Posted by Ian Holsman
Sun, 22 Oct 2006 04:45:00 GMT
in the age today there was a interesting article about how soldiers are using the web (and in particular FireSupportBase ) to talk between themselves and discuss the goings on.
The reason why I mention this, is that some ‘well-meaning’ support staff thought they shouldn’t and blocked access to it. Only to have the head of the army general Leahy tear them a new one and get it unblocked.
This actually shows me a level of insight by the general, he needs to hear first hand what is going on at the ground level, and not have it filtered out by middle management.
When I worked at CNET, they had a similar thing called cnet-spam, a mailing list where anybody and anyone could mail about something. Some senior people were also lurking on the list, and sometimes took action because of it. A great thing for senior management I belive.. and I hope my new corporate has something similiar.
My only sadness is the outing of firesupportbase might render it useless, as journalists and other onlookers register to look for the juicy gossip…
Posted in General | Tags community, forums | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:53:00 GMT
I really fell sorry for some people sometimes.
take the Trolls.
From my experience.. some/most of them have a valid point to say, but have absolutely no clue on how to communicate it. so they start flame wars and start getting personal.
The common reaction is to ignore them on the list. (usually when a known troll enters a list a flurry of private emails go around saying “don’t feed the troll”.
But recently I have noticed a attack on trolls by google bombing and putting wikipedia entries up about them. The purported aim of this is to help the next community they interact with.
Personally I feel like it is more to ostracize them from any development community.
when dealing with Trolls .. please remember Google lasts forever, and a Troll might actually see the error in his ways (or get a girlfriend/mellow out) and contribute in the future.
so .. my mantra is
'starve the troll, but don't kill it'
Posted in General | Tags community, trolls | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:51:00 GMT
So I had an alterior motive when I created an area for people to talk about Sun Fire benchmarking and performance
It was to see how easy (or hard) it was to start a community from scratch.
My initial experiences over the last 4-5 days (and about 800 page views) has been interesting.
First of all my django forum isn’t ready yet (I’ve been busy porting it to the Magic-Removal branch I promise it isn’t dead), so I chose a popular PHP one (phpbb) to get the site up and running quickly to see what it was like to actually run one (so I can build one which matches those needs better)
So far my basic decision points have been:
- The Structure.. do you start it big with lots of different areas and try to prompt people into things they can discuss, or just have a single ‘chat’ area and see how things progress. I chose lots of small areas.
- Advertising .. Should I/Shouldn’t I. and how blatant should I make it. at the moment I’ve just put a little ad on the top right corner with google.. This was partly because the default template didn’t really lend itself to putting in ads easily. So far zero clicks, but I’m guessing that is because the ad it’s showing is for 2nd hand sun hardware.. too much of the word ‘Sun’ on the pages I’m guessing.
- Letting people know about it .. I’ve gone for a slightly spammy approach, posting comments on people’s blogs who have said they are benchmarking a T2000 to let them (and their readers) know the area exists. It hasn’t really worked… most of the refererals are from my own blog, and when I posted it to open solaris performance forum I’m guessing not many people actually read comments of blog entries.
- How do you make it inviting enough for people to post? .. This really is the critical one a community is only as good as the people who contribute to it. So .. do I overload the forum with my own views in the hopes that good natured people like Mads and Yusuf who know solaris 1000 times better than me answer them, or do I wait for a newbie to start the ball rolling (which one or two have)..
If you have visited SunFire Fanatics what did you think of it? did you think of posting then gave up? or just didn’t think you had anything interesting to say?
and for all you experienced community builders out there.. and words of wisdom?
Running something like (a trial by fire so to speak) is a great way to spot annoyances .. the good ol suck it and see does work.
Posted in General | Tags community, django, solaris | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 31 Oct 2005 14:34:00 GMT
Following on the this previous post, I got the following questions stuck in my mind.
How does one measure the ‘value’ of a community?
and more specifically the value of a community member (to the supplier of the service).
Now if we go to a M&A type approach the value of a community is based on the revenue generated by it (and the Discounted Cash Flow for the next couple of years).. basically more users = more clicks. This is very similiar to a subscription model where:
where n is the number of subscribers you have, and the value of each subscriber is simply
Now what this means to me is that every member is worth the same amount regardless of the size of the network. This formula would work wonderfully when you have a subscription model, a mailing list, or a basic news portal where you supply the news and the community is really passive and can’t participate (except for clicking the ads or buying your goods of course)
Now if you look at the power law approach, where it basically says that every new member you get increases the value of the network at a much higher rate. so you get a formula like:
and the value of each new subscriber is
so plugging in some numbers (k=2) the value of the 10th member would be ‘19’, and the 100th member would be 199. whichs makes the newer members MUCH more valuable than the older ones.
While this might be the case for networks and purely distributed communities, alot of that value ‘little v’ comes from the other members in the network, not the supplier itself. (and I’m caring about the supplier here)
I think a more appropiate value would be something like:
- v = ((n^k - (n-1)^k) / n^k
Where in our example above, the tenth member would be worth 0.19, and the 100th would be worth 0.0199.
This approach sounds a lot more natural to me and my experience with communities, but is it only the supplier? does a community member in general follow the same formula? I think they do. I think after a certain size the value of more community members adds a very small amount to everyone. similar to a pareto distribution similar to graph below:
If this is the case, what does it mean?
to me it means:
A supplier should not aim to create 1 large big thing. It should try to create lots of medium sized things.
When the supplier gets large enough HE gets to dictate the terms of membership, not the individual members.
When starting a community the members have the most power, and should take advantage of this to secure favorable terms (ie profit share) but once it grows to a certain size the supplier will tell you where to go.
Posted in Business Related | Tags community, economics | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 02 Aug 2005 18:49:00 GMT
I'm trying to find research done about community health, and how to monitor/measure it.
anyone got any pointers?
stuff like netscan.
Ideally a open source implementation of something like this (to save me doing it) would be ideal.
Tags community, monitoring | no trackbacks