My 2008 Conferences

If the list seems heavily weighted toward Forum One Communications, that because they tend to be local to me and, in the area of community, provide more bang for my conference dollar.

Oct 2007
Online Community Summit
Sonoma, CA
Okay, not 2008, but I lead a group discussion on "Community Growth Strategies".

March 20, 2008
Mobile Communities Unconference
Palo Alto, CA

April 14-15, 2008
Online Community Business Forum 2008
Santa Fe, NM
With Gail Williams, we led a group discussion on "Community Management Best Practices".

May 12-15, 2008
Community 2.0 Conference
Las Vegas, NV

May 27-28, 2008
NetSquared Conference (N2Y3)
San Jose, CA
I will be presenting/leading a session on "Measuring Impact in Online Communities - Lessons from Schwab Learning".

June 18, 2008
Online Community Unconference
Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA

Jul 30-Aug 2, 2008
Romance Writers of America 28th Annual National Conference
San Francisco, California
I will be leading a workshop on early modern surgery. Details TBD.

Oct 9-10, 2008
Online Community Summit
Sonoma, California
This is an invitation only event so my attendance is TBD.

Last Wednesday of every month
I'll be bouncing between two local meetings of community-minded people:
The San Francisco Online Community Report Meetup and
Online Community roundtable (links to facebook group).

Meanwhile, back on the ranch

A quick post to update what I have been up to.

Getting laid off - In Sept 2007, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation announces they will close their operating websites SchwabLearning.org and SparkTop.org. New homes for both sites are found and transition work begins. I learned important lessons about coordination, strategy, resources. Considering the parent community ultimately fragmented between the official host, GreatSchools.net, and at least 3 other community spaces, I can say I also learned difficult lessons about working within overly structured organizations and sudden losses of decision-making.

Reinventing myself as a consultant - I been keeping an eye out for jobs in online community and there are a lot of them out there. Unfortunately, most of them are for managing communities under the direction of a product manager or VP. These are too limiting given my experience in handling all aspects of communities including control over UI and feature design and mining the data for information directly. I've had a few people express interest in hiring me and I have been offering contracts for more foundational help rather than accept permanent work in a limited role.

I've had good luck so far and will be doing some work for a couple of non-profits and a health-oriented for-profit. None of it is long-term, but it involves helping the organization get the most out of a community strategy and plan for features, staff or skill sets they will need.

Attending conferences - To keep myself connected and relevant, I've been attending online community round tables, meet-ups and conferences. I'm even getting a chance to lead small group sessions at some. I'll turn that into a separate post of both past and upcoming 2008 conferences.

Enjoying myself - I got a pretty sweet layoff package and I've been taking advantage of that to sleep in, clean my house (I have half of my back office reclaimed as an actual office - go me!), spend more time with friends, and a road trip through Arizona and New Mexico (with an important stop in Bakersfield, CA, pictured right). I've been listening to The Thomas Jefferson Hour via downloads, twittering, walking and reading in preparation for a presentation on early modern surgery for a group of historical romance writers. Somewhere in there, is also losing weight (35 lbs since last Nov), roasting coffee and playing games on the computer and Nintendo DS.

Online Community Meetup in SF, May 23

Susan Tenby, the Online Community Manager for TechSoup.org has been reviving the Online Community Report Meetup. When I have gone it's been a nice mix of new and experienced folks talking about their online communities.

If you are in the San Francisco area and can make it, it's a nice way for a small group to meet and talk in a relaxing environment. It's a very welcoming group.

RSVP through the official link or just show up!

When:
Wednesday, May 23, 2007, 7:00 PM

Where:
Hotel Biron
45 Rose Street
San Francisco , CA 94102
415.703.0403
Map

My interview on the Online Community Report

Not that you would guess from recent posts, but I have spent some time starting and fostering communities through computers for some time. With "Online Community" being all the rage this year (three conferences to date and two more on my calendar before the year is out), I've been able to act like a grizzled Veteran of the Bubble.

Do I stand up to today's views of community? Judge for yourself as I answer questions for Forum One's Online Community Report:

OC Expert Interview: Scott Moore, Schwab Foundation

Unless you *want* to dig through odd posts about trips to Germany and, uhm, delicate medical conditions, you can skip right to the good stuff tagged as Community

Web 2.0 Expo -- midway

Okay, so the post a day thing went down the tubes. Right now, I am at the Web 2.0 Expo where the wifi is overloaded, especially when sessions are on. It seems there is no limit to the underestimating of traffic at these things.

Because I can't jump on, I can't check out digg spy at the moment. I also don't have a chance to check out TruthScape.com which is a site set up to help people from getting scammed in the popular free online game RuneScape. It also has some parental advice. However, that last one comes as a recommendation from a parent in the forum I support and not from Web 2.0 people.

I know this will sound overly negative, but I'm really tired of hearing misapplications of the "wisdom of crowds" (the Net Gain of this post-bubble bubble) which most often comes out as a confusion between crowds (people who may be aware of each other, but are not influencing each others actions) and communities (where people are influencing each other through trusted relationships). Crowds are *not* inherently communities.

So far the best session wasn't even on the schedule. Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency and HorsePigCow organized a community roundtable in one of the unused alcoves on the third floor. It was scheduled from 10am to 5pm and I missed the first half, but poked my head in and saw Gail Williams and John Coate who gave it a thumbs up and said they would return after lunch. There's a set of notes and soon to be audio and video (where you can witness just how big my mouth can be).

Growing up with Charles Addams

Not literally. But I'll get to that.

Last night, I woke up and couldn't fall asleep. I woke up because for the past week a muscle in my left jaw has been acting up. Any attempts to chew or otherwise close my jaw resulted in excruciating pain. It's not TMJ, but more likely just a stress knot in my Masseter muscle. It's getting better, though.

I couldn't fall asleep because I had a dozen ideas kicking around in my head again. Stuff ranging from ways to improve how we foster community at the parent's website I work on to coming to the conclusion that arguing about which is better for fostering community, blogs or message board is moot because the design of both has been rooted in one form of narcissism or another and neither are purposefully designed to foster actual conversations.

I typed all of these ideas up just to get them out of my head. Then I looked for something to read. I grabbed a biography my mother had given to me for Christmas, Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis.

As I said, I grew up with Charles Addams. Since before I was born, my father had a copy of Addams and Evil on the family bookshelf. I must have been in 2nd or 3rd grade when I first pulled it off the shelf and started flipping through the pages, reading, though not always understanding the captions.

It didn't matter though because some of my favorite cartoons were of the boy and the trouble he made: speeding a wind-up school bus across toy tracks just so the locomotive would hit, building a town in the bath tub and turning on the spigot, mixing chemicals in a Jr Scientist kit and turning into a Jr. Hyde and back before his mother arrived. Though my mother may have worried about my desire to find and hang stolen "danger: bridge out" signs on my bedroom wall, she used these moments to point out why that would be wrong.

It may have stopped me from doing it, but it didn't stop me from thinking it was still funny. These were the moments when I grew up --knowing the difference between right and wrong, but still being able to imagine the possibilities of wrong were funnier than the possibilities of right.

Today, I have only a small collection of his cartoons on my bookshelf. Whenever I read these, especially the macabre ones, I get a sense of nostalgia. They comfort me and I love to revel in his art and their twisted takes on the twisted world around us. It's Charles Addams' cartoons that warped my sense of humor -- and my sense of tragedy.

I can't see myself any other way.

I hate blogging and why I'm doing it anyway

I swore to myself many years a go that I would not ever write a post about the fact that I haven't been updating my blog.

"It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it." - G.K. Chesterton (1923)

Well, there we go. Chesterton was most likely talking about broadcast radio when he said this but it seems to apply nicely to myself at this moment. The fact that I am not the first to use this quote in reference to blogging is, to me, proof of the validity of the criticism.

For a long time, I've viewed creating personal spaces on the internet (since the days of Geocities) and now blogging with an unhealthy grain of salt. Part of this comes from a few paragraphs from Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably take on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

(1) an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;

(2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals.

(3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view; it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi is, moreover, right to say that looked at from the outside, she hasn't experienced anything. The mainspring that drives her to write is just that absence of vital content, that void.)

But by a backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from the outside.

[Later in the text]

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

I always come to the end of reading this and have the overwhelming sense that anything I might write afterwards simply contributes to the universal deafness and incomprehension that surrounds us today.

This is why I don't blog.

However, conventional wisdom claims that in order to connect via blogging, one must produce. If one cannot produce quality, then produce quantity.

Aside from my moral misgivings about excessive blogging, I suffer from a form of mental constipation where I will read something that will trigger an idea for writing a blog post, but I have a need to look deeper before I say anything publicly. What happens is hours of reading other people's commentary, often months after I have had the original urge and often better though through or written than what I might wish to say. Then comes a day or more of thinking about all of what I have read and forming some half-baked new tangents off of that. After that, the desire to regurgitate any of it and put form to it in a way that it is even remotely comprehensible to anyone outside my skull is gone.

In the mean time, pent-up ideas needing feedback, or ill-formed opinions needing correction lie festering only to explode through my synapses at the worst possible moments.

So, I will give conventional wisdom a try and commit to writing a post a day, regardless how trite, how ill-formed, until either I form a habit or I completely solidify my view against inane writing altogether.

Fantastic. I'm clearly off to a good start on the ill-formed part.