Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what forms the foundation for communities?  What matters most?  Which things are the building blocks for all other activities that go on?  I’ve identified what I believe to be the four most important building blocks for community.  Tell me if you agree or not.

1.  Leadership and Vision

I recently wrote a post about leadership and its significance to open source projects.  Leadership may be the single most important factor in your community’s success simply due to the fact that people want to belong and believe in something.  In essence people want to follow an inspiring message.  Some want to lead, but most want to be led towards a vision of the future that they believe in.  Well functioning communities lead their members towards an objective that solves real problems and is well (more…)

No tags Hide

I recently saw survey results from a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll that stated only 15 percent of Americans believe Twitter to be an important new tool for communication and I believe it.  Not because it’s true but because Twitter can be hard to understand and get the hang of at first.

I distinctly remember my first experience with Twitter when I noticed someone casually mentioning they were “putting lipstick on at a redlight”.  My first thought was “this is totally worthless”.  My how times have changed.  Not only has the growth of Twitter been off the charts (1382% to be exact), but I’ve actually started using Twitter on a regular basis and find it extremely helpful and useful in my job. (more…)

No tags Hide

There seems to be a misconception about what’s required to build a vibrant open source community and it’s not “community management”. Community management focuses on providing infrastructure and facilitating communication for a community. This includes setting up events, maintaining TO-DO lists, keeping forums under control, making announcements, etc. And that’s all well and good, in fact it’s vital. However, although this role is important it will likely not lead to any significant growth in your community. Communities need Leadership in order to grow because leaders create a vision of the future that draws people to their communities and motivates them into action.

(more…)

No tags Hide

Does instant messaging (IM), email, and social media make us more productive?  Of course they do, right?  …  Well, the real answer is ‘no’ (what would be the point of this post otherwise?:).  As a Community Manager for two open-source projects I reach out and ‘connect’ with people as part of my job.   In doing so I use Twitter, mailing lists, IRC, and discussion forums almost constantly, but what about people who aren’t tasked with making connections and building community?  Is it good for them?  What about the secretary whose Facebook page is constantly updated throughout the day or the sales guy who updates his followers minute by minute?  Are they as productive as they should be or are they just awesome multi-taskers?

Let’s look at a simple fact …

The human mind does not process information in parallel (you may want to go back and read that again).  It just can’t be done.  The Myth of Multitasking by Dave Crenshaw.  In his book he uses a simple example that is very convincing.  Simply take a sheet of paper and draw a line across the page.   (more…)

No tags Hide

Anyone else want to run TweetDeck on openSUSE (or any Linux for that matter) but can’t because they don’t use GNOME or KDE?  When I first tried TweetDeck using XFCE everything looked okay but the interface would not respond to any button clicks.  After a quick trip to Google it appears that TweetDeck wants someplace to store your username/password information and it only knows how to use Gnome or KDEs keyring.  I got around this by launching Gnome services on startup.  This can be done by opening the menu Settings -> Sessions and Startup and choosing the Advanced Tab.  Under this tab I selected ‘Launch Gnome services on startup’.

I then wrote the little script below to extract the gnome-keyring process id and pass it to TweetDeck on startup using the (more…)

No tags Hide