Originally published @ OnCollabNet as Strategic Reuse Process

Community managers have a tough job. They deal with lots of different stakeholders trying to find that elusive “middle ground”. They incessantly cheer on community activities and push adoption of collaboration best practices; but when it comes to validating their position through tangible and quantifiable metrics it can sometimes seem daunting. Is the best measure user participation? How about community size? Each of these seem like great things, and they are, but typically organizations don’t have a lot of tolerance for soft measures that don’t directly impact the “bottom-line”.

Recently I have been working to identify ways in which organizational performance gains can be tied to community activities. Since my current position involves helping large organizations increase performance from their development teams, I started first by looking at something that may seem far removed from community, knowledge reuse. (more…)

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“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is there any more familiar quotation related to innovation?  I doubt it.  However, “build a better mousetrap” was actually a misquotation. What Emerson really said was…

“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

So there you have it.  The original quotation wasn’t about innovation at all.  It was about quality.

The thing that strikes me most about this quote is the last bit about “though it be in the woods”.  I think the implication here is clear.  You may not be a marketing genius or have the best location but if you build quality products that people need and want and you can get people sharing their experiences with your product, you’ve got yourself a winner. (more…)

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Ouch! I let one of my domain names expire on Tuesday and BAM someone pounced on it. Not normally a big deal unless it’s worth something, this one was. It wasn’t that it was valuable monetarily, however it was the primary domain I used for my Wordpress MU site. I suddenly found myself with a half working website, not good. Took me an hour or so to piece everything back together so I thought I’d share it.

1. Stop lighttpd
2. I had to change my DNS records at my provider and update with a new domain to take over for the lost one .
3. Modified /var/www/wp-config.php variable DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE with the new domain
4. Modified /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and replaced the old $HTTP["host"] entry
5. Unfortunately WP sticks the domain name of your primary site EVERYWHERE in the database which was a real bummer.  After I had found it in more than a few places I decided I’d better dump the database, replace using vi and then import the database back.
6. mysqldump -u username -p wp_databasename > databasename.sql
7. I then used vi to do a global replace of the old domain with the new
8. I then dropped the old database and recreated it with the same name.
9. Importing the database is easy with mysql -u username -p wp_databasename < databasename.sql
10. Restart lighttpd

I think that’s it.  It seems to be working again and hopefully this will help someone out of a jam in the future.

Word of caution:  I’d do a backup of everything before I starting and I also can’t promise that this will work if some WP plugin is doing anything strange with the domain name.  Good Luck.

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Originally published at OnCollabNet

Many a project has gone down in flames because they failed to take the time to really think through a communication plan that educated their stakeholders of the organizational value of their project.  Communication is one of the most important factors to the success of your community. Without communicating your project or program’s benefits and successes, users and stakeholders alike won’t be aware of new offerings, program progress, or the goals and direction of your project.

“The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them.”

–Sam Walton

The first step in any Communication Plan is identifying your stakeholders.  This is a key step that is often overlooked.  Many projects and programs focus only on keeping users informed about community news, however its important to look outside your active community members and find the stakeholders that are most important to your continued success.  This may include management, partners, or even other projects and programs only tangentially related to yours.  Putting together this list comes first and will help you not only identify key players but also will help you discover the correct communication channel to reach them.

(more…)

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I recently stumbled across a great post called Communities Manifesto by Stan Garfield that I highly recommend.  In his post Mr. Garfield lays out 10 principals that define community and also has suggestions for helping them grow and mature.

What communities are not …

Two of his principals in particular caught my attention because I’m wrestling with how to explain the basics of community to a company that draws a distinction between where they are now and where they want to go, so these two really jumped out at me.

1. Communities are not teams
2. Communities are not websites

These two principles nicely articulate what a community is not and sometimes that’s more helpful and descriptive than trying to state exactly what they are.  Communities are NOT some nebulous team to manage or a website to maintain, communities are people.

(more…)

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