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?

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.

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.

When individual interests and the public good intersect

With a new fiscal year upon us, my role is shifting a bit. as a part of that, i've been taking a closer look at community planning, broadly speaking. during this process, i keep on coming back to a best practice of sorts that occurs when individual interests intersect with the public good.

while this can be applied to just about anyplace where individuals and the public intersect, i'd like to call out flickr in this regard. one of the killer features (in my opinion) on flickr is "interestingness." according to flickr, many actions go into determining whether or not a picture is "interesting." these actions include:

• where the click throughs are coming from
• who marks it as a favorite
• it's tags
• and much more

taking a closer look at those actions, they are all focused on the self. clicking through to a picture is to actually display the full image. favoriting is so you can find it again. tagging it helps you to find it among countless other photos. in short, the individual actions of people then go into surfacing "interesting" photos for everyone.

what is the public benefit? seeing what others on the site find most interesting. other benefits include inspiration for photographers -> better photographers, or the joy from looking at beautiful photos. many of these items are also very individual goals, but overall, the public benefits as a result of these actions.

how this relates back to overall community planning is that i think a rather nice framework, or at least pillars to keep in mind, can be derived from this example.

1 -- know your audience
2 -- what's in it for them? identify the actions and items of highest individual value
3 -- what's in it for everyone else? identify the actions and items of highest collective value
4 -- determine the points of intersection
5 -- focus efforts on making it as easy as possible for the individuals to perform those actions, find those items, etc

note -- this is in part derived from earlier readings on flow, game design and the like. nod to amy jo kim for calling this out initially

"Death and Life..." a promising start

After finishing Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class, I finally got around to starting The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. For years, I've been wanting to read this classic in urban planning, and community design. I can't believe it's taken me this long.

While it's very easy to read, regardless of one's knowledge of urban planning, I'm only about 100 pages into this book (compared to 200 pages in the latest Harry Potter book). Partly that's because every page or so in Jacobs' book has me thinking about the cities she mentions and how they function (or do not) today. I also find myself taking a closer look at the city in which I live now, in addition to all the communities (online) that I've been a part of over the years. In short, this book has really got my gears spinning when it comes to thinking about community -- and more importantly, designing for community.

Something as simple as looking closely at sidewalks, for example, has me wondering about the parallel in an online community. Where is the proverbial sidewalk in a community of developers? Is it found in a blog? On a forum? In the tags used by others? How do people associate with one another (at different levels of participation) in a way that is meaningful to them, whether they are strong ties, weak ties, or loose ties? How does a community manifested online help people acclimate to the "neighborhood" so to speak?

As I work my way through this, I'll continue to post some reflections on this great read.

A touch of love...

I love recap posts. For those of us who weren't able to attend the CommunityNext summit, I found recaps by Anastasia, Lee and Tara quite useful. I personally find it helpful to see how others view the same content -- that alone makes it that much more insightful and authentic.

Loosely related...it was great to see folks point out that the community space is not at all monolithic and there are multiple community camps. On the one hand, you have those who more or less set out to build a community, and if money happens, then it's a good thing. Others set out with money as the primary driver (either making it or saving it) by using a community. As similar as these may sound, they represent two very different philosophies. To make things more complicated, sometimes you may encounter situations where the two different camps are working on the same project!

Having worked in both camps from time to time, I would like to suggest that there is yet another piece to this matrix -- the people who build the tools used in community. Think of this as the Belgium of the community space. It doesn't fit into either camp perfectly, and instead prefers to remain neutral, and flexible so it can benefit the masses. I don't believe I belong to any one camp, but rather I tend to float between, adapting to the needs and the circumstances of the day. If pressed though, I'd say that I lean more towards the focus on the community first. What about you? What's your community philosophy?

Heh -- I just noticed that I started and ended this particular post with love -- explicitly in the first sentence, and implicitly in the last with philosophy. While I'm at it, here's another loving post from the Windows Live QnA Team

(crossposted)

slowing down, snowing down

Last night during the rush hour commute, the Puget Sound region was hit again by snow, ice and rain. Needless to say, it did not make for a fun commute. After spending about two hours waiting for a bus that never showed, I ended up hitching a ride with others trying to make it back to Seattle. Were it not for the generosity of Marcel, I don't know how I would have gotten home as the buses I could have taken either never showed or they were stuck in the ice.

While his kindness is not surprising, I still wonder why shared experiences, or shared difficulties seem to bring people closer together. A few years ago, I wrote upon this a bit...here's a little snippet from 2005:

Another example of how the unexpected can be a good thing would be what happens in Seattle when it snows. First, it rarely snows, and if it does, it rarely sticks around. So it is not that surprising that people in this city get all "weird" when it comes to snow. For days the top news story was the snow. This overall weirdness though, is somewhat unique though. At work last week when it snowed, the focus of everyone in the office was elsewhere. People worried about how to get home, some had to get their kids from school, others looked in awe at the big fluffy flakes falling from the sky. Regardless of how individuals reacted, there was this overall giddiness in the office. Likewise, it seemed that there was this sense of wonder for all experiencing the snow. Just a few years ago when it did snow heavily and stay, the city of Seattle literally shut down. Hills turned into ski slopes. Neighborhood restaurants never looked so packed. The place down the corner from me turned into a ski chalet, offering free hot chocolate to those braving the weather...

...this notion of surprise and shared experience seems key in terms of bringing people together. It seems to shake people momentarily from their day to day routine, and we are all then able to look at the world with a sense of wonder, possibility and play.

Following the big windstorms in Nov 2006, a local columnist also commented on this notion of community here

All of this makes me wonder, are we *too* distracted in this day and age of constant activity and connectedness to really be connected to one another as a community? Kathy Sierra wrote recently on how our flow seems to get disrupted with all the noise of mail, feeds and the like. Do we all just need a good old fashioned "snow day" once in awhile to better ground us so we truly are better connected to one another? As much fun as that might be, that's not a good longterm solution. I get the feeling that this magic formula of community through serendipity has to do more with this notion of flow and play in everyday life. Now, if I only knew how to bottle it ;-)

(cross posted On community...)