Forum One Communications - Latest Items

Should Your Organization Use Scribd? - Influence

nospam@example.com (Jim Cashel) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:49:00 GMT

Many of our clients at Forum One produce large numbers of PDF documents (reports, studies, policy briefs) which then are placed in a "documents" section on their web sites. The challenge these organizations face is then making these documents as widely accessed as possible.

One way to increase attention to documents is to use Scribd, a third-party document sharing site (or in shorthand, "YouTube for documents"). We have had good luck at Forum One using Scribd for our clients.

For example, one of our clients produced sixty well-crafted, arcane reports on medical technologies. The reports were getting about 11,000 "views" per year on the client's site. We put them on Scribd, where they quickly received about 50,000 "views" per year. It is difficult to precisely compare web site traffic to Scribd traffic because the notion of "view" may be different (on Scribd it can mean a quick visit to the document's description page). Nonetheless, at relatively little cost, the documents clearly got a lot of new attention.

There are three ways in which Scribd increases "views" of your documents. First, users of Scribd can find your documents through the site's internal search or "related documents" links. Second, Scribd documents generally come up higher in search engine results than documents on your site. Finally, Scribd documents can be easily embedded in third party web sites through the Scribd viewer. Happily, all of these extra views should be complementary to ongoing traffic on your web site.

In addition to increasing traffic, Scribd offers another service of relevance to many organizations. Documents can now be sold via the recently launched "Scribd Store". The store charges a 20% commission, a lower figure than competitors.

For all of its benefits, Scribd does have one drawback: how do you pronounce "Scribd"? (Answer according to Scribd staff: short i.)

So in short, we have found Scribd to be a useful service for organizations seeking increased attention to their documents. Scribd's core services are free, work well, and are worth a try.

Future post: Twitter.

Jim Cashel is Chairman at Forum One. Feel free to write him at cashel@ForumOne.com .

Community and Social Media Salaries Remain Relatively Steady Despite Economic Downturn - Forum ...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:45:00 GMT

Community and Social Media Salaries Remain Relatively Steady Despite Economic Downturn - Forum ...

Forum One Networks — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Forum One Network’s second annual Online Community and Social Media Compensation Study delivers important data points to help set benchmarks and build standards for community and social media roles, responsibilities and compensation.

Director, Online Fundraising - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Replacing Form Buttons with Images - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Corey Lafferty) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:16:00 GMT

So you want to use CSS to style a form button to appear as an image, similar to the way you would with any anchor link (using background-image). While the process is very similar, there are a few odd behaviors that form buttons exhibit that anchor links do not (particularly when viewed in IE6) that require a little extra CSS tom-foolery to get around.

We start with a normal form button that, without any css, looks like what you see above, generated from this html.

<input id="stayConnected" type="submit"/>

And what we want to end up with is a nifty little square with an arrow in it, like you see in the above image.

Using the traditional background-image replacement technique would lead to the following CSS.

input#stayConnected {
background: url(images/button_submit.png) no-repeat 0 0;
display: block;
height: 25px;
text-indent: -9999px;
width: 28px;
}

That code forces the submit button to behave as a block, gives it the same dimensions as our arrow button image, applies the image as a background and forces the actual text of the button (submit query) off the screen. In most browsers, this leaves us with basically what we're looking for except that there's a strange border on the edges of the button left-over from the form button (see above). Adding the following line to clear the borders will take care of that, and leaves us with a nice looking button for our sign-up form.

border: 0;

The button looks good now, but in some browsers (Firefox included) it doesn't fully function as we'd like. When hovered over, the cursor does not change to the expected pointer for a link... so we need to add one more line to get things working properly in modern browsers.

cursor: pointer;

After that, hovering over the button behaves as shown in the picture above.

Are we done? Well, like many things in the world, everything looks ok with this technique until you view it in IE6. As you can see above, the majority of our CSS gets properly applied within IE6 except for the negative text-indent, which doesn't work for form buttons in IE6. What to do? Well, we can try shrinking the text infinitesimally and see if that works.

font-size: 0%;

Despite the fact that 0% should mean the font has no size at all, IE6 still renders it, albeit in a very very tiny fashion (shown above). If we replace the font-size declaration with one setting the line-height to zero, however, the text disappears completely and we have a nicely styled image form button that's cross-browser compatible.

line-height: 0;

Below is the complete style used to create the button. As far as I'm aware, it works in all major browsers.

input#stayConnected {
background: url(images/button_submit.png) no-repeat 0 0;
border: 0;
cursor: pointer;
display: block;
height: 25px;
line-height: 0;
text-indent: -9999px;
width: 28px;
}

Online Community & Social Media Staff: Satisfaction - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:08:26 GMT

In addition to studying compensation during our second annual Online Community & Social Media Compensation study (summary here), we also want to dig in to issues related the organizational environment that community and social media professionals work in. One key dimension is overall job satisfaction.

As part of the research, we asked the question: Please rate your overall job satisfaction?
Of the 370 respondents, most are "somewhat satisfied" with their jobs with an average satisfaction score of 4.1 and a median score of 4. The average satisfaction score was slightly less than last year’s score of 4.2. It is encouraging that while there is an economic downturn, the overall satisfaction with Online Community positions is well above average. This indicates the combination of salary, benefits, work environment and subject matter is working for most of the respondents. The economy can't be ignored as a major factor of influence on satisfaction scores, as a tough economic environment generally discourages folks from aggressively exploring new opportunities and tending to stay with existing positions.

The graphs below show data from the satisfaction questioned presented in a couple of ways: answers form our 2008 survey compared with 2009, and overall satisfaction compared between genders.

2008 Satisfaction vs. 2009

Satisfaction by Gender

As you can see from the graphs, average overall satisfaction was down slightly from 2008 to 2009. You can also see that women were less satisfied than their male counterparts.

A few write in answers from the report that add color to the graphs:

Unfortunately I feel that most companies are still unable to fully grasp the importance of a dedicated social media team. They do not see a direct correlation between social media and ROI, and therefore are hesitant to put as many resources (both people and money) into social media as is typically necessary. Granted, I was on the periphery of social media for the last three years while I was in graduate school; however since my graduation and re-immersion into social media, I haven't noticed much of a change. Most social media job postings are for intern positions.

I think, even still, a lot of organizations (executives and HR) don't understand what we do, and therefore tend to undervalue it. I was laid off from my previous job last year and although I found another job fairly quickly, compensation was a struggle. I ended up settling for less compensation than I wanted in order to get back in a job quickly.

Engagement with the online community and interacting with others in the field is the most rewarding part of my job.

Because community management is often rooted in customer support organizations, compensation tends to be determined relative to CSRs. In fact, more and more community managers play a critical role in shaping customer experience and ultimately brand, and their compensation needs to reflect that value in a way more commensurate with significant marketing roles.

Perhaps the only one other comment I would suggest is that the corporate world needs to understand that community building is a full time job and as such we need official job descriptions put together by HR that are aligned with the business needs as well as the personal career development opportunities from knowledge workers. Something we haven't even started to think about just yet!

Unless Online Community and Social Media is considered a valuable part of an organization and an intrical part of the overall customer touch processes, it won't get the resources and funds to grow. The value given directly correlates into the # of bodies dedicated to support it and the salaries that are paid.

On the one hand, community and social media professionals still seem very enthused about their jobs, and the emerging "social" industry. On the other hand, issues related to lack of standards on community and social roles, team structure, funding as well as difficulty showing financial ROI (in some cases) are clearly starting to cause fatigue.

What do you think? How satisfied are you in your community or social media role?

Policy 2.0: Can Online Collaboration Lead to Better Public Policy? - Influence

nospam@example.com (Brian Pagels) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:22:00 GMT

First came "Web 2.0" in which we (the people) got the power to publish, share, comment, friend, follow, tag, and organize online.

Then came "Gov 2.0" and the trumpets sounded for transparency of government data and innovation.

Now, Hope Street Group (a Forum One client) has opened up the policy making process with a new collaboration platform: Policy 2.0.

The concept is simple. The three steps are:

Recruit engaged citizens from outside of government -- most importantly the people directly impacted by the policy

Provide them with the tools to learn about, collaborate and refine real world policy recommendations

Give them a microphone and access to government leaders to advocate for and implement these recommendations

Hope Street Group pilot tested its Policy 2.0 model this past summer with a project to craft recommendations that improve teacher evaluation systems nationwide.

"Recommendations like this generally come from researchers and policymakers, administered top-down in states, districts, and eventually schools," according to Monique Nadeau, Executive Director of Hope Street Group. "But Hope Street Group recognizes that teacher and administrator input is critical in designing and implementing teacher evaluation systems, and this project really brought their voices to the table."

The pilot team comprised 22 K-12 educators, 6 private sector professionals, and 8 participants from the civil society sector across 17 states. They collaborated online on the Jive community platform, the recommendations were published in a report, and the results were presented at an October 26 event at the National Press Club.

Hope Street Group and team leaders from the pilot project then took their recommendations to Capitol Hill.

What's most exciting about this platform is that it puts the power to craft real policy solutions in the hands of the engaged citizen, whether that citizen is a teacher who wants to have input in the policy that impact his/her livelihood, or a community member motivated by a desire to improve a failing school district.

In the coming months, Hope Street Group and its Policy 2.0 community will be busy identifying targets and implementing its teacher evaluation recommendations in 10 or more districts, expanding its policy focus into health reform and looking to the public for the next great policy area to tackle.

LegiStalker.org: Real-Time Lawmaker Monitoring - Forum One Communications

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Community Manager – Hi-tech Channels - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

How-to selectively import data from a data file in MySQL 5 - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Dan Crowder) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:05:05 GMT

If you ever need to import a selected number of columns from a data file in MySQL then this how-to is for you!

Recently I had to import a data file (tab delimiter) containing geo-coding data for zip codes into a table that had less columns than the data file and the columns were not in the same order as my database table. Using MySQL's LOAD DATA INFILE 'path_to_file' syntax and @User_Variables I was easily able to get the data that I needed into the table.

Data file colums:
The data format is tab-delimited text in utf8 encoding, with the following fields :

country code : iso country code, 2 characters
postal code : varchar(10)
place name : varchar(180)
admin name1 : 1. order subdivision (state) varchar(100)
admin code1 : 1. order subdivision (state) varchar(20)
admin name2 : 2. order subdivision (county/province) varchar(100)
admin code2 : 2. order subdivision (county/province) varchar(20)
admin name3 : 3. order subdivision (community) varchar(100)
latitude : estimated latitude (wgs84)
longitude : estimated longitude (wgs84)
accuracy : accuracy of lat/lng from 1=estimated to 6=centroid

Database table columns:
zip
city
state
latitude
longitude
timezone
dst
country

When doing an import from a data file there are a few things that you need to take note of and adjust your import script and/or table definition accordingly.

How your columns/fields are terminated.

How your data (column values) are enclosed.

How your rows are terminated.

How large of a entry will your values be and does the column definition of your database table expect the maximum size. If not, your data will be truncated to the maximum allowed length.

Once your table structure has been adjusted to accommodate the data expected to be imported you are ready to write your script.

Rules on importing in MySQL 5:

The order of the columns are dictated by the data file, not the table.
You have to account for every column within the data file rows.

So the fields that I want to capture are mapped to their respective table columns:

datafile columns--------------table columns
country code-------------------country
postal code----------------------zip
place name----------------------city
admin name1-------------------
admin code1--------------------
admin name2-------------------
admin code2--------------------
admin name3-------------------
latitude---------------------------latitude
longitude-------------------------longitude
accuracy-------------------------

In order to produce a query statement that will adhere to the rules mentioned above we need use @User_Variables as fillers for the columns/fields that we are ignoring.

User variables are created by simply using the '@' sign in front of a variable name (ie, @user_variable). The naming convention of the user variable really doesnt matter when being used. But I will use @ignore just for readability sake.

Below is the new mapping with the addition of the user variable, @ignore, which again is being used as a simple filler to get to the columns/fields that we want to import.

datafile columns---------------table columns
country code-------------------country
postal code----------------------zip
place name----------------------city
admin name1-------------------@ignore
admin code1--------------------@ignore
admin name2-------------------@ignore
admin code2--------------------@ignore
admin name3-------------------@ignore
latitude---------------------------latitude
longitude-------------------------longitude
accuracy-------------------------(not need cause we do not need to get to any columns after this one)

With the completed mapping we can write our script as such.

LOAD DATA INFILE '/path_to_file/datafile.txt'
INTO TABLE zipcode
FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
(country,zip,city,@ignore,@ignore,@ignore,@ignore,@ignore,latitude,longitude);

Query Explained
LOAD DATA INFILE '/path_to_file/datafile.txt' ---------Points to the location of the data file.
INTO TABLE zipcode ----------------------------------------------Points the the table that we want to import into.
FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t' ---------------------------------Specifies how the fields are terminated. In our case, they are terminated by a tab, '\t'.
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' ----------------------------------Specifies how the lines are terminated. In our case, they are terminated by a new line break, '\n''
(country,zip,city,@ignore,@ignore,@ignore,
@ignore,@ignore,latitude,longitude); --------------------Specifies the table columns that we want to map the incoming data to. Again, the order is dictated by the data file.

For more information on importing data in MySQL 5 visit, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/load-data.html.

Social CRM Virtual Summit - November 11th, 2009 - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:56:29 GMT

We’re proud to be sponsors of Lithium’s online conference Social CRM on November 11th.

The Social CRM Virtual Summit is a five-hour online conference, which includes webcasts by industry leaders in an interactive exhibit hall, a resource center with extensive materials for download, and a virtual networking lounge to chat live with speakers and prospects. Bill Johnston will lead a session on Best Practices: Community, Strategy and Planning with Joe Cothrel of Lithium. Their session includes discussions on:

Defining and creating a community strategy by working with organizational and customer stakeholders to determine needs, goals and key influencers.
Determining what metrics are important to track, what is currently being measured against what many companies want to measure, and current key performance indicators, featuring research from the Online Community Research Network.
Defining the value of online communities through the key sources of value, including: cost reduction, lead generation, increased engagement, building customer loyalty.

5am to 10am PT / 8am to 1pm ET / 1pm to 6pm GMT, or
10am to 3pm PT / 1pm to 6pm ET / 6pm to 11pm GMT

Social CRM Virtual Summit Agenda

Webcasts by industry luminaries such as Mike Fauscette (IDC), Bill Johnston (Forum One), Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), and Ray Wang (Altimeter Group) in a virtual auditorium
Scheduled live chats with industry experts and practitioners from companies including Barnes and Noble, Lenovo, National Instruments, Redfin, Best Buy, Juniper Networks, and T-Mobile
An interactive exhibit hall with dynamic sponsor booths, including Genesys, ON24, Ant's Eye View, Forum One Communications, CRM Media, Cognizant, and Liveperson
A resource center with dozens of valuable white papers, podcasts, and presentations for download
A virtual networking lounge to meet other like-minded professionals through live chat
Keynote speeches from CRM thought leaders, Paul Greenberg (The 56 Group) and Brent Leary (CRM Essentials)

Go here to register for this free event and to see the complete agenda.

The Voter Information Project - Influence

nospam@example.com (Andrew Cohen) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:20:00 GMT

It's election day in the Commonwealth of Virginia -- the state in which most Forum One staff call home. Today we'll elect a governor, a lieutenant governor, attorney general, and 100 house delegates.

Thousands of people woke up this morning seeking answers to these three questions:

How do I found out if I'm registered to vote?

Where do I vote?

What's on the ballot?

Many will turn to the internet for the answer and will find themselves at this polling place form on the Virginia State Board of Elections voter information web site. The form is clunky. It assumes you know your exact "locality." ("Do I live in Fairfax City or Fairfax County?"). Worse, it is the only place to find this official information.

Official voter information should be easily available in myriad web sites, search engines, and mobile phone applications. It should be presented in simple, attractive user interfaces. Unfortunately, the information is stored in a variety of dissimilar, muddy, closed formats. Every state stores this information differently.

Fortunately, a new partnership of state election officials, foundations, and technology companies are developing a better system. The project is led by the Pew Center on the States and Google.

The initiative is called the Voter Information Project. Their goal is to standardize official voting information into a common, XML standard. This will enable states to share this data widely with civic groups, political parties, and the media. Web programmers, in turn, can develop better voter web sites and applications.

The Virginia Voter Information Tool is a example of how good these tools can be once voter data is standardized and shared. Check it out. And if you live in Virginia, vote today! Polls close at 7 p.m.

This video introduces the Voter Information Project in plain English:

Online Community & Social Media Compensation - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:25:32 GMT

Last year, Forum One recognized that one of the key issues community and social media professionals face is that we (as an industry) are suffering from a lack of solid benchmarks, including compensation of online community and social media professionals. In July of 2008, as part of our ongoing research efforts with the Online Community Research Network, we conducted the first comprehensive study and gained valuable insight about online community and social media professional's compensation, team structure, and current job satisfaction.

In July of 2009, we launched the second annual Online Community & Social Media Compensation study, and received approximately 370 qualified responses. Participants represent a comprehensive sampling of organizations involved in building online communities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, media & entertainment, retail and independent consultants. A sample of the 300+ organizations that participated include (with their permission):
Answers Corp., Autodesk, Avid, Best Buy, Cartoon Network (Turner), Consumer Reports, Electronic Arts, hi5, IBM, KaBOOM!, Nokia, Quest Software, Sage Software, Seesmic, Sony Online Entertainment, The Knot, and Yahoo!

This year's report was truly global in scope, and included respondents from the USA, UK and Canada as well as Australia, Argentina, Spain, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine.

Several key issues pertaining to online community and social media salaries surfaced during this report, including:
• The gap between the average male and female salaries widened, with male respondents averaging $86,644 (up from $85,423 in ’08) and Females averaging $75,624 (down from $77,319 in ’08).
• The majority of respondents reported a salary increase in 2009, but the percentage compared to last year was down, as was a significant increase in the number of respondents who took a salary decrease in 2009 compared to 2008.
• Average overall job satisfaction was down by a fraction, from 4.2 (out of 5) in 2008 to 4.1 (out of 5) in 2009.
• Several respondents mentioned feeling like they were being inadequately compensated because of lack of data available regarding community and social media salaries, as well as lack of understanding of community and social media ROI relative to their organization’s activities.

Demographics
Key demographic and background information about the respondents:
• The majority of the respondents are Female (52%) vs. Male (48%).
• The majority (77%) of respondents are from the USA.
• Most of the respondents have more than 5 years of experience, completed a Bachelors Degree, and work 41-50 hours per week.
• The majority of respondents work for a Profit Based Organization (85%) vs. Non-Profit (15%).

Industry

Years of Expereince

Work Environment

Location of Community Team
The majority of responses indicate their Community teams reside in the Marketing and Community departments. “No formal structure” and “Throughout the company” were also popular responses. The placement of the community team seems to be shifting to Marketing and Community departments. Last year 20% reported residing in the Marketing department and only 19% reported that they had their own Community department.

Hours Worked Per Week
Most of the respondents (45%) work 41-50 hours per week.

Percentage of Time Dedicated to Community & Social Media
Approximately three quarters of the respondents (73%) said that their job duties were not only comprised of working within the online community, and that a percentage of their time is dedicated to other areas within their organization.

Compensation
The average salary of the research participants, $81k, is the same as last year. The mean was $77.5k, which is $10k higher last year. As in 2008, there were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k). There were also peaks and dips throughout the salary spectrum for 2009, including peaks for the following salary ranges; $50-55k, $65-$70k, $90-$95k and $100-$105k.

Salary by Gender
On average, the female participants earned an annual salary of $75.5k, which was slightly lower than last year’s $77k. At $86.5K, the male participant’s average annual salary is one percent higher than last year. The overall average annual salary for all participants was the same as last year’s $81k.

Salary by Region: USA
Respondents in the southwest region of the USA reported the highest average / median salary. The average salary for the southwest region was $99k with a median of $102k, which is significantly higher than last year’s average salary of $85k.

The second highest average / median salaries in the USA are in the northwest region. These respondents have an average salary of $87k, which is slightly less than the average annual salary of 2008. Within the northwest region, California had a higher average annual salary ($92k) than reported last year ($89k).

Even though lowest average / median salary in the USA was the same this year as last, the southeast region did have the largest reported average annual decrease compared with last year. This year the southeast region had an average annual salary of $46k, whereas last year it was 72k.

There were general peaks on the high ends (more than 150k) and low ends ($0-$25k) for all regions, except for the Midwest region, which dipped at the low end and remained even at the high end.

Satisfaction
The average satisfaction score was slightly less than last year’s score of 4.2. It is encouraging that while there is an economic downturn, the overall satisfaction with Online Community positions is well above average. This indicates the combination of salary, benefits, work environment and subject matter is working for most of the respondents. Although female and male participants mostly rated as being satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs, the female participants are slightly more satisfied with their jobs than their male counterparts. The women had a higher percentage of rating in the somewhat satisfied category, whereas the men had a higher percentage rating for the somewhat dissatisfied category.

The Full Online Community & Social Media Compensation Report
The full 45 page report can be purchased here: http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/oncosomecosu.html
includes detailed information, analysis and charts on:
Participating organizations industry, size and history of community programs
Community Team Staff & Size
Education and experience of respondents
Compensation structures
Detailed benefits
Salaries
- Ranges
- Average by title
- Average by Gender, Age, Eduction
- Average by global location and USA Region
Salary Changes (Increase and Decrease)
Advice from many of the participants about factors that affect compensation, and the evolving roles and responsibilities of the online community team, the team's staff, and executives.

The tag for the Online Community & Social Media Compensation report is #occomp09.

Forum One's Experience with SlideShare - Influence

nospam@example.com (Jim Cashel) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:53:33 GMT

We recently described how we use social media at Forum One. Today we'll talk about the category leader for posting and sharing PowerPoint presentations, SlideShare.

Since we're a consulting firm, we (and many of our clients) produce a lot of PowerPoints. Some of them are not too bad. We've used SlideShare actively for the last three years posting our better efforts, as well as presentations from many of the events we host. The Forum One channel on SlideShare currently has 64 presentations.

The good news about SlideShare is that it is free, relatively easy to use (we'd give it a B+ for usability - some uploading is tricky), and seems to attract a lot of traffic. Our presentations have had about 90,000 views, with 5000 new views per month. This is more than they receive when posted on our own site. (A "view" means someone went at least to the landing page of the presentation, but didn't necessarily open it.) We assume that this attention is useful for propagating our firm's name and ideas.

The bad news is that we don't see SlideShare as a significant source of referral traffic to our web site. We're careful about including contact information in all of our presentations and on the presentation description pages, but despite our efforts we don't see much impact. About 30% of the traffic to our site is "direct" (that is, somebody already knows us and types in our URL), so it is possible that some of that is due to SlideShare.

Our overall conclusion is that for relatively little effort we can post presentations, refer to them in our daily correspondence which is useful, and (probably) benefit from their broader exposure on SlideShare.

Feel free to post your experience in comments below!

Next up: Scribd

USIP.org: Powerful, Elegant Content Management - Forum One Communications

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:45:00 GMT

First Place Winner:Apps for America 2 - Forum One Communications

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:30:00 GMT

Web site makeover or total overhaul? Lessons learned from a kitchen remodel. ...

nospam@example.com (Brian Verhoeven) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:38:51 GMT

Recently a friend asked me, “How do you know if your company’s web site needs a visual design refresh opposed to a full redesign?” Because we both spend a lot of time cooking, I talked to him about the decisions he made during his kitchen remodel process and how they may apply to his web site as well.

Why are you considering a remodel?
Believe it or not, determining if you need a web site redesign or face-lift is very similar to investing in a home improvement project. It all starts with a solid understanding of the aspects of your kitchen that don’t meet your needs and what type of budget you have for the project. Some reasons you may be considering a kitchen remodel:

Is your family expanding? Have you suddenly found yourself doing a lot more cooking? Did you compromise on the kitchen when you bought the house? Are you constantly misplacing your utensils, pots, bowls because you do not have enough storage? Do you suddenly have the budget for the kitchen of your dreams? Did one of your appliances die? Are you generally happy with your kitchen but feel it looks dated?

Similarly, when considering a web site redesign or refresh you are probably prompted by similar changes in your needs:
Are you suddenly producing more content? Is your current site a starter site? Do you or your users have a hard time finding information on your web site? Have you been recently provided additional funding for your web site? Does the site continue to support your goals but feels dated?

It's Time for a Change, Now What?

Once you've identified that there is an issue with your kitchen / web, you have options on how you plan address them:

reface your cabinets

full remodel

upgrade your appliances.

Cabinet Re-facing
You do not require a bigger kitchen. You find everything you need with ease. The cabinets just look out of date. You’re a good candidate for cabinet re-facing.

The same principles can be applied to your web site. If your goals are being met and you are happy with the general structure of the site (content organization and layout); you’re probably a good candidate for a refresh.

The Remodel
Do you have a structural problem that prevents you from finding your tools? Is your kitchen just too small and you need more room? Do want more appliances (bigger fridge, a wine cooler, etc). More room, more cabinets, better organization, new appliances all suggest that you are looking at a remodel if you have the budget.

Similarly, if your web site is making it hard for users to find information or you want to add large pieces of functionality that were not previously accounted for; it’s probably time for a redesign.

Upgrading Appliances
How I long for a nice Subzero stainless steel refrigerator with side-by-side doors. While I am dreaming, why don’t we add a Wolf or Viking oven and range to the wish list? Appliances are expensive! People usually only replace them when 1) the old ones break, 2) they are investing in a larger remodel.

On the Web; however, people add new appliances (widgets, tools, functionality) to their site all the time. This is usually where the trouble starts and before too long you have that Subzero refrigerator, two avocado 1970’s ovens opposite each other, a fantastic wine cooler and disposal held together by duct tape. Not to mention your previously organized recipe collection is now in four or five places—one of which is not even in your kitchen!

Why we Refreshed forumone.com in early 2009

Our last redesign of forumone.com was in 2006 and the site was built on a custom CMS (syntaxCMS). By 2009, the visual design felt very dated and we were missing a few key pieces of content on the homepage. Over the last few years we have been attending and hosting more events and we wanted to feature them on the homepage. We have also created a strong following on several social networking sites and wanted to provide links to those communities from our homepage to encourage more conversation with our core audiences.

The primary reasons that we went for a refresh over a redesign:

Goals / Objectives: The homepage no longer supported our expanding goals and objectives and we needed to address them in a timely manner.

Timing: We did not have design or development resources available to address a full redesign

Visual Design: The visual design felt dated and we wanted something that was more representative of the caliber of work we provide our clients.

If we just refreshed, then why are there rumors of a redesign?
It’s true . We are redesigning Forum One’s web site and we are excited to be able to share the new design with you soon. The existing technical platform, information architecture and visual design do not support all of our objectives for the new site.

Technical Platform: We used to (and sometimes still do) develop our sites on SyntaxCMS. Most of current client work is now developed on open-source platforms; most notably Drupal or Wordpress. We felt it was very important that our company web site demonstrate our abilities with these technologies.

Information Architecture: There are significant tweaks to page layout, interactive behaviors, and to some site sections that will help users more quickly access content related to their needs.

Visual Design: We really want the visual design of this site to showcase our capabilities in both coordinating a strong design and implementing that design through CSS, HTML and Javascript.

Stay tuned to our blogs to learn more about the upcoming redesign of forumone.com

Pods: An introspective on software development - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Matt Gibbs) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:42:26 GMT

Pods is a pet project that I've been working on for more than a year. It's purpose is to sit on top of WordPress and allow for users to create custom data structures, called content types. It's sort of like Drupal CCK, but for WordPress.

The biggest challenge for the Pods team isn't what most developers would expect. It's not the coding itself, the bug tracking, or the release testing. The toughest aspect for us is balancing coding and documentation. We're not proud of our documentation yet, but we're finally aware of how important it is for our project (or any project) to suceeed.

There are many great open source projects out there. A lot of great projects also fail. Why?

It's not necessarily because their code is obsolete, or because there are better ways of doing things than their project code allows. Most of the time, projects fail simply because people don't know how to use it. The software itself isn't intuitive enough, the documentation sucks, or both. Your potential users move on, and your software gets left behind.

The WordPress team didn't succeed only because the software itself is easy to use (although it didn't hurt). WordPress succeeded because when you can't figure something out, the well-written documentation and tutorials are there to guide you in the right direction. It's only after your users start reaching "Ah-ha!" moments that your community can really start to flourish.

In the spirit of documenting how Pods works, here's the first of (hopefully) many tutorial videos. Enjoy.

A Compass for Congress - Influence

nospam@example.com (Andrew Cohen) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:36:00 GMT

I want to tell you about a fantastic new (and developing) resource for congressional staff.

Back in September, Forum One was one of the sponsors of CongressCamp, an informal "barcamp" unconference here in Washington. For two days, attendees exchanged ideas on how social media and collaboration tools could increase citizen engagement with Capitol Hill.

As conversations came to a close, a session's focus turned toward creating something of lasting value. Hill communication folks are smart folks, but things are changing fast. Each Hill office typically has one person focused on social media. They depend on external advice and lack a single common resource for finding (and suggesting) the best tools and practices.

Even once the event ended, CongressCamp participants wished to help bridge the gap between citizen knowledge and congressional needs. They asked themselves, "How can we help Hill staff make their internet sites and services more useful for citizens?"

The result is the "Compass," a guide to online communications for Congressional offices.

Led by Wayne Moses Burke of the Open Forum Foundation, the Compass is just getting off the ground, and we could use your help. Hill staff are already using it and are anxious to receive feedback and expertise.

Wayne has created an open wiki that anyone can edit. Questions of interest to Congressional staff will be posted and answered. For example, we are currently authoring an article that answers the question: "What widgets are available to display social media content on a representative's website?"

I know we all have something to contribute. Get on over to the Compass and help improve Congress' ability connect with citizens!

Recap: UX Show and Tell at Forum One - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Brian Verhoeven) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:02:45 GMT

Last night, Forum One hosted a UX show and tell session with Chris Avore. Chris's idea was to bring together ux practitioners to share the documentation that we create and establish an open dialogue about the work that we do. Nine user experience designers gathered in Forum One's conference room for a little less than two hours and we discussed usability reports, wireframes, and creative briefs. In short, we participated in a UX show and tell.

Usability Reports
One of the participants brought a very detailed usability report and asked the group how we translate usability recommendations into designs and keep up with them during the design process. We had a lively discussion about the format of his report and many noted how they liked the separation of severe issues that needed to be addressed immediately and smaller issues that could be address later. Some participants mentioned that they use a much more visual style of report and showed examples of reports that included a screen shot of the page / functionality under scrutiny with call outs to usability participant's comments about the issue.

Many of us suggested that the recommendations from the usability report be brought into either a bug tracking system or a requirements documentation system. For further traceability, some people suggested that you number the recommendations in a way that they can be tracked within your requirements system.

Wireframes
Another participant shared a set of wireframes. The group was extremely impressed by the level of detailed included in these wireframes (I think there were over 100+ pages of detail!). The group had some discussion around wireframing tools (of course) and also how knowledge of javascript libraries can help you make sound design decisions.

Creative Briefs
We shared a creative brief for one of our recent projects and lead a discussion around how to best capture visual requirements for both client sign-off and to inform the visual design process. While most people said that our current report format served the goals that we have for it, some participants suggested new ways for us to collect the feedback that goes into the reports. More than a few people suggested that rather than sending out a questionnaire (as we sometimes do) we interview stakeholders with our design partner on the phone, thus allowing them to ask probing questions about visual design feedback. Chris also suggested that we may be able to learn something about our moodboard process by reading Kim Goodwin's Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services

Thanks again to all who attended. It was a great event!

Global Health Essay Contest -- Please Share - Influence

nospam@example.com (Suzanne Rainey) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:27:37 GMT

This opportunity may be of interest to Influence followers or your colleagues:

The CSIS Commission on Smart Global Health is seeking essay submissions that answer the following question in 500-800 words by midnight, November 20th 2009:

"What is the most important thing the U.S. can do to improve global health over the next 15 years?"

We are looking for fresh, innovative approaches to global health problems. The author of the winning essay will receive a $1,000 scholarship with a chance to be published in the Commission's final report. Read complete details on their website.

The CSIS Commission on Smart Global Health Policy focuses on practical solutions that maximize efficiency, produce measurable results, and engage the American public. This essay contest is one way we're expanding the conversation to include the ideas and opinions of people who are passionate about global health issues.

I hope you'll forward this opportunity along to students, friends and colleagues.

Watch Bill and Melinda Gates Live Online Tonight - Influence

nospam@example.com (Suzanne Rainey) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:14:24 GMT

Tonight, (Tuesday, October 27) at 7 PM (EST), Bill and Melinda Gates will give a multimedia presentation to challenge the current problem-based global health narrative through illustration of success stories. The presentation is brought to us through the ONE Campaign Team.

I just RSVP'd to watch and get a special reminder email when the video and chat go live on Tuesday night. I thought others would like to check it out too:

Sign up for a link and a reminder here.

The presentation will offer evidence that current U.S. investments in global health are working, and will demonstrate progress against global health challenges. Bill and Melinda will share their optimism that through sustained commitment to global health issues, the U.S. and its partners around the world have the potential to save and empower millions more lives.

Sounds very interesting, and I love the idea of tuning in to a live event with Bill and Melinda--so I thought I'd share.

How We Use Social Media at Forum One - Influence

nospam@example.com (Jim Cashel) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:20:00 GMT

At Forum One, we spend a lot of time thinking about social media: we run the Online Community Research Network, we lead many social media events every year, and we have provided consulting services to several hundred organizations. We have even published the Online Community Report newsletter for 13 years (yikes).

So when it comes to designing our company's own social media strategy, it should be simple, right? While it's true we have a big head start, social media are changing so quickly, we need to strategize and experiment just like everyone else.

Here is how we currently are approaching social media as a company.

Goals

Before we are overwhelmed by countless opportunities in social media, we need to be very clear-headed: why are we doing this stuff? In our case we have four specific goals for our social media efforts:

1) Enhance our marketing efforts for consulting services, events, and products we sell such as ProjectSpaces;
2) Strengthen our ties with existing clients and colleagues;
3) Learn about social media, so we are in better position to advise others;
4) Increase Forum One's overall visibility.

All of our social media efforts need to tie clearly to one or more of these goals.

Channels

We currently manage 14 digital media channels at Forum One:

Web sites (five)
Blogs (five)
Newsletters (two)
Twitter (six accounts)
Electronic press releases
LinkedIn page
Facebook page
Scribd
Slideshare
Flickr
YouTube
Delicious
Events sites (eventbrite, upcoming)
Paid channels (Google, Facebook)

We periodically review each channel to evaluate if efforts are tying to our corporate goals, and to analyze costs / benefits. At this point our efforts are prioritized into three categories:

Receive high effort: Web, Blogs, Twitter, Newsletters
Receive some effort / appear to be useful: Press releases, Slideshare, Delicious, Event sites
Receive low effort / watching: LinkedIn, Facebook, Scribd, Flickr, YouTube, Paid channels

Our corporate circumstances are different than many of our clients. We don't really use YouTube or Scribd internally, for example, but have had good luck with clients that produce lots of video or documents.

Metrics and Reporting

Social media offer great opportunities for gathering useful metrics. While it is hard to directly tie social media to outcomes (do our blogs really drive sales?), it is possible to watch outputs (posts, tweets, etc.) and actions (clicks, re-tweets, etc.). We have set up comprehensive social media reporting systems for a number of clients. We confess that internally we do something lighter weight than we typically advise others -- quarterly channel reviews to prioritize upcoming efforts, and quarterly performance tracking on a relatively small number of metrics which demonstrate reach.

In all of this it is necessary to experiment. At any one time we have a half dozen totally experimental new services underway (anyone else using Yammer, for example?). We also do what we can to learn from others in our own professional events and other events. Things are moving so quickly, other practitioners are really the only source of useful information. (The Online Community Research Network also provides this sort of information sharing.)

In the future, we'll be posting more detailed information about various channels, including those which seem to be performing best for us and our clients. We'd also love to hear any of your advice on this topic in the comments below.

Community Platform & Service Provider Research - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:38:56 GMT

The Online Community Platform and Services Satisfaction research report was published in March of this year as part of the ongoing efforts of the Online Community Research Network. The intention of the research project was to provide insight about customer attitudes towards online community platform and service vendors, particularly around satisfaction. Further, we wanted to explore the unmet needs in the online community platform and services market. The study had over 200 participants, and we gathered data on all major commercial and open source online community platforms, as well as feedback on custom built platforms. Key highlights from the research are covered in the slides below.

The full Online Communities: Platform and Services Satisfaction Report can be purchased here:
http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/oncoplandses.html

Online Community: Platform & Vendor Satisfaction

View more presentations from Bill Johnston.

Creating Usable Content: A Few Tips - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Matt Humphrey) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:01:12 GMT

This post is a follow-up to my previous post Writing for the Web: A Few Tips, where I focused on more conversational tactics for writing web content. In this post, I want to brief you on a few things you can do to make your web content more usable.

Shorten the Length of Lines
Keep your line length to a manageable minimum. Research has shown that the rate of reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width of about 12 words per line.^₁ As line length exceeds 12 words, the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. If the eye must scan great distances on the page, the reader is easily lost and must hunt for the beginning of the next line.

Great use of chunking, imagery, and clean fonts. (example from Pattern Tap)

Break it up!
Chunk your content into meaningful sections. Use section headers to reinforce the user’s understanding of the content. Doing so will provide them cues as to what they are reading. These also improve the ability of the user to scan the page in order to easily pick and choose what sections they may be interested in reading. Chances are your users are bouncing between your site, another site, a handful of social networks, and various other external influences. Providing them clear cues will help them quickly return to where they left off.

Use Images and Photographs...
...but use them wisely. Imagery is one of the most powerful tools in visual design. When choosing or creating images for a page, it's important to use graphics deliberately to support your message and communication goals.

Using images to demonstrate examples of specific ideas increases your site user’s understanding of the content. Thus, satisfaction is improved by helping the user feel that they grasp the ideas.

Imagery also can enhance page hierarchy and scanning by providing visual cues to guide the user throughout the page. Consider the use of a primary focus image with secondary supporting images. The secondary images should support the primary images by helping the eye scan through the page hierarchy. Doing so provides the user with a break from reading content heavy pages.

Use Familiar and Readable Fonts
To achieve the best possible reading speed, use fonts that are familiar and easily scanned. Save unique stylized fonts for headers and features. Use a clean font like Arial or Helvetica for larger amounts of text that requires more dedicated reading time.

These are just a few tips to ensure the best usability for the content on your site. Have any more? Share them in the comments!

-----

(1) Web Style Guide - Basic Design Principles for Creating Website
Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton

Internet Strategist - Seattle - Forum One Communications

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:15:00 GMT

Forum One Communications is seeking an Internet Strategist who is passionate about online communication tools and their potential to change the world.

The right person for the job will help leading organizations, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, PATH, the Center for Global Development, and USAID, effectively communicate and advocate on the web.

NASA, Mercy Corps, KaBOOM! to Speak at Forum One's Audience-Focused Seminar - Forum One ...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:00:00 GMT

UX Show & Tell Knowledge Sharing - Forum One Communications

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:45:00 GMT

Forum One is hosting the next "UX Show and Tell," a casual gathering of DC-based UX practitioners who discuss/critique each other's documentation and learn from each other's work.

Visual Design intended for CMS - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Jason Powell) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:40:00 GMT

Web designs for CMS can be a challenge at times, as the approach has to be taken in a different manner than it would be if the site were only static content. Many times we get excited about the most innovative and creative designs, however, these designs do not always accommodate the CMS framework and structure the developer is dealing with.
As you begin your approach to designing for a CMS, the designer must first take into account that this site is not static. We must consider that the content, navigation, and images will grow at an infinite amount and the design must accommodate any future modifications. Specific elements such as background images and columns cannot break if this happens the design ultimately fails.

Here are recognizable issues when designing for a CMS:

Any designs, layouts, or elements that are designed as if the site was going to print are bad way to begin. – Some examples are:

Elements that are meant to only accommodate a fix width or height. Fixed areas on a site, such as a fixed width or fixed height should be heavily scoped by the designer to make sure these elements never change, as a CMS is an application meant to load data and content. Usually, most elements and information change or are dynamically driven. The approach should be that the design take into consideration and is adaptable to content loading.

Gradients that go through an entire element whether vertical or horizontal should always consider expansion. Also, radial gradients should be utilized with extra caution, as this can be quite tricky or hard to achieve in an expanding elements. We love the gradient look as it adds an outstanding visual design, however the elements that use these must be heavily identified and defined.

Evaluate and scope the usage of shadows, gradients and transparencies. Moderate the use of these and evaluate the length of them as well. Think about content elements that grow. If these elements expand or contract, we must take note that the shadow, gradient, or transparency must do the same. We should consider if these effects have a place of cutoff; I.E. will the shadow end at some place? Does the gradient flow into a solid color at some point? These are areas that should be carefully thought threw.

Headers, navigation, and any copy or text that are images. – When designing for these elements you must always consider that these can change at anytime. If using graphics for any of these, you must recognize that it may be difficult or not possible to change these in the future.

Design for future needs and minimize efforts to have to create new styles in the future. – An example of this may be where as a header is created and a client needs a new one using that style, however the header was specific to the existing content. The header style didn’t consider wrapping or long text and distorts because of this. Create designs for most elements and even scope out and design for elements a client may wish to add in the future. By doing this, you help to keep a consistent look and feel and keep your visual design clean, even as future elements or modifications are added.

Text-wrapping elements – What happens if the header is too long for the background element? The design should always consider this as the client may wish to change this element text. Be cautious on how you use fixed widths and make sure that text can wrap in those elements accordingly.

As overview, just remember it is important as a designer to understand the CMS and how it works, and map out a fully thought-out design strategy and attack plan. The designer must think to create a stable design first, and innovative and creative second or else you may face a challenging situation in trying to fix what has been created. Solve tomorrow's problems with today's design!

Forum One to Host UX Show and Tell - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Brian Verhoeven) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:32:00 GMT

On Tuesday, October 27th from 6:30 to 8:00 Forum One will host a UX Show and Tell at our headquarters. We still have a few spots available. Please contact Chris Avore to RSVP.

What is UX Show and Tell

A UX Show and Tell is a small, informal gathering of UX practitioners to critique each others work and provide insight on how to better communicate ideas. It is all about being a better communicator and a better designer.

Chris describes the UX Show and Tell as..

a casual get-together that’s all about the work. Show shortcuts. Ask what to annotate in a wireframe. Practice writing scenarios and user stories, and identify one from the other. Share resumes and portfolios. Get feedback from practitioners instead of stakeholders.

Format
Each presenter has about 10 minutes to show his or her work and share dialogue and get feedback from the group.

The presenter will introduce the document to the group by:

explaining what document/deliverable you've brought to share and a background on the project/audience/etc
Explain whether you're demonstrating a unique way of communicating OR if you would like feedback on how to improve the documentation that you've brought

If you'd like feedback, you will be expected to ask targeted questions, particularly if you need feedback on the document itself.

Chris held the first UX Show and Tell in September. You can read more about the first UX Show and Tell session on Chris Arove's Blog. Chris is also taking the UX Show and Tell on the road to Interaction 10. He will be leading a UX show and tell session during lunch on Sunday. If you're attending be sure to bring some work samples to get in on the fun!

We hope that you will join us!

NPR’s API and Open Data (Public Media Camp DC 2009) - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Sophie Campagne) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:24:28 GMT

Today, I attended Public Media Camp in DC to hear/discuss with locals how Public Media + Social Media trends are shifting. Daniel Jacobson from NPR held a session on NPR’s API. With a goal of publishing NPR content through various channels, opening up the API and building NPR.org on top of it has resulted in NPR’s content showing up repackaged on iPhone apps, member station sites, etc.

The NPR API's target audiences include NPR itself, partners, member stations and the general public. NPR sees the API as a great opportunity to allow the public to cultivate and repackage NPR content in ways that the NPR team doesn't have resource time or expertise to build.

One example of a NPR mashup (content + comments) includes http://www.twitter.com/NPRbackstory, which uses Yahoo Pipes to display NPR stories into a twitter feed.

WBUR is able to pull in NPR stories wrapped in WBUR.org's visual identify. Requires no human publishing, but of course means they have no control over the content within the news story.

Geomapping’s up next. Here’s a test project Daniel’s been working on: http://danieljacobson.com/NewsMap using Yahoo Placemaker which scans text to guess location and ultimately show stories overlaid on a map.

NPR's API output formats include: NPRML feed, RSS, MediaRSS, Podcast, ATOM, JSON, HTML Widget, Javascript widget - learn more on npr.org/api

Want more? Here’s a collection of articles about the NPR API -> http://delicious.com/metacreek/nprapi

Personas in comic form - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Sophie Campagne) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:04:45 GMT

A fun interpretation of personas, illustrated by Brad Colbow.

Personas are fictitious characters created to encapsulate the needs of target users of a site or product.

Indi Young, the star of his story, originally hails from Adaptive Path and is well known for her work on mental models, an audience research method mapping audience tasks to site structure.

Enjoy!

Online Community Unconference East 2010 - Forum One Communications

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:45:00 GMT

The Online Community Unconference is an Open Space gathering of online community practitioners - managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors - to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities.

Vote for Our Sessions: 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference - Influence

nospam@example.com (Michaela Hackner) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:24:56 GMT

It's that time again. Folks are getting excited about next year's Nonprofit Technology Conference in Atlanta. Last year, Forum One brought you great panels in user experience, data visualization, digital storytelling, and who could forget: Iron Chef!

This year, we have nominated a number of great new sessions. But they won't get selected unless people score them highly. Voting ends this Friday, October 16, so time is short. Our list of proposed panels is below. We'd love to hear what you think, and of course, we'd appreciate your vote!

Voting is easy and doesn't require registration. You just click the stars to vote. It will take you just a few minutes.

Creating a Culture of Storytelling
We know that storytelling is the most powerful way to get your organization's message out there, heard and remembered. We know that compelling stories inspire action and change. But how do you get your organization to commit to storytelling?

In this session -- a continuation of last year's "Better Online Storytelling" panel -- we'll explore successful, specific techniques to get your organization started finding and telling its best stories. From stories to emails, blogs to social media, you can create a culture of storytelling. Level: Intermediate. Leads: Roger Burks and Michaela Hackner.

Vote for "Culture of Storytelling" now!

Storytelling Techniques in Practice

This session will be the culmination of a webinar series leading up to the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. During the session, participants from the webinar will share their experiences in getting buy-in from their organizations, collecting stories, packaging them and sharing them with the world.

These participants will read their stories to the group, share lessons learned and solicit feedback. We will also name the winner of the webinar series storytelling contest. Level: Beginner. Lead: Michaela Hackner and Roger Burks.

Vote for "Storytelling Techniques in Practice" now!

Do You Want Fries With That?: Adding Value to User Experience

Users' priorities aren't always our priorities. They come to our sites looking to "buy" one thing when we wish to "sell" them something else. How can we serve their needs while also engaging users with our missions? How can we create online products and services that will keep our constituents -- whether advocates, donors, or members -- coming to our site again and again? Level: Intermediate. Lead: Sophie Campagne.

Vote for "Do You Want Fries With That" now!

Big Things in Small Packages

Once again, your organization faces a short deadline and needs to come up with an application or campaign in record time. How can you do it? And more importantly, how can you do it well? We'll hear from several web managers who deployed a web site, internet application or interactive campaign in a few weeks from start to finish. Level: Intermediate. Lead: Michaela Hackner.

Vote for "Big Things In Small Packages" now!

Set Your Data Free: How to Let OTHERS use YOUR data to make an impact

Data is sexy again, and setting it free with open API's, feeds, and open standards is transforming the way other people can use your data to help you make progress on your mission. This session will look at nonprofits that have choosen to let set their data free on the web, how they did it, and how it's helping their mission. Level: Intermediate. Lead: Kurt Voelker.

Vote for "Set Your Data Free" now!

Online Community: Real World Lessons for Supporting Meaningful Constituent Engagement Online

To build or not to build (your own community features)? That is the question. When it comes to building engagement about your issue online, we all know that interaction and community matter. But how do you balance between building community on your site, and throughout the social web? What online community tactics work best? And most importantly, how have others tackled this problem and succeeded. Level: Intermediate. Lead: Kurt Voelker.

Vote for "Real World Lessons" now!

Report Back from the Online Community Summit 2009 - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:04:43 GMT

Forum One hosted the eighth annual Online Community Summit 2009 last week in Sonoma, and by all accounts (and feedback) it was one of the strongest. We convened 70 online community experts to discuss important and timely topics including: community strategy, employees as social media advocates, "ideas" platforms, the growing importance of mobile and "operationalizing" social media.

I've included links to a few key content sources below. You will find a rich set of observations in the Twitter stream, as well as video interviews from 3 of our session leads.

Tweet stream from the Online Community Summit 2009
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23ocs2009

Flickr stream:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ocs2009&w=all

Video Interviews:
Sharon Carothers of Legacy / BecomeAnEx.org

Jordan Williams of REI.com

Erica Kuhl of Salesforce.com

"Real Time Web" Summit - Thursday, October 15, Mountain View CA - Influence

nospam@example.com (Chris Wolz) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:15:03 GMT

We're pleased to be partnering with ReadWriteWeb on an exciting conference this week - "The Real Time Web Summit". If you will be in the SF Bay area you should really think about going!

The real-time web is creating new opportunities in business, media, communication and collaboration. We are bringing together industry leaders using the real-time web in social networks, financial services, media and nonprofit groups to discuss:

* the state of the art, science and business of the real-time web

* efforts to create standards and interoperability

* challenges in user experience, technology and monetization.

The event will be an unconference format - leveraging users' interests to drive the sessions, and ensuring plenty of time for interactions.

REGISTRATION
Click here, and enter discount code: forumone to save $50.

Forum One's Chief Community Officer Bill Johnston will be there and has also blogged about essential reading on the topic of the real-time web.

Software Test Lead-Bangalore - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:15:00 GMT

HealthMap's New 'Outbreaks Near Me' iPhone App - Influence

nospam@example.com (Suzanne Rainey) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:07:51 GMT

Our friends at HealthMap have created a very useful iPhone App for those in the global health community who need to track and/or report disease outbreaks--from swine flu to diseases affecting crops and animals. HealthMap brings together disparate data sources from all over the web to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This new app lets them take in data from yet another valuable source: those on the ground, closest to the disease outbreak.

The app automatically identifies where a user is, and then displays the latest news feeds and uploads from the immediate vicinity. I'm able to quickly scan recent outbreak news from the Northern Virginia area. It also provides a simple form for reporting an outbreak in the vicinity.

This is a very nice model for the international development community in general, and one can imagine how reporting of all sorts of information (financial? programmatic? environmental?) might start to happen on a more widespread basis through these kinds of extremely user-friendly mobile interfaces.

(For more about Health Map's orgin's, view this presentation by co-creator Clark Freifeld.)

Eclipse Works With Preexisting Code, But Not Well - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Sandy Smith) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:25:29 GMT

I recently upgraded Eclipse PDT to the most recent version, and I decided to figure out something that had been bugging me: why couldn't Eclipse use a project I'd already checked out via the command line to the same workspace?

A colleague suggested that I could indeed do it, and that I just needed to start a new project but check "Create project from existing source." This does work, but it has a couple of restrictions that explain why I was having so many problems and why it's kind of useless for me.

Projects from existing sources cannot be in your workspace. I have no idea why this restriction exists. I could understand why starting a project inside another project would be bad, but all Eclipse has to do is add a couple of extra files to a directory. Nonetheless, all the sites I'd set up in my workspace and had been using other text editors to edit were unusable. Coda, by contrast, will happily take over an existing project, no matter where it is or what is in it. Interestingly, you can set up a workspace inside another workspace, so I could get around this by creating another workspace that pointed to a subfolder of my current workspace that contained the source code I wanted to use.

If using subversion, Subclipse will not be able to work with your checked out copy if the versioned files are in a subdirectory of your project. This is also strange to me. In Drupal, for example, we only version the sites/all directory and use Drush to update the main application. In other projects, we have versioned code outside the public root and create the public root from a tarball we keep in the repository. Since these files have configurations that shouldn't be versioned, I want to be able to edit them in Eclipse while using Subclipse to control the versioned part. Sadly, this restriction means I can't do that.

So my workflow is still to create subdirectories, including a public root, in my workspace by hand, and then importing the project from Subversion with Eclipse's Import function. These seem like pointless restrictions to me. If anybody knows a workaround, I'd be grateful.

DataMasher - the IA perspective - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Courtney Clark) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:53:08 GMT

In early July, Forum One participated in the Apps for America 2 contest, organized by the Sunlight Foundation.

The Background
The goal of the contest was to show “that when government makes data available, it makes itself more accountable and creates more trust and opportunity in its actions.”

As we put together our Forum One team, we came up with our own set of goals for the website, eventually called DataMasher. DataMasher would:

Use government data from Data.gov

Create something with returning value

Let users interact with the data in ways that they couldn’t before

With a team of five people (two developers, one information architect/designer, one project manager, one advisor) and four weeks to create something, we hit the ground running!

Since data.gov is full of state-specific data, we decided to create a website that could include any type of data, as long as it was broken down by state. DataMasher allows users to combine any two data sets and display the results in a table and on a map.

What I Learned
With a limited amount of time, there are a couple of things I kept in mind while creating the information architecture and design:

Focus on a small set of solutions and goals. Do them well.
We knew that we would never get the site done in four weeks if we tried to add every bell and whistle. We had to move fast. I chose to focus on a small set of pages that we could build on (home page, detail page, list page).

Be flexible. Constantly brainstorm.
These two go together. I did tons of sketches, with different layout and functionality options, and presented those to the developers. We chose which solution to move forward with based on what required a low level of effort on the development site and still achieved a good user experience. No solution was perfect. We brainstormed and changed as needed to keep things moving. Below are some of my early sketches.

Maximize the easy stuff.
We built DataMasher on Drupal. Throughout the process we thought,

What does Drupal do well (or innately) without customization? Let’s do that!

For example, within Drupal it is easy to add commenting and rating systems. So, voila! Stars and commenting were added. I just had to figure out where to place them.

Keep it fresh.
We wanted users to see something new every time they came to the site. The easiest way to do this was to incorporate a running list of the newest items on the home page. In this case, those items are mashups.

Keep the design simple.
We didn’t have a lot of time to apply a design (or theme), so I keeping the visual layer simple was an important technical objective. I used standard web-safe fonts throughout, and not a lot of images. As you can see the buttons in the right column are simple blue backgrounds with different colored and sized text. If I had added rounded corners everywhere, we would have needed images for each corner.

Test. And then test again.
There were a couple of items that weren’t completely intuitive.
The name
We originally planned to name the website Indik8r (pronounced indicator). We chose this name because after a user combines sets of data, they get a map that shows how the states rank, and users can identify trends or indicators. After we shared the concept and site (in very early stages) with a couple of coworkers and friends, we heard from all of them that they didn’t understand what we meant by Indicator and why it was spelled wrong. Our solution was to rename and open up to forum for suggestions and DataMasher was born.

The explanation
We wanted users to do a couple of initial things on the site:

check out the data sets

check out the mashups

create a mashup

The original designs showed each action, but again, after running it by a few folks, they didn’t get it. They didn’t understand what a dataset or a mashup was, or how to create one. So, I went back to the drawing board and tried to address these issues.

I first attempted to add more visuals and examples to make it clearer. I started with a mashup. How do you represent a mashup? My idea was based on a Venn diagram, which shows two items and where they overlap.

Before:

After:

Second, I simplified the information even more, attempting to answer the user’s question of “So what?” The user needs to know how DataMasher works and why they should participate. What do they get? The result was the final infographic on the home page.

Before:

After:

Online Community Unconference East 2010 - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:45:00 GMT

Community Manager - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:15:00 GMT

The Real-time Web: A Short Reading List - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:24:00 GMT

A recent series of articles from ReadWriteWeb has spawned discussion here at Forum One of what impact the "real-time web" will have on online communities. Those conversations continue, but I wanted to share our short list of selected readings on the topic from the last 12 months.

Ken Fromm wrote the series of articles about the real-time web, and they can be found here:
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 1,
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 2,
The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 3

In the articles, he describes the collection of activities that describe the emerging Real-Time Web:

As with other recent waves of innovation (Web 2.0 and cloud computing, for example) there is no single definition of what the term "real-time Web" means. As a result, it is used as a catch-all phrase for a number of developments underway. At this point, we can identify that the real-time Web...:
1. is a new form of communication,
2. creates a new body of content,
3. is real time,
4. is public and has an explicit social graph associated with it,
5. carries an implicit model of federation.

Other recommended reading:

Google vs. The Real-Time Web
O'Reilly: The Real-Time Web

Real-Time Web Summit
Forum One is working with ReadWriteWeb to promote the Real-Time Web Summit in Mountain View on October 15th. I'll be there - will you? You can register here. Price is $195 until October 8th.

Thanks, Come Again - Web Executive Seminar - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Courtney Clark) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:38:16 GMT

The November Web Executive Seminar is quickly approaching! This year we're focusing on how organizations keep users coming back to their websites. Join us on November 5th for "Thanks, Come Again: Audience-Centric User Experience"

Over the years I've worked on several project where we focus on establishing a strong foundation for a website with intuitive navigation, clear layout, and beautiful visual design, but the work doesn't end there. Websites, like cars or houses, require continual maintenance and improvement. But how do you know what your audience wants? How do you create a compelling user experience that keeps your audience engaged? How do you get more users to return to your site? What does it look like?

During this event, speakers will tackle these tough questions and share lessons learned. You'll learn what other organizations are doing to keep their audiences coming back for more.

Register now!

CodeWorks 09 DC - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Sandy Smith) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:17:13 GMT

Thought I'd give a few overall impressions from CodeWorks DC while they're fresh in my mind.

The community

What really impressed me was just how great the PHP community is. There were some Big Names there, but everybody was really approachable and happy to share what they knew and ready to listen to others. They were really friendly, and I had some great conversations in the hall and after hours, both with other attendees and with speakers and staff. Get a sense of this over at Dawn Casey's blog.

The tutorials

I had expected the tutorials to be somewhat interesting, but otherwise expected the meat to be on the second day with the more traditional talks.

Wrong.

The code review I attended in the morning was very educational, and Keith Casey was quite sporting about letting his project be dissected by ze Germans, as they came to be known. Best line: "Well, think of how many people are in this room, multiply it by our billing rate, and see how much it cost us just to figure out what the hell this piece of code does." But the Advanced OO Design talk was really valuable. The lower crowd size coupled with the length of the presentation made it very easy to ask substantive questions and get serious responses. It helped me get over a number of mental blocks I'd been having with the implementation of MVC in web apps and better ways to do Dependency Injection.

None of this takes away from the second day's talks. I'll highlight some of them in coming blog posts. But the tutorials were an unexpected gem.

Microsoft

Microsoft appears to be making a really big effort to reach out to the PHP community, and I appreciate it. They were a big sponsor of the event, including an open bar the second night. I also appreciate what they've been doing to improve PHP's performance on IIS. I hope they follow this effort up by taking steps to make themselves really interoperable with other systems, so it doesn't feel like going Microsoft is an all-or-nothing choice.

The Organizers

Even though it was small enough to handle informally, CodeWorks felt very well-run. Despite a truly grueling schedule (two teams leapfrogging across the country, one day on, one day off), everybody seemed in good spirits and there was comparatively little confusion. When a mixup or a technical glitch occurred, they were able to adapt quickly, even ready to get a speaker to throw in an extra talk.

If they decide to to this again, I highly recommend this conference. If they're in town again, I'm going to lobby to get the whole Forum One team there--it was really that good.

PublicMediaCamp - Forum One Communications

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Forum One is co-sponsoring PublicMediaCamp, a barcamp-styled unconference focused on strengthening the relationship between public broadcasters and their communities through new forms of collaboration.

The Open Government Directive - Make a Plan for Your Data - Influence

nospam@example.com (Joe Pringle) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:44:06 GMT

The Obama administration is close to unveiling a new Open Government Directive to push agencies to become more transparent, accountable, and collaborative. The directive builds upon the memorandum on transparency and open government released by the administration in January, and was announced by US CTO Aneesh Chopra during the Gov 2.0 Summit. Since the announcement, there has been a lot of discussion focused on the expected component of the directive that pushes federal agencies to make data available in machine readable formats. This is a huge opportunity that will help make it even easier for third parties to create valuable applications to aggregate, organize, and visualize government data. Our experience building DataMasher as part of the Apps for America II contest was extremely positive, but one of the biggest challenges for us was transforming the data on Data.gov into a useable format. See our recent post with some more thoughts on this. Pushing federal agencies to do more of the legwork up front will help third parties focus on creating value with the data rather than just burning hours to transorm it.

However, some are concerned about how far agencies will have to go to transform legacy data, especially when it is in inaccessible formats such as PDF. This concern is understandable, but it shouldn't delay efforts on the part of federal agencies to take action. In planning their response to the directive, we'd recommend that agencies go through a series of steps:

Do an inventory - valuable data is often dispersed throughout the organization, sometimes "owned" by people with little incentive to share it (or are just unaware of the need).

Identify and prioritize - evaluate the utility of different data sets to determine which has the highest potential value to the public and assess the difficulty to transform it or make it available in an accessible format. There might be different approaches for opening up different data, including APIs, XML feeds, RDF format, or in some cases CSV.

Develop a plan - based on the priorities, develop an ongoing plan for making the data available, starting with the easiest and most valuable data.

Just do it - whether submitting existing data to Data.gov, planning an API, or conducting pilot projects to transform and make data available. Start with the low hanging fruit immediately to show progress, and work in parallel to make other data available.

Highlight progress and build upon small successes. This will take time and effort, organizations should promote their progress so far and communicate to the public the steps they are taking.

Ideally the organizations' plans to make data available in machine readable formats should be part of a larger plan (that goes beyond data) for being more transparent, participatory, and more accountable. But that is a topic for another day, and another post. Stay tuned.

Chief Technology Officer - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:45:00 GMT

Community Manager, Food - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:45:00 GMT

Online School for Girls - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Sophie Campagne) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:34:38 GMT

I was recently surprised to discover that a local school is leading an effort to partner with three other US schools to launch an online girls school, merging two concepts: thanks to today's technology, obtaining an education no longer requires a person to physically sit in a classroom, and single sex education has its merits. In fact, studies show that girls tend to engage and participate more in a single sex learning environment, and that females respond to technology differently than males do.

This last fact is not surprising to me. Social behaviors vary between males and females at a young age and carry through into adulthood. I remember reading similar research from a 2002 Nielsen Norman report while conducting audience research for a children's web site we were redesigning.

For this online girls school program, teachers design the curriculum, and students work through the material largely independently. This model lowers the barrier of engagement across geography, allowing registered students to exchange ideas with other female students and teachers around the globe, with whom they would otherwise not have an opportunity to interact.

Given that more than 4 millions college students are already taking classes online, it seems like a natural expansion for online coursework to be conducted at the highschool level. In fact, a national survey released in January by the Sloan Consortium, an online education organization, estimated that the number of K-12 students nationwide who took online courses had increased by nearly 50 percent since the 2005-06 school year. [1]

Because research shows that young girls respond best to environments where connectivity is emphasized, I'm interested in hearing what the program's measures of success are, and how it will overcome time differences and geographical barriers for an audience that thrives on connectivity. Shared publishing, Wikis, Web Cams, what else?

A great user experience and service design opportunity - customizing the experience to the target constituents' needs. And exciting to see to what extent technology will break down those geographic and collaboration barriers.

[1 ] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/05/AR2009070502424.html

Nifty iPhone Webclip Icons - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Corey Lafferty) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:15:12 GMT

We all know about favicons, but not everyone is aware that the popularity of the iPhone has introduced a new concept similiar to the favicon called the iPhone webclip icon. Currently if you push the big + symbol in the iPhone Safari browser to create a bookmark, you are given the option to "Add to Home Screen."

Doing this will create one of those rounded, glossy iPhone icons on the home screen that links directly to the website. On most sites, the icon will be a very tiny representation of the website's homepage. For example, bookmarking the site you're reading right now, using its homepage as the icon, would lead to an iPhone webclip icon that looks like this.

That's pretty cool and all, but it doesn't convey much information other than "you're looking at something we've made really tiny." If you bookmark a few websites, it's unlikely such icons would be very useful in differentiating them. Luckily, there's another option. You can create your own icon, much in the way you do for a favicon.

Simply create a 45x45 pixel PNG file and name it apple-touch-icon.png. You need not add the glossy, rounded look to the file as the iPhone will do that itself when it creates the icon. Drop that PNG file into your site's root directory, and you're good to go. For this blog, I simply used a slightly larger version of our favicon. Adding this site to your iPhone's home screen now yields the icon shown below.

To create slightly crisper images, I've seen others suggesting using an image size of 158x158 pixels, which the iPhone will automagically shrink to the proper size. If you'd rather store the image in a directory other than the root (or you'd like to name the file something other than apple-touch-icon.png) you can simply add this bit of code to the <HEAD> of your site, changing the directory and filename to your liking.

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://uxd.forumone.com/directory/img/iphone.png" />

Director, Customer Engagement - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:45:00 GMT

Designer - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:45:00 GMT

Social Media Superstar - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Senior Community Moderator & Customer Services Representative - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Spin Art at 'Art on the Avenue' - Forum One Communications

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Forum One will be hosting a spin art booth for the 10th year in a row at Alexandria's Art on the Avenue on Saturday, Oct. 3, 2009.

Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009 - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:04:07 GMT

Updated 9/22/09.
The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting research study was initiated in late July of 2009, and ran until the second week of August 2009. The research project was conducted by the Online Community Research Network, and the intention of the study was to get a broad look at what online community metrics organizations are tracking, how organizations determine and report on the ongoing value of their online community initiatives, and the reporting and metrics tools that help companies assess this.

We received approximately 175 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community culture. Participating industry categories include: software companies, hardware companies, consumer goods non-profit organizations, independent consultants and media companies, amongst others.

Report Highlights
Several key issues pertaining to online community and social media metrics surfaced during this report, including:

In general, organizations need to do a more thorough job of defining their business objectives for online community engagement, assessing ways to measure progress towards these objectives, reaching beyond their native platform metrics capabilities, and finding ways to measure the more qualitative components of community member engagement.
The Role of the Community Manager is increasingly important to developing and refining business process, and measuring performance in these new “social spaces.”
There is a growing need for community metric standards that are platform and vendor-independent.

Determining What to Measure
From Question 14: How does your organization determine what is important to measure and report?

SUMMARY:

20% (34) We stick with what the platform can provide
61% (100) We work from a strategy based on business goals and find solution to help us measure what we need
19% (31) We try to measure everything, will develop more of a strategy later

TAKEAWAY:
Respondents are primarily shaping metrics strategies based on business goals (61%), even if their platform doesn’t support gathering or tracking desired metrics. Platform metrics are generally speaking, not comprehensive or extensible enough to create a meaningful dashboard to see overall community health, get an accurate visualization of the community’s social graph, and to understand the ongoing insight created by and the sentiments of the community population. The risk in relying only on data that a platform can provide (20% of the respondents) is that the data sets aren’t comprehensive or contextual to organization’s needs. “Measuring everything” (19% of respondents) can overwhelm the community team and stakeholders, and is unlikely to yield meaningful performance data or insight without some rigor in the analysis.

Metrics Currently Being Tracked
From Question 16: What do you currently measure?

SUMMARY:
The top 5 items that online communities measure for tracking and reporting are as follows:

152 Responses - Unique Visitors
150 Responses - New Member Registrations
143 Responses - Page Views
126 Responses - Visitors
116 Responses - Message Posts

90 Responses - Member Satisfaction
90 Responses - Influencer / Evangelism
84 Responses - Member Life Cycle
83 Responses - Member Loyalty
73 Responses - Referrals to Community

Currently Measuring - Profit and Non Profit

http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/images/metrics_tracked_2009_graph.png

Top 3 Key Performance Indicators

32% (74) User Activity / Engagement
21% (49) Membership Count [New Registrations, Active]
18% (42) Number of Posts / Comments
5% (12) Member Satisfaction / Loyalty
4% (10) Number of Questions Answered
4% (10) Sales Revenue - Up Sell, Cross Sell, Renewals
4% (8) Leeds / Referrals Generated
3% (6) Number of Downloads
3% (6) Number of Influencers / Evangelists
2% (5) Visitor Retention
2% (5) Number of Conversions
1% (2) Donations Received
1% (2) Visitor Geographic Dispersal

33 Number of Page Views / Clicks
22 Number of Site Visits
19 Number of Unique Visits

Access to the Full Report

please go here

The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009

available for purchase for $295

Federal CIO Council Seeks to Advance Trustworthy Social Media - Influence

nospam@example.com (Michael Walsh) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:00:00 GMT

In the absence of social media compliance and regulatory standards, social networking technologies face increased scrutiny in both the government and commercial sectors. While many government leaders and corporate executives recognize the ability for social media to enable organizations to tap into the vast amounts of knowledge in communities across the country and around the world, many organizations (especially ones with Enterprise IT Departments) harbor serious reservations with respect to workplace use of external social networking sites by employees:

Deloitte

U.S. Strategic Command

Websense Security Labs

Sophos

Confronted with a Memorandum for Transparency and Open Government and over 200,000 websites designed to spoof social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter already on the Web, the US Federal Government faces a unique challenge. It must work to quickly overcome the difficult social media challenge in order to: 1) Support the Presidents OpenGov objectives; 2) Ensure the security and privacy of US Federal Government IT.

Fortunately, the CIO Council is rising to the occasion. Just last week, the council released Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies, intended to provide guidance for any federal agency that uses social media services to collaborate and communicate among employees, partners, other federal agencies, and the public.

In drafting the document, the CIO Council chose to neither fully endorse nor censure social media and related social networking technologies; instead taking the wiser approach of acknowledging:

The decision to embrace social media technology is a risk-based decision, not a technology-based decision. It must be made based on a strong business case, supported at the appropriate level for each department or agency, considering its mission space, threats, technical capabilities, and potential benefits. The goal of the IT organization should not be to say No to social media websites and block them completely, but to say Yes, following security guidance, with effective and appropriate information assurance security and privacy controls.

Rather than take a position on one side of this potentially divisive topic, the report strives to provide a high-level overview of the risk associated with social media technologies (ex. spear phishing, social engineering, and web application security) and a series of recommended policy controls (ex. policy; acquisition; training; host; network) to mitigate these vulnerabilities. It also recommends that the senior technology official at each federal agency develop a social media communications strategy, with the support of their communication office that accurately addresses the guidelines in this document in conjunction with (existing) government-wide policy and proposes the creation of an overarching government wide policy on social media.

A section of the report that is getting a lot of attention is the series of recommendations made under Acquisition Controls. These include: 1) Use of two-factor authentication, including the secure identity card, under Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12; 2) Designation of a dedicated government server or instance within the corporate social media network; 3) Code validation and signing to improve the security of 3rd Party vendors websites; 4) Risk assessment of the vendor's systems or services. Since these recommendations could place considerable cost directly upon service providers, it begs the question: How can the government ensure social networking sites meet demanding security and privacy requirements without commercial mandates when so many vendor platforms operate free of cost to users (including the US Federal Government)?

While challenging, it certainly is not impossible for the US Federal Government to overcome the non-user fee based revenue model of many social media vendors. For example, the US Federal Government could support the creation of a national certification process for social media vendors. This would require: 1) Creating a rigorous set of public guidelines; 2) Fostering the development of 3rd party certification agent(s) for these standards; 3) Rewarding social networking vendors who elect to undergo (and pass) testing with a branded certification that they can then use in consumer and B2B marketing; 4) Fast-tracking certified cloud-based services to be listed under social media applications on Apps.gov; 5) Promoting global acceptance of the new certification in concert with private enterprises.

The downside:

The upside:

In seeking to advance secure social media in the US Federal Government, the CIO Councils Web 2.0 Security Working Group (W20SWG) should weigh the relative costs and benefits of a number of options, including a new certification process, as part of future policies on social media and related social networking technologies. The US Federal Government also should work closely with established (ex. Facebook; Twitter; YouTube) and emerging (ex. act.ly; Hi5; Bebo) social networking sites and technologies to elicit their feedback on how best to advance trustworthy social media, sustain private sector innovation, and encourage social media adoption by government (and commercial companies).

China and Social Networks - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Editor) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:59:58 GMT

The world's conversation is moving online. Every significant issue that people care about -- education, environment, development, health -- is debated and shaped on blogs, message boards and social networking sites. This is particularly true of global issues, since online conversations know no borders.

But there is one glaring absence in this new global conversation: China.

China blocks most international blogs, including any using popular blog services such as Wordpress or Blogger. China blocks any international URL with the word "blog" in it. China also blocks Twitter, Facebook, and many bulletin board sites. China currently does not block most news or information sites, but social sites are currently off limits.

This means that China is cut off from participating in the global conversation. At the very time when China is working hard to join the global community (all grade schools now teach English, among other things), Chinese have little opportunity to make their voices heard online.

This is a serious problem. Many current global issues pivot on China, including important financial, natural resource and environmental challenges. These issues will only be addressed through global cooperation and agreement. Much of that work is done online. But China isn't present.

Is there something the global online community could be doing to invite Chinese authorities to change policy and join the conversation? Is this best accomplished at the government to government level, or is there a grassroots strategy? Feel free to comment below.

Director of Community [Managing 20+ Employees] - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:15:00 GMT

Online Community Expert Interview: Angela Connor, WRAL.com - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:36:00 GMT

This week's Online Community Expert Interview is with Angela Connor is a multimedia journalist and community manager with a passion for online communities and social media. She is the Managing Editor of User-Generated Content at WRAL.com where she launched and currently manages the top-rated news organization’s first online community GOLO.com, which has grown to more than 13,000 members. Angela has worked in broadcast, print and online news in Cleveland, Tampa, West Palm Beach and Ft, Lauderdale and is author of the book, 18 rules of Community Engagement.

Q: Tell me a little about how you became a Community Manager. What attracted you to the role?

Actually, it fell in my lap in many ways. I was working as the Multimedia Editor at a newspaper in South Florida when my former boss and good friend contacted me about the position. He thought it would be a good move for me based on my relationship building experience as a news manager and producer and wanted to know if he could recommend me. I was heavily involved in the online video strategy for the newspaper and managing our broadcast partnerships and pretty content in my position at the time so it felt like it would be an unwelcome disruption to my life, but it turned out to be the best move I could have ever made. When I started researching what the job was all about, I told him to go ahead and submit my name. I was attracted to the fact that it was a startup and I had never been involved in a brand new online initiative. I was also attracted and intrigued by the UGC aspect because it was a term being heavily circulated in the online publishing industry and I knew that meant something big. His advice to me was to go try it out because even mild success would chart a new career path for me. I wasn’t convinced, but once I started talking to the folks at the TV station and saw how committed they were to the community they serve I knew it would be a good fit.

Q: What were the most challenging lessons you learned during your first 90 days on the job?

I am now well over two years in the job and I continue to learn new things, and new challenges emerge pretty much weekly. But I have to say that in the first 90 days I realized that there was no guide book on how to do this and that trial and error was a major part of finding success. So I would say that coming to terms with that was a bit tough, especially since I have always known how to do my job and do it well. This was new territory because there are so many aspects of community management that you simply do not control. I wanted to see membership take off, and by many standards it did but I wanted it to happen more quickly. It’s very challenging to sit back and wait for others to act. You are depending on people to make your project a success and they are not on your payroll. It requires a different mindset. Once I really understood that, I was able to chart a course of action.

Q: What excites you the most about your job?

I am excited about the fact that I am doing something that continues to gain popularity and is increasingly gaining value across all industries. How many times do you really get to say that you were involved in something at the ground floor? I feel like I am, and that’s pretty exciting. I like being able to try something and see what happens without worrying about long-term repercussions. If it doesn’t work I can just try something new. It’s also very exciting to teach others both inside and outside of my organization about the value of online communities through real life stories that take shape right before me. Watching relationships emerge online as a result of a venue you provide, manage and maintain is very fulfilling.

Q: What 3 pieces of advice would you give to those considering Community Management as a career?

1. You must have a thick skin. If you cannot walk away from derisive comments and constant, sometimes unwarranted criticism, you cannot do this job in the way it needs to be done.

2. Study the craft. It is important to learn from others and pay close attention to the developments in this space.

3. Be prepared for change. This is a position that means different things within different organizations and your responsibilities may ebb and flow.

Q: How do you see the Community Manager role evolving over the next 12-18 months? What trends should CMs be paying attention to?

This may not be a popular train of thought, but I think there is a distinct difference in community management geared towards the mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs, and the management of those that are owned by a specific organization or what some would refer to as branded communities. Right now it seems as though everyone is lumping it all together and that could be because the position is hot and top brass at organizations don’t really know how to label much of what they are asking people to do, particularly with social media related positions. For instance, is someone who is responsible for monitoring twitter a community manager? I guess the first question to answer there would be if twitter is even a community. It certainly isn’t one that any of us owns and if for some reason it’s gone tomorrow many people would be in big, big trouble. But that’s a conversation for a different day. Is the person who maintains a Facebook fan page or YouTube Channel a Community Manager? Could they transfer what they’re doing in that space to a less mainstream or new community and grow it from scratch? That’s where you get down and dirty and go through all the frustrations that make you better or make you realize that this isn’t the craft for you. I think we are mistakenly confusing social media savvy with the ability to manage online communities. I think we will see more of that in the next 12-18 months and beyond. And that’s a mistake. Community managers should pay attention to technology trends and if you are one responsible for engaging in the mainstream platforms you have to pay attention to what is happening with each and every one. Pay attention to every move made by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and beyond and find smart people who provide good analysis and interpret those moves.

ProjectSpaces named one of the "10 Best Project Management Tools" - Online ...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:30:00 GMT

ProjectSpaces was recently recognized as one of the "10 Best Project Management Tools" by Smartlife, a publication dedicated to professionals about how to get more out of life using technology, outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and other lifehacks. We are honored to be among the top tools for online collaboration to help people manage documents, coordinate tasks, and communicate better.

CongressCamp: Where the Hill Meets Web 2.0 - Influence

nospam@example.com (Michael Walsh) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:11:00 GMT

Last weekend, Forum One participated in CongressCamp at George Washington University. CongressCamp was an unconference focused on the Congress side of Gov 2.0. Participants explored the use of web-based social and collaboration technologies and their use in transforming congressional engagement with the public.

The event attracted a breadth of experience, including congressional staffers, public policy specialists, advocacy practitioners, software vendors, and professional service providers. The open format encouraged the constructive sharing of varying (and sometimes opposing) perspectives. A variety of topics were discussed, including social media metrics, case studies and best practices, tools and applications, and strategy and planning. A number of vendor applications and technologies also were presented, including act.ly, Legistalker, DataMasher, Drupal, WordPress, Democracy in Action, Joomla, Ning, GovLuv, You2Gov, GovLoop, Qik, TwitVid, Bit.ly, and GovPulse.

Forum One was very interested in the opinions expressed by others at the event. Out of the sessions Forum One staff attended, we took away seven key lessons from the event:

Congressional staffers view social media and related Web 2.0 technologies as an effective means of driving citizen engagement and increasing government transparency. They are committed to advancing OpenGov initiatives and are looking for best practices and case studies to assist them in improving their use of Web 2.0 technologies.

Congressional use of social media and related Web 2.0 technologies frequently is not guided by an underlying digital communications strategy. The failure to invest in an up-front strategy results in Congressional staff often establishing social media presences (ex. Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook) without integrating them into their existing web presence, aside from home page cross-link placement. This suboptimal use of social media and Web 2.0 technologies is lowering the return on investment for these properties.

Congress is in the initial stages of social media maturity - typically leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to broadcast their message and respond to negative PR. That said, there is a deep interest by many staff to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to enable conversations and encourage two-way feedback with constituents. Already, there are a number of examples of representatives and senators who are breaking the mold and redefining congressional web communications. Congressional staff recognize that these representatives and staff are strengthening their powerbase by employing such tactics and seek to replicate their success in their own offices.

Congressional implementation of social media and related Web 2.0 technologies is occurring without overarching governance and technology guidance from institutional bodies. Congressional staff on a number of occasions mentioned that they look to outside parties for guidance as social media is an emerging issue for their communications teams. Institutional entities, like the House Information Resources, appear aware of the need for guidance and are slowly making progress to meeting this need with new rules/policies.

Congressional staffers are looking for better metrics to track social media performance. Social media metrics are not as mature as those used by commercial companies and brand management consultants. Congressional staff are not widely leveraging business intelligence software or listening technology to gain insight into public discourse on policies and their representative/senator. Web analytics likewise are not being leveraged to the extent possible to provide feedback on the effectiveness of social engagement and the amplification of the office message.

Ownership of data and security and privacy issues is not widely understood by congressional staff. When staff begin using sites such as Twitter or Facebook, they don't always pause to consider the implications for the data captured on users. Web-savvy staffers perceive this will be an increasing issue for congressional offices in the future and therefore will seek guidance from their peers and outside parties on these issues.

Political campaigns and nonprofits are fueling the push to transform digital communications on the Hill. Congressional staffers are gleaning insight from the recent Obama campaign to ongoing congressional campaigns. Staff are looking for examples of where innovative use of social media and related Web 2.0 technologies has been a game-changer to candidates and seeking to replicate the most effective solutions, where possible. (Note: The different communications requirements and rules for a campaign and a congressional Office make some of the campaign examples irrelevant on the Hill.) They also are well aware of initiatives by nonprofits, such as the Sunlight Foundation, which are in many ways more influential on the congressional staff than the campaigns themselves.

Example of Amazing Graphic Recording Services Provided by Diane Cline. (Photograph © by Christiana Aretta - Used with Permission)

It is important to note that the aforementioned takeaways are broad generalizations of the conversations that arose from the event. Clearly, there are some exceptional examples of Congressional staff proper (and improper) use of social media and related Web 2.0 technologies that counter many of the points above. In one session, participants addressed these exceptions by discussing the Gold Mouse Awards and exploring a select group of these case studies from federal, state, and local government, including:

Congressman Bob Latta: Innovative use of mobile technology;

Senator Claire McCaskill: Twitter presence;

Congressman John Culberson: Former employment of Qik (mobile streaming);

Newark Mayor Cory Booker: Application of Google Translate.

Looking back, CongressCamp was a great experience for everyone at Forum One. We always are excited to be part of such deep engagement on the topic of Congressional use of social media and related Web 2.0 technologies. We enjoyed the people we met, the insights we gained, and look forward to the next opportunity to engage on this topic.

[Forum One was a Gold Sponsor of CongressCamp. Andrew Cohen (@andrewjcohen), Courtney Clark (@circlish), and Michael Walsh (@walshtechnet) represented Forum One at the event.]

Ideas to Open Government Data - Influence

nospam@example.com (Sandy Smith) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:56:30 GMT

Data.gov

In brainstorming ideas to create Datamasher, the team spent a lot of time perusing data.gov and thinking about making government data more accessible by the average informed citizen. We actually spent quite a while trying to find data we thought we could understand well enough to present it to others in a compelling way, but it was difficult.

With huge, cumbersome IT procurement processes, massive corporate IT vendors, and a culture that rewards amassing data over sharing it, opening government data up is a challenge, but here are three quick things the Obama administration could do to encourage adoption and demonstrate that small, nimble organizations can partner with government to open data up to the public and give government more robust tools in return without spending gobs of the taxpayers' money.

APIs

There are lots of Facebook applications that let you share data with other services--for example, you can link your Twitter account to your Facebook account and update your Facebook status every time you tweet. This is done through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), essentially contracts between applications saying "if you give me a request formatted like this, I'll give you a response formatted like that." Applications like Datamasher would be far more numerous and effective if government made its data accessible over APIs.

Data.gov has a lot of data, but many formats are technically accessible but in reality hard to parse for people not using the original SAS applications the datasets were probably built for. While it would not be as "raw" as initially envisioned, urging as many agencies as possible to produce actual queryable APIs with the data would have made more possibilities for truly creative visualizations and allowed new participatory applications to be built. Some of these the government could then use for its own purposes without spending a dime of additional budget.

Open Standards

Even if APIs require a greater level of effort than is immediately possible, putting data in XML with open schemas and good descriptions would enable outside organizations to do interesting things with the data. Again, the government could reap the benefits of essentially donated outside expertise. The government could even act merely as a convener, allowing outside universities and companies to do the grunt work of standardization. Much of this could be done on a shoestring, compared to large IT initiatives. If data were published in standard formats and schemas, open source projects could arise to interact with the data and give a standard set of tools to developers with great ideas to create new and useful applications.

Demonstration Projects

It is a challenge, trying to change the orientation of government toward a new culture of sharing data. We think that a few targeted demonstration projects could do a lot to encourage agencies to try this, and we believe there is pent-up interest in government. For example, Forum One has worked with the USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) and the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency (EIA), both data-centric organizations with a mission to share data and knowledge. We think they'd be eager to experiment with more open data approaches, but they have lacked the expertise and resources to create such internet-enabled applications. Some rapid demonstration projects could also counter the notion that such projects need to be large, or involve large IT contractors. Many small firms and individuals would be eager and able to participate.

Changing how government works with data, both inside and outside of government, is at least a decade-long endeavor. We think starting with these initiatives would score quick wins for both government and citizens, and create new opportunities for innovation in government, nonprofits, and the private sector.

Latest on the Online Community Summit, October 8-9 in Sonoma, CA - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:09:31 GMT

We’re just under four weeks away from our 8th annual Online Community Summit in Sonoma, CA, on October 8-9. We have a fantastic speaker and session line-up that I’ve detailed out below.

If you’d like to attend the Summit and you’re a senior online community or social media practitioner, please go here to request an invitation. There are limited tickets still available.

Please note: We restrict attendance of platform and service vendors to those sponsoring the event. If you would like information about sponsoring, please email me.

Check out the event site here for more information.

Event Schedule:

Thursday, October 8th

8:00 - 9:00: Registration / Breakfast

9:00 - 10:00: Introductions & Welcome
Bill Johnston – Chief Community Officer, Forum One Networks
Joi Podgorny – Head of Community, Mindcandy

10:00 - 11:00: Session 1 /Turning to the Crowd: Ideas and Contest Sites
How can you generate great ideas and enthusiasm for your organization at low cost?
Session Lead: Anil Rathi, Idea Crossing
Session Lead: Ryan Wilson, XPrize

11:00 - 11:30: Break

11:30 - 12:30: Session 2 / What You Need to Know About the Mobile Communities Revolution
As mobile usage explodes, the importance of mobile communities is increasing dramatically. We’ll review experiences from Obama to Armani to the American Cancer Society and demonstrate the coming wave of change that will impact your organization.
Session Lead: Kevin Bertram, Distributive Networks
Session Lead: Miles Orkin, America Cancer Society

12:30 - 1:30: Lunch

1:30 - 2:30: Session 3 / Social Marketing & Advertising
Communities and traditional forms of marketing and advertising have historically acted like oil and water. Progress is being made by innovative organizations that involve the community in feedback, permission-based programs and even advertising creation.
Session Lead: Paul Levine, Current.com
Session Lead: Bruce Smith, Answers.com

2:30 - 3:30: Session 4 / Break Out Sessions

3:30 - 4:00: Break

4:00 - 5:00: Session 5 / News Communities
While the importance of PR and marketing hasnʼt changed, the ways to influence major news sites has transformed radically. Weʼll discuss the news landscape and what it means for your organization.
Session Lead: Lila King – CNN.com
Session Lead: Chris Tolles – Topix.net

Friday, October 9th

8:00 - 9:00: Registration / Breakfast

8:00 - 9:00: Community and Good Ideas Demos (open podium)

9:00: Introductions

9:00 - 10:00: Session 6 / Social “ME”dia: Employees as Advocates
How does an organization combine employee passion with social media tools to meet organization goals?
Session Lead: Erika Kuhl, Salesforce.com
Session Lead: Lucia Willow – Pandora.com

10:00 - 11:00: Session 7: / Break Out Sessions

11:00 – 11:30: Break

11:30 – 12:30: Session 8: Operationalizing Social Media - Reshaping the Organization
As social media and community programs move form short term, tactical engagements to longer-term business strategies, organizations must transform to take full advantage of the possibilities. Hear about the topography of the “social organization” from our panel of experts leading the charge to transform their organizations via social media.
Panelists: TBA

12:30 - 1:00 Conference Close and Wrap up

Some of the current attendees include community and social media practitioners from leading companies including: Apple, GlobalGiving, Autodesk, Inc., Leadership Corps, Moshi Monsters, Edutopia, LinkedIn, American Legacy Foundation, SEGA of America, Time Inc. Lifestyle Digital, WestEd, TripAdvisor, Dell, Inc., Answers Corporation, Executive Networks, Inc., Microsoft, REI, Care2.com, Stupski Foundation, and The MathWorks, Inc.

CongressCamp - Forum One Communications

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:15:00 GMT

Forum One is co-sponsoring CongressCamp, a barcamp-styled unconference on citizen engagement with Congress through social media and collaboration tools. The event will be held on Sept. 12-13, at the Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet at George Washington University.

Forum One's DataMasher Receives First Place in 'Apps for America 2' Contest - Forum One ...

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Community Evangelist - Forum One Networks

Forum One Networks — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Datamasher Wins! - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Sandy Smith) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:23:29 GMT

In case you haven't gotten the news via Twitter or elsewhere, Datamasher won in a squeaker, over some very stiff competition from This We Know and GovPulse. I got to meet and talk shop with those developers and the developers behind the Visualization Prize winner, QuakeSpotter. They're all scarily smart and great people. Since the voting was incredibly close, I think it shows the entries were all really strong.

A big thank-you to everyone who voted for Datamasher!

Online Community and Social Media Executives Convene at the Eighth Annual Online Community ...

Forum One Networks — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:45:00 GMT

Forum One announces discussion leaders covering global community problem solving, the mobile communities revolution, and leveraging employees as advocates for its latest conference in Sonoma, CA.

Datamasher at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Sandy Smith) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:33:18 GMT

Some of my Forum One colleagues and I will be at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase today to talk Gov 2.0 (duh) and present Datamasher. If you're going, come by the Datamasher table and say hi, and pick up some Nerds or Smarties.

Datamasher: a Drupal-Based Data Visualization Tool - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Sandy Smith) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:31:30 GMT

Concept

In creating Forum One's entry into the Sunlight Labs Apps for America 2 competition, we were faced with a challenge: how to take some of the data cataloged on the government's new data.gov website and make it more easily used and understood by average citizens. Much of the data is obscure and not easily understood by someone not already familiar with advanced statistical analysis and whichever field the data is about, such as economics, labor studies, agriculture, biology, or environmental science.

Once we hit on the concept of taking state-by-state data and making it more available to people, we looked at what was out there to make sure we weren't reinventing the wheel. We were impressed by StateMaster, which already ranked states by single data sets. Norman, a web developer, had the idea of letting users combine datasets and graph the results. That reminded me of the Misery Index, famously used by Jimmy Carter to bash Gerald Ford, and then used by Ronald Reagan to bash Jimmy Carter. The formula was simple: take the national unemployment rate plus the national inflation rate, and you have an indicator of the pressure being felt by working families.

Initially, we considered a more complex service that would allow someone to create simple equations, such as (a + b) / (c * 2), but we realized getting the interface right would take a lot of time we didn't have. Additionally, we realized none of us were statisticians, and few of our target audience (average but web-savvy citizens) would be either. So doing something with mathematical and analytical rigor was out of the question. We decided instead to make the tool much more about discovery and discussion. The challenge of graphing 51 points also led us to lead with a map-based display. The time limitation meant we'd pare out everything that wasn't essential and polish what we had.

In the end, we decided to let users create mashups of two data sets out of a repository of datasets we'd pre-load. Users would also discuss and rate other mashups. Since we wanted the site to be self-sustaining, we would allow users to add additional datasets so updated and additional data could be included.

Components

The online community element led us naturally to use Drupal. This saved us having to build registration, commenting, pretty URL, and basic CMS features. We started with Acquia Drupal to give us a bunch of pre-screened modules we could use as we saw fit during development. We wanted a rating component to allow users to float good or interesting mashups to the top, so we used the Fivestar module, and enabled comments on the Mashup content type. To supply the datasets, we created a dataset content type, and used CCK nodereferences to connect them. To display the maps, we used a Flash map from Fla-shop.com, which we had worked with previously and knew could let us color states with XML and provide additional information in popups. To ensure the data was easier to scan, we created a second table view. To guard against spam, we enabled Mollom. To enable people to personalize their mashups with icons, we used ImageCache and a CCK Image field.

Customization

Getting lots of lists of states plus data entered wasn't easy, and required some of us to comb through data.gov and other sources looking for state-level data to include. To facilitate this and make the combinations less database-intensive, Norman built out a module to take a CSV file in State Name, Value format, create a table for that data set in the database and store the data there, and then retrieve the appropriate table for its associated node, combine them with the appropriate operator, and provide an array. I wrote a module to take the table data from Norman's module, compute the color needed for each state, and format it in the XML schema required by the Flash-based map (which, among other things, required the states be in a fixed order).

Datamasher: selecting an operator

To make it easier for people to create mashups, I themed the checkbox form element to use JQuery and formatted options to select the operator, which was the most confusing part of the default interface. Now users simply click on the operator with which they'd like to combine the two datasets, and see their choice in a very large font. Norman themed the mashup content type template, using Drupal 6's templating features to provide a tab for the map view and a tab for the table view.

We decided people would still like to look at maps and tables for each dataset, so we adapted the modules to provide the same display for those. And to deal with the inevitable carping over statistical rigor, we added a little surprise. To let people more easily add future datasets, Norman created a user data set module with a custom form that displayed an entry for each state--all the user has to do is fill in each value and some metadata. Add in views for most recent, highest rated, and most discussed mashups and datasets, a view of latest comments, an instructional video, and then some dusting off of my Photoshop cutup and theming skills, and voila, in essentially three weekends we'd built a data visualization tool.

Vote for Datamasher!

If you like it, please vote for Datamasher, by registering and voting at Sunlight Labs via that link. Today is the last day!

Online Community Summit 2009: Updates - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:59:56 GMT

I wanted to post a quick update with the latest session leads and topics for the Online Community Summit, to be held October 8-9 in Sonoma.

I am looking forward to hosting the Summit, along with co-host Joi Podgorny, Head of Community at Mind Candy.

The current list of session topics includes:

Big Communities to Tackle Big Problems

Turning to the Crowd: Ideas and Contest Sites

What You Need to Know About the Mobile Communities Revolution

Social Marketing & Advertising

How Online Communities are Reshaping News

Social “ME”dia: Employees as Brand Advocates

Operationalizing Social Media - Reshaping the Organization

Session leads include:

Kevin Bertram, Distributive Networks

Sharon Carothers - Legacy

Austin Heap – Haystack

Lila King – CNN.com

Erika Kuhl - Salesforce.com

Paul Levine, Current Media

Miles Orkin, America Cancer Society

Bruce Smith - Answers.com

Hardy Wallace - Murphy-Goode Winery

Joi Podgorny – Head of Community, Mindcandy

Lucia Willow – Pandora.com

Ryan Wilson, XPrize

If you are a senior online community professional interested in participating in the Online Community Summit, and you haven't received an invitation, you may request one by writing me here.

Photos from last year's Summit:

Please note: We restrict attendance of platform and service vendors to those sponsoring the event. If you would like information about sponsoring, please drop me a note.

For more information about the Summit, you can check out the event site here.

Event tag is #ocs2009

Apps for America 2: Lessons Learned During Speedy Application Development! - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Michaela Hackner) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:01:19 GMT

Since many of us are involved in campaign-focused work that requires rapid turn-around, I wanted to share some lessons from a recent internal project we delivered in 4 weeks for the "Apps for America 2" contest.

(Our application, DataMasher, placed in the top 3 (out of 47), so by they way, I'd appreciate your vote so we can be pushed to #1.)

First some background: The contest was created by Sunlight Labs to celebrate and publicize data.gov, a new resource for federal government data. We were given 11 weeks to work on it, and we actually completed the entire application in 4 weeks from kickoff to launch, in less than 200 hours. We spent a few weeks brainstorming in June, but the bulk of our work happened during the last 4 weeks. At times we weren't sure we would finish in time, but we really believed in our idea to make government data usable, visual, and accessible. So, we persevered!

Here's are a few lessons we captured that should be applicable to similar projects:

1. Keep the team small. Our team was only 5 people - a Senior Advisor, a Project Manager, a Tech Lead, a Developer, and an Information Architect/Designer. This focused the scope and increased our overall productivity.

2. Choose a few pieces of key functionality and ROCK them! Although the possibilities were/are endless with DataMasher.org, we tempered our expectations and were practical with our decisions. We wanted to ensure that the features we built into the site worked really well and that we'd have time to test and tweak. We also wanted to ensure that the site would be flexible enough for growth in the future. There were times we had to turn down great ideas because we weren't sure we'd nail them in the time we had left, but we kept a running tally of enhancements to develop in the future, and continue to seek out that feedback from users (including you!).

3. Leverage user-generated content whenever possible and appropriate: many heads are better than one! DataMasher is by "the people" and "for the people". We wanted the site to be about the users and their data, and most importantly, the ways in which users could manipulate that data to be relevant. Letting people create their own mashups, rank and rate them, add comments, and upload new data sets was critical to our overall goal.

4. Be flexible and keep moving - don't get caught up in the churn and debate, make decisions! If we had spent a lot of time planning and scoping, we never would have entered into development. We chose basic goals, met weekly to discuss progress and opportunities, and were always willing to both succeed and fail, and most importantly, learn.

The project was a ton of fun to work on, if not a lot of work. I hope these insights are helpful.

Once again, if you wish to vote for DataMasher, here's how.

Forum One's DataMasher an 'Apps for America 2' Finalist - Forum One Communications

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Center for Strategic and International Studies - Forum One Communications

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Online Community & Social Media Compensation Survey 2009 Closes on 8/28 - Online ...

nospam@example.com (Heather Virga) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:32:21 GMT

Forum One Networks Partners with Linqia's Moderator Community - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:53:00 GMT

Forum One is very pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with Linqia's The Moderator Community. The Moderator Community is a gateway for community managers, group moderators and enthusiasts to connect with others and exchange knowledge, learn and ask questions. Our goal in partnering with the Moderator Community is to provide our readers with additional resources and a network of community professionals from around the world, in addition to our online community and social media research conducted through the Online Community Research Network (OCRN). This partnership will provide community professionals with an opportunity to connect, learn, and share best practices and community programs that are managed all over the world.

I have been especially excited about the possibility of working with The Moderator Community since hearing about the concept from Maria Sipka, CEO of Linqia and founder of the site.

Our partnership includes the following:

*Linqia will be the European representation for the Online Community Research Network (OCRN) and will be promoting our library of online community and social media research, conducted through the OCRN, which focuses on specific issues and topics in the online community and social media space. Some of our reports include: Online Community Metrics, Online Community ROI: Models and Reports, Social Media Ecosystems, Online Communities: Surviving & Thriving in the Downturn and more.

*The Moderator Community will give their social media guide (valued at $29.99) to all of the OC Report readers who become new members of their community. The social media guide includes advice on engaging in social media, with an emphasis on using social media for listening. It also features a categorized recommended reading list, a list of social media case studies, and a list of social media listening tools with explanations on each one.

*The Moderator Community and Forum One will co-host a free public webcast in the fourth quarter that delves into the most important and pressing issues that community and social media pros are facing.

*Forum One Networks and the OCRN will be featured sponsors of the Moderator Community and the Moderator Community will be featured as a sponsor of the Online Community Report Newsletter and a media sponsor at our Unconference Events.

We're really excited for the opportunity to work with the Moderator Community and look forward to building a more global representation of community and social media pros who will share ideas, challenges and solutions that represent the online communities around the world.

Forum One Networks Partners with ReadWriteWeb on Online Community Research - Online Community Report

nospam@example.com (Bill Johnston) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:52:19 GMT

Forum One Networks is thrilled to announce our partnership with ReadWriteWeb, a leading blog that provides Web Technology news, reviews and analysis (and is one of our favorite sites). This partnership allows us to collaborate with another organization that we highly respect, who is actively involved in the analysis and creation of online community resources. We particularly like (and recommend) ReadWriteWeb’s Guide to Online Community Management, which is a collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community and a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web.

ReadWriteWeb is also partnering with us on our Online Community & Social Media Compensation research study, which means that we will reach many more online community and social media pros, making this the largest and most comprehensive study of online community and social media compensation to date. Go here to participate in the study: http://bit.ly/occomp09

We're ecstatic to be working with RWW (I'm a HUGE fan of their work), and look forward to the opportunities that this relationship holds.

WordPress: Certain Widgets on Certain Pages - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Matt Gibbs) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:31:29 GMT

WordPress and Drupal are similar in a lot of ways. They're both extremely popular, powerful, and flexible frameworks. They both have minimal cores, but were built from the ground-up to handle tons of extensibility.

Even though WordPress has been traditionally thought of as a blogging system, it's gradually shaping into a more refined, full-featured CMS. WordPress Plugins like Pods CMS and Flutter are opening the flood gates of potential, just like how the CCK and Views modules have revolutionized Drupal.

Drupal - Blocks

Drupal includes things called "Blocks", which are chunks of code/HTML that you can stick in various "regions" of your site (e.g. Header, Footer, Content Top, etc). With blocks, you can choose which pages these blocks appear on, or which pages to exclude them from appearing on.

WordPress - Widgets

WordPress has similar things called "Widgets". The main thing missing with Widgets as opposed to Blocks is the ability to display specific Widgets on specific pages. Regardless, Widgets are relatively simple to implement.

You first add some PHP code in functions.php to define new "regions" to place widgets into.

<?php
if (function_exists('register_sidebar')) {
register_sidebar(array(
'name'=>'My Footer',
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>'
));
}

Then, it's a matter of adding some code to your WP Template file (e.g. index.php) to display this custom Widget region:

<?php dynamic_sidebar('My Footer'); ?>

WordPress Plugin: Widget Block

I created a plugin so that you can treat WordPress widgets more like Drupal blocks. Specifically, you can choose which pages a certain widget will appear on (or be excluded from). This plugin also prevents you from needing to create many slightly different Widget regions. The plugin is called Widget Block; give it a try!

Pandora Update: Feedback & Fitt's Law - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Brian Verhoeven) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:15:35 GMT

I stepped away from my computer and paused Pandora. When I returned, I noticed that they had updated the interface to include a large pause icon over the current track. This struck me for two reasons

1)It made it immediately apparent that the system was paused. In previous sessions, I had struggled with the play / pause toggle (largely due to delays in pumping sound into my headphones). However, I was also confused by the toggle itself. Was the grey triangle for play representing that it was "pressed" and therefore playing music? Or did the orange color indicate the state? In the new version, I have no questions, I clearly know when the system is paused.

2)The area to get the music playing again is MUCH larger than the small play button. Now I can click anywhere on the album cover to resume my listening session.

ProjectSpaces adds reporting and security enhancements - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ...

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:00:00 GMT

We recently released some new additions to ProjectSpaces, including site statistics reporting, enhanced adminisrator control over security settings and usability enhancements.

What We Learned at RedUX - DC '09 - Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog

nospam@example.com (Brian Verhoeven) — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:59:38 GMT

On May 9th, IxDA-DC and DCIA held a conference RedUX of the 2009 IA Summit and Interaction conferences at CDIA in Georgetown. The event had 13 world-class speakers, 5 hours of presentations, over 100 attendees, and cost less than $500 to organize. You can watch video of all the presentations at the ux workshop

My big take aways from this event:

Your career is what you make it.
Find a way to explain why you are important in only 1 sentence without hesitation. Believe it. You can take charge of your career by sharing your message / knowledge. You are an expert. Share your knowledge. Grow your network. If you are not blogging, start. Read as much as you can and share your thoughts. Use twitter. Use your REAL name. Stay positive.

Your job is your business school. Learn from your organization: what does it do well? What does it do not so well? Collect samples: documentation, contracts, etc. What makes a bad client? What methodologies didn’t work? Why? What makes a bad boss? What makes a bad employee?

Strategy is very much dependent upon themes.
For a storyteller, theme is used as a compass. Themes can inform strategy. On the web, a theme is an overarching statement or phrase that encapsulates the value and focus of the experience that we intend to deliver. For the tech team, themes can define functional and content requirements. Examine every element in terms of the theme. The theme coordinates the elements of a story / direct message of your site.
In this way, themes help us design for pleasure, emotion and meaning.

Guiding principles for prototyping:
1. Know your audience and their goals
2. Don't plan too much. Prototype a lot.
3. Set expectations.
4. You CAN sketch.
5. It’s not the Mona Lisa.
6. If you can’t make it, fake it. (simulate AJAX with keynote, .ppt, even paper)
7. Prototype only what you need. Don’t do the whole entire system

Managing people is different than managing face-to-face
1.Enrich your communication skills
2.Be sensitive to what going on in other locales: Don’t schedule a meeting with team members in New Orleans on Mardi Gras
3.Email: Avoid sarcasm, terseness, and contractions
4.Telephone: Be clear and direct. Speak up. Sometimes you NEED dialogue. Don't be afraid to use the phone because you are used to email.

The UX Community is passionate.
The UX community is passionate about the work that they do. Thanks again to all who pitched in to make this happen; especially those that traveled great distances.

Thanks to Matt, Sophie, & Courtney for contributing their notes / feedback on this post.

The Cloud: how is it relevant? - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Jo Ryden) — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:02:08 GMT

I attended the Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. As in so many other places these days, both on and offline, a lot of the buzz and talk was centered around The Cloud and Cloud Computing. What is it? What can it do for us? Who uses it? It's easy to get into long discussions about these topics and there are many articles, blog posts and even books covering a wide array of aspects and philosophies of Cloud Computing. I'll try to give a very brief and cursory overview below in an attempt not to cause immediate information overload. If you would like to continue the discussion a bit more in-depth, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me at any time.

What is it?

There are still quite extensive (and sometimes heated...) debates going on regarding how to define The Cloud and services operating from The Cloud. I'm a visual person and I think this video is a good attempt at depicting The Cloud, what it is and where it came from.

A few highlights:

A collection of shared, internet accessible resources or infrastructure evolved from several "as a Service" infrastructure and software delivery models
Can be tapped into on an as-needed basis (resources can be scaled up or down with little to no effort)
Pay for the resources you use, and don't pay for what you don't use (utility type metered billing model)
"Open" philosophy (open meaning access from any device anywhere at a higher level and API access at a lower level)

Some people like to argue that with the evolution of The Cloud, the various "as a Service" concepts have become obsolete. I don't necessarily subscribe to that view. To use a familiar example: Google Apps (GA). GA is what has traditionally been categorized as Software as a Service (SaaS), and I think that is still the most accurate description of what it is. However, since GA runs off The Cloud you could make the argument that it should be called a Cloud [based] Service.

What can it do for us?

Besides the obvious and immediate cost savings associated with life in The Cloud, it also offers a level of flexibility in a number of areas that is previously unparalleled in the computing world:

No more long binding hardware/hosting contracts
Need a staging site for that one new application to show off for an afternoon? No problem, just click a button
Have a high profile campaign driving a lot of traffic to your web site? Deploy some extra resources for the duration of the campaign effect and terminate them at will as soon as your traffic returns to normal levels
Need some compelling arguments when presenting and/or defending your web operations budget? How about: no longer will you be spending on what you might need, you are now spending on what you in actuality need and use

So what's the catch? There really is no catch to speak of. The barrier of entry to The Cloud is very low, cost is exclusively operational as opposed to in previous years where the barrier of entry to high level computing resources has been associated with large upfront capital expenditures.

Who uses it?

Chances are you as an individual or maybe in some business capacity, are already taking advantage of what The Cloud has to offer in some way or another without even knowing about it, which is coincidentally one of the major characteristics of The Cloud; the abstraction of the underlying infrastructure, hardware or software platform. I mentioned Google Apps above, here are some other major players using The Cloud and/or providing access to it and services running from it:

Salesforce.com - provides cloud services
Amazon.com - provides cloud services and cloud infrastructure (which have evolved from an infrastructure that mainly came about due to its own need for an operating platform for its e-commerce business)
Razorfish.com - operates from The Cloud

The distinction between who "uses" the cloud and who provides access to cloud infrastructure and services can sometimes be a little fuzzy since providers are oftentimes middle men and end users as well, and vice versa.

Final words

At Forum One we offer our clients and partners a slice of, and a guided way into, The Cloud and all of the benefits discussed above through our partnership with Rackspace and its Cloud Division. We also have several SaaS offerings (or Cloud Service offerings if you will), our flagship being ProjectSpaces. The Cloud isn't just the future of computing, it is here now and ready for you to put to use!

LegiStalker: Getting people engaged with Congress - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Matt Gibbs) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:27:09 GMT

There's a lot of people out there wanting to keep up with Congress.

Many people just want to know what their representatives are doing in Congress, how they're voting, and who they're interacting with. Unfortunately, that's pretty hard to find, especially from several different angles.

We at Forum One felt that exposing this information was a pretty good idea, so we ran with it. The final result is the site LegiStalker.

From the low level, it's a pretty simple concept. We pull in all the information we can find about every Congressperson, clean it up, and store it in an ever-growing database. So far, we've managed to harness YouTube, Twitter, latest voting data, and several hundred different news sources. With so many different news sources, there's a pretty good spectrum of differing perspectives -- ranging from CNN and the New York Times to Fox News.

This is a lot of good information, but a lot of information nonetheless. If users are presented with just the latest items retrieved, it would get pretty overwhelming for the user. With that in mind, we came up with a 5-tiered system for filtering the data to meet any user's needs.

1. U.S. Level - a high-level view with the latest feeds from any congress member.

2. State Level - When the user clicks on a state, it first displays all representatives in that state. All the tabs now display feeds relating only to congress members in that state.

3. Zip Code Level - When the user enters their zip code in the box, all their Congress representatives will first appear. This will include the two senators, as well as one or more representatives. All the tabs now display feeds relating only to those people listed.

4. Detail Level - At this level, the congressperson's contact information is displayed. In addition to News, YouTube, and Twitter, that person's most spoken Congress words are displayed in the new "Capitol Words" tab, and there is also a history of that person's latest votes. All the other tabs are filtered to that single person in question.

5. Watch List Level - When users are viewing a congressperson's detail page, they have the option to add that person to their "Watch List". When they do, that person is displayed in the "My Watch List" area at the top right corner of the site. An unlimited number of people can be added to someone's watch list. This allows users to filter content based only on representatives that they want to keep track of.

Adding this much fine-tuning was quite some work, but we feel that it's worth it. Visitors can now keep track of who they want to keep track of, thus making more informed decisions.

Although the Apps for America contest is over, we'll definitely keep adding more features to pry open the doors between congresspeople and their constituents.

ProjectSpaces on Twitter! - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ProjectSpaces

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

ProjectSpaces is now on Twitter to help our users stay up to date on any new releases, tips, and other interesting information we are working on.

Code Samples, Job Applications, and You - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Sandy Smith) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 03:16:15 GMT

According to a couple of sources I've checked out recently, code samples are rare in the software development interviewing process. One discussion was full of responses calling the idea ridiculous and suggesting candidates cancel interviews at places that request a code sample. I think they're incredibly wrong. I think code samples are a great idea, and I'm going to not only tell you why, but give you tips on amateur mistakes to avoid if you want to be taken seriously.

You can't tell that much about a person from a code sample

That's right, and that's wrong. It's right in that many commenters calling a company "stupid" for "relying" on code samples assume there's no other criteria to hiring. Code samples are actually one of several initial screening devices I use to cut out people who aren't going to work out. At every stage in the game, I'm looking for something to tell me--before committing a lot of money and diverting a lot of other people's time to bring you on board--whether you're likely to be the sort of programmer we're looking for. This doesn't mean you're a bad programmer if we don't hire you; it just means that who you are and where you are as a programmer doesn't match our culture and our needs, and likely our culture and opportunities won't be a great fit for you, either.

Of course, if I like a code sample, there are still interviews, references, and some discussion of real and example code. We still care very much as to whether you know our technology, can work well on a team, are comfortable working with policy nonprofits, and several other factors that go into a hiring decision.

Then again, I can tell a lot about a person from their code. Are they consistent? Do their variable names follow a pattern? Do they have a coding style and stick to it? Basically, do they write code to be read by others, or assume they'll always know what they meant and code for themselves in the moment? Do they follow contemporary idioms for the programming language the code sample is in? Is the code filled with convoluted ways of solving simple problems? Is there anything clever, and is it in service of the problem or just adding complexity to make the solution more interesting to create? Is the code from an open source project? Have they collaborated with others? Do they follow good habits, even on personal projects? Is it well laid out or look like a quick hack?

But you don't even know it's the person's own code!

Yeah, I do. I mean, not immediately on first glance, but there should be some correspondence between the level of sophistication in the code and the work history on the resume. Rarely have I gotten a sample so perfect I wonder if the programmer wrote it themselves. And even if they stole the code, whether they have the sense to steal a Renoir or a Kinkade also tells me something. I mean, if you can't even steal good code, I can safely pass on to the next application.

If, during an interview, I get an impression that's at odds with the code sample I've seen, I can always ask about it. It's tough to fake familiarity with a piece of code you grabbed off a server somewhere. If the code uses design patterns, I ask about them. If it doesn't, I ask why not. I ask about the tradeoffs in using a given pattern versus not using one. I'll usually ask these sorts of questions anyway, so I get a sense of where the programmer is in thinking about code as well as writing it.

But maybe my code is all proprietary or even classified!

The code you write at work is, but there's no reason you can't write out part of a common solution. We're also an open source shop, so you can always write a plugin or extend an open source app. If you need a few days to get a sample together, I'll understand, but hey, if you're going to apply for programming positions, you shouldn't be surprised if they want to see samples of your work. This is a problem long ago dealt with in other aspects of your profession: strategists will be asked to provide writing samples and designers will be asked for samples of their portfolio. Programming isn't a job you tend to hold onto for decades; you should have a sample ready. I have always had current samples since I became a programmer.

OK, so what should I provide?

Above all, something you're proud of, or at the very least feel is a good representation of where you are as a programmer. This does not mean the cleverest thing you've ever done (frequently the cleverest thing a programmer does is not the best thing a programmer does). It can be a whole program or just a part of one. It should be more than one screenful of code--I need enough to see patterns.

In a way, it's like the various cooking competitions that are all the rage now (go Carla!). These chefs have a body of work and produce pieces of dishes many times each lunch and dinner (or even breakfast). But the finale comes down to whether they produced a great meal that represents them as a creative artist. And, like food, programming is a mix of artistry and engineering.

So...what should I not provide?

Thanks for asking--because I rarely worry about stolen code when I see so much bad stuff given to me as representative of a programmer.

Don't indulge your bad habits

Anybody who gets out of a programming 101 class knows good programmers comment their code. There are arguments about how much or how little, but there's a reason almost every code-completing IDE also generates comment templates for you. We all slack off sometimes (admit it), but the time to do it is not when you're sending me code that's going to help me determine whether or not to bring you in for an interview.

Likewise, giving me code with obvious XSS or SQL injection vulnerabilities is probably not a good idea. Even if you're writing a toy app to demonstrate a few techniques, the fact that you code without basic filtering and validation is going to make me nervous that you'll do it when there's a project manager asking you if there's any way you can add a couple of more client requests by the deadline. Sure, it's the kind of thing non-technical people aren't going to notice or praise you for, but they will curse you when their site around sensible regulations for underwater basket weaving curricula is replaced with pr0n.

Don't be weird

I see some really odd constructions. If you think the rest of the universe is wrong about most things about programming in a given language and you're going to prove them wrong and stun me with your brilliance in a single code sample, you're basically doomed. I'm looking to see if you're aware of best practices going on in the wider world around you (do you read any programming blogs? articles on your language?). I'm also looking to see if you think about problems in a way that makes sense to most people. In our organization at least, everybody is going to work on someone else's code at some point. Wrapping a static HTML block inside a PHP include that contains a Javascript function to print out each line of HTML is not the kind of innovation that I'm looking for. Save it for the obfuscated C competition. Don't laugh; I've seen that.

Don't give me the same code sample you used six years ago

I'm looking to see what you're like now. If you haven't really progressed in six years, then, OK. I've still got the PHP 4 samples lying around. Heck, I've even got the Perl CGI flat-file database I used when I interviewed here. They're probably not my best chance to prove to you that I know what I'm doing now. Likewise, don't give me HTML 4 table-based layouts with nested function calls that assumes register_globals is on.

Remember, all of this--at least in my case--is not to prove you're the most brilliant programmer that ever walked the face of the earth. I'm not actually interested in hiring that person. I'm interested in a really good programmer who works well with others, can be put in front of someone non-technical, and who can easily pick up our idioms and have positive contributions of their own. So don't overthink the code sample, but don't put less thought and care into it than you do how you dress for the interview. Neither will get you the job by themselves, but both of them can either keep you from getting the job you want or make a good impression you can confirm throughout the interview process.

DrupalCon DC - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Matt Gibbs) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:10:46 GMT

Hey everyone, just a heads up that the whole Tech Team will be attending DrupalCon DC from March 4 - 7. "DrupalCon is the official Drupal unconference that attracts the most talented open source developers and innovative web shops in the world and brings them together to share knowledge, make decisions on the future of Drupal, and get to know each other in person". If you're also attending, feel free to stop by our booth if you want to chat or know more about us.

We hope to see you there!

How to make new users feel welcome - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ProjectSpaces

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:30:00 GMT

Here are a few tips on how to welcome new users effectively and orient them on how to use an online workspace and actively participate in the community. Sending a welcome message to new users within the first 24 hours of joining often makes a huge difference encouraging new community members to actively participate. A friendly, informal, and light-hearted tone helps people get comfortable and points out specific actions users can take.

Big plans for ProjectSpaces in 2009 - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ProjectSpaces

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:45:00 GMT

We're planning some big things for ProjectSpaces in 2009. Here is a laundry list of what is currently on our roadmap. As always, we love to hear input and suggestions from ProjectSpaces customers so keep them coming!

What is a Content Type? - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (Matt Gibbs) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:42:00 GMT

A "Content Type" is jargon for what is a simple programming concept. I've been asked this question many times over the years, and hopefully this post will cut through the obscurity once and for all.

Document. Event. News Article. Staff Member. These are all examples of Content Types.

Which input fields would you expect to see when adding a new Staff Member? You'd probably want "First Name", "Last Name", "Date of Birth", "Phone Number", "Active Projects", etc. For Events, you'd likely want "Event Title", "Start Date", "End Date", "Location", and "Contact Name". The fields serve to describe the item, and any field(s) can be added to or removed from a content type.

That's it. A content type is the term for a "bucket" of input fields. All items marked as "Events" share the same fields. If you add a new input field to the "Event" content type, then all current (and future) Event items will have that new field, too. Pretty simple, huh?

The real power of content types isn't the categorization alone. Since all this information is now nicely structured within these content types, it's a whole lot easier to form relationships among different items. Remember that "Contact Name" field in the "Event" content type? A developer could easily set that field to pull in all staff members (items belonging to the "Staff Member" content type) and allow the user to select which staff members to use.

Many modern CMS platforms (Drupal, Pods, SyntaxCMS) allow developers to easily add and configure new content types without touching a line of code.

Drupal module and theme naming collisions - Forum One Tech Blog

nospam@example.com (William Hurley) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:33:58 GMT

As good as Drupal is, as many third-party enhancements there are, there usually comes a time when they just aren't quite enough. The answer to that is to create your own module that does exactly what you or your client needs. And since they are for a particular site the natural inclination is to name them after that site. Similarly when developing a theme for a site the natural inclination is to name the theme for the site. This, unfortunately, is a Very Bad Thing (TM). For why this is let's take a quick look at where the configuration for modules and themes ends up, the system table.

A quick export shows us the following:



CREATE TABLE `system` (

  `filename` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',

  `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',

  `type` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',

  `description` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',

  `status` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',

  `throttle` tinyint(4) NOT NULL default '0',

  `bootstrap` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',

  `schema_version` smallint(6) NOT NULL default '-1',

  `weight` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',

  PRIMARY KEY  (`filename`),

  KEY `weight` (`weight`)

)

The important rows are filename, which holds the file included for the module or the stylesheet displayed for the theme; name, which holds the name of the module or theme; type which is either module or theme; and description which holds the description of the module or the path to the templating engine for themes. While I could take a slight detour to talk about why this structure is a bad idea (hint, it involves using the same column to mean two different things -- bad, Drupal, bad), it only partly contributes to our problem.

When the theme and module have the same name and a user goes to the theme administrative section it updates all rows in the system table with the name of the theme to have the correct filename and description/templating engine. It, however, does not check for the type. So when it finds the module with the same name it overwrites it. So you end up with a row that has a type of module but has the filename of a CSS file, and when the system goes to include all modules that are active it grabs the CSS and you end up with it output at the very top of the page. Oh, and any functionality that your module provided no longer works.

So the moral of the story is don't name themes and modules the same.

ProjectSpaces Adds Usability Enhancements - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ProjectSpaces

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:30:00 GMT

After hearing many of your suggestions, we added many small usability enhancements to different sections of ProjectSpaces. For example, you can both now specify user rights at the time of inviting others and use the email notification feature to better serve your needs.

Host ProjectSpaces on your own servers - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ProjectSpaces

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

We are now offering a self-hosted version of ProjectSpaces that makes it easy and cost-effective to install on your own servers. This is a great option for organizations that need to keep their files and data inside their firewalls.

ProjectSpaces releases API - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ProjectSpaces

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:15:00 GMT

We are pleased to announce the availability of the ProjectSpaces API. The API allows ProjectSpaces customers to integrate the powerful, easy-to-use and quick to implement project management and extranet tools with existing systems and tools.

Top 10 tricks/tips for ProjectSpaces - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ProjectSpaces

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Here are 10 tips and tricks you may/may not have not known about for using ProjectSpaces.

ProjectSpaces adds Gantt charts and Cloning - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ProjectSpaces

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

In response to overwhelming demand, we released the ability to generate Gantt charts for workplans. We also added the ability to clone projects and easily create templates with standard folder structures, work plans, documents, etc.

Embed ProjectSpaces Login Fields on Your Public Web Site - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ...

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Want your users to be able to login to ProjectSpaces directly from your home page? It's a great way to make it really easy for staff, partners, clients, and others to log in to their workspaces. Here's how...

Collaboration convergence - how collaborative workspaces are like mobile phones - Online ...

Tue, 20 May 2008 14:15:00 GMT

There's been a huge increase in the diversity of mobile devices on the market over the past couple of years. From the simplest bare bones phone (e.g. the jitterbug) to the most feature bloated windows mobile device, there is a market for diversity because every consumer has different priorities. The same goes for collaborative workspaces.

Break the email habit - encouraging adoption of online collaboration tools - Online ...

Tue, 13 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Here are some suggestions for getting your users to break the email habit and adopt an online collaboration tool to share files, manage tasks, and communicate better. It obviously starts with using a really intuitive and easy-to-use technology platform, but it is equally important to pay attention to the "people part" and actively encourage adoption and use.

ProjectSpaces is going multilingual: Spanish, French, Arabic, etc - Online Collaboration ...

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

We are working on adding multilingual functionality to ProjectSpaces. If you are serving non-English-speaking users, read on...

ProjectSpaces vs. SharePoint - Online Collaboration Workspaces - ProjectSpaces

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Here are some thoughts and musings about ProjectSpaces as a SharePoint Alternative.