DavePress

What community managers should know and do

Dave — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:17:00 +0000

For an internal bit of work at Learning Pool, I was asked to contribute to a list of things that would need to be a part of the role description for a community manager – a position we might be recruiting for in the near future.

I quickly threw together a list and emailed it round, but then thought it might be something worth sharing here.

So here’s my list – this is in no particular order. What would you add?

Network well online – either have or be able to build reach and influence online
Has established online presence and regular use of online communities in either personal or professional capacity
Ability to think strategically about the needs of the community, and of the products they support, and design the development of the community around those needs
Draw up appropriate community guidelines and ensure adherence to them
Encourage new members to join the community
Write high quality, engaging online content
Spread the reach of the community using a range of social tools
Provide regular updates to community members through regular email newsletters etc
Know and understand the community – be able to identify which members would be interested in, or have answers to, certain issues
Good mediation skills and ability to defuse online arguments and tensions
Ability to moderate content and manage difficult members an promoting good behaviour
Has a good understanding of the technology and culture of the net
Ability to measure and track analytics and membership stats and develop strategies to improve them
Ability to identify technological improvements that would improve user experience and make the community useful for the company
Proactive approach to interacting with the community – this is not a 9-5 Mon-Fri job
Knowledge of the rest of the organisation and the ability to identify the people who need to be involved in responding to issues
Good knowledge of the issues involved in the community and the ability to respond to topics in a knowledgeable fashion
Ability to find and share useful related content to the community from elsewhere on the web
Ability to identify key community members, and work with them to help promote and manage the community

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Come work at Learning Pool!

Dave — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:28:40 +0000

I’ve had a great time since joining the team at Learning Pool. It’s a forward thinking company with lots of ideas, jokes and abuse bouncing around the whole time.

If you’re looking for a new job, why not consider taking a look at some of our current vacancies? They are all based in Derry, in Northern Ireland – the UK’s capital of culture in 2013!

Development Manager – help manage our team of developers and make sure our new projects get finished on spec, on time and on budget.
Operations Manager – managing the doing bits of the organisation – mainly tech and customer services.
Senior PHP Developer – a ninja-level coder is required.
Systems Administrator – keeping the plumbing right and helping us develop our cloud strategy.
System Tester – break stuff before our customers do!

All the links above are to PDFs with the details. If you fancy applying, bear in mind Mary’s helpful hints for people going for jobs at LP.

My main one piece of advice: it helps to love what you do when you work here.

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10 rules to start innovating

Dave — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:30:06 +0000

James Gardner‘s Little Innovation Book is a great read for anyone who has an interesting in getting their team, department or organisation doing things differently. Not only is it short, and very practical, it’s also cheap – you can read it online for free, or buy an ebook version for a few quid.

Innovation seems almost a dirty word at times. I lose count of the number of times I see people putting on their lists of words they cannot bear. I don’t understand why this is; maybe because most people and organisations are so bad at it? I should think that would mean we ought to be talking about it more, in that case!

It strikes me that we need good innovation now, in government, more than ever. After all, what with the budget cuts, things are going to have to change one way or another. The two ideas that seem to be emerging from local government are shared services and outsourcing. I’m sure we can do better than that?

Anyhow, James’ book is made up of 10 rules for innovating. Am sure he won’t mind me reproducing them here, with a quick description of each. If you want more (including some great case studies), you’ll have to read the book.

Create an Innovation Strategy First – decide what your innovation aim is and how you can best get there: do nothing, play to win, or play not to lose
Define What Innovation Means – “one has to have an understanding of what will be acceptable as outputs from innovators before one starts to be innovative”
Make Sure the Role of Innovators is Clear – are those with responsibility for innovation actually involved in innovating, or in promoting a culture of innovation?
Have a Connection to the Money – innovators must ensure they get some budget, although not too much – but have to justify it to the bean counters
Address the 3 Big Myths – which are that 1) ideas are the most important thing; 2) innovation is all about big hits; and 3) innovation is risky, unpredictable and a luxury
Manage the Technologists – “The key to co-operation is to find a trigger point which allows Information Technology to contribute within the boundaries of their prioritization framework without alienating them altogether”.
Answer the 3 Key Questions – which are: ‘Can we do this?’, ‘Should we do this?’ and ‘When?’.
Drown the Puppy – to keep returns on innovation projects high, get used to killing the ones which probably won’t work out.
Share Everything – “innovators who talk about their work, share their knowledge, and network widely seem to be much more successful than those who don’t”.
Manage the People – have you got the right group of people in the team to work on the innovation project and make it work?

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Personal learning and technology

Dave — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:14:18 +0000

I blogged over on the Learning Pool site about the personalisation of learning and development in public sector (indeed, any) organisations, and the role of technology in it.

Thought DavePress readers might also be interested.

One of the interesting developments of web technology has been the increasing focus on individual, personal choices. Don’t like what’s on TV? Choose something for yourself to watch on YouTube. Nothing of interest in the newspaper? Use Google to find a blog that covers the issues you’re into. And so on.

Now this issue of personal choice isn’t limited to our personal tastes in media consumption. It applies to everything. Increasingly, it’s applying to learning and development – and that could have significant implications for workforce learning.

Read the rest of it here.

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Quick thoughts on open government

Dave — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:11:51 +0000

I rather like using the phrase ‘open government’ to cover – if I’m honest – the stuff I’m interested in. Indeed, the eagle eyed among you may have spotted that the tagline for this blog is now the suitably pompous “Open government and everything else”.

In many ways I like it because it enables me to put the use of social software in government into a wider context – important given the age of austerity in which we find ourselves. I’ve never thought that social media usage was an end in itself, but perhaps sometimes the actual end was never articulated particularly well. ‘Open government’ does that nicely.

The O’Reilly book, Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice (which I would recommend) offers a useful definition of the three elements of Open Government:

Transparency - open data and that sort of thing
Collaboration - working together better within government (knowledge sharing, learning, enteprise 2.0 type stuff) and also collaborating with service providers, social innovators etc
Participation - crowdsourcing, use of social media, co-production etc

My friend Dave Coplin posted up a video of a talk he gave outlining these principles, which is rather good and well worth watching all the way through.

So how are these things actually going to happen? I think the two main contributors are going to be:

Technology – which I would break down further to include social technology, cloud computing and open source
Culture – including sharing, learning and innovation – all of which government needs to get better at to make open government a reality.

Another thing that is vital to open government is a combination of the two things above, in other words, the culture of technology. This is something I have banged on about before, but the greatest recent example was the one I documented here. Technology provides the platforms and the infrastructure of open government, but open government itself is not predicated on technology. However, I do think it is key to take technology seriously, and not to dismiss it as the stuff of geeks and weirdos.

Here’s a good (if long) discussion about “government 2.0″ – often used as a synonym for open government, but which for me has a slightly more technical bent. For me, ‘government 2.0′ means “what can technology and technologists do to improve government”. Open government is more “what can everyone do to improve government”.

Expect a bit more on this from me in the near future as I extrapolate in my usual half-baked way on the various threads involved in open government.

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Yay for Kindle

Dave — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 12:23:07 +0000

Amazon have just relaunched the Kindle e-reading device in the UK, with a new model, which looks rather spiffy.

Mine is one of the old, white ones – but I still love it. The new one features a new layout which makes the device smaller overall but keeping the same sized screen. The Kindle now supports wifi, which is cool – mine can only use 3G networks.

As John Naughton writes in his Observer column on the subject:

In the end, however, it’s not hardware that matters, but the effectiveness of the overall system in which the device is embedded. That was the great lesson of the Apple iPod: although the hardware was lovely from the outset, it would never have had the impact it had without the link to iTunes software on the PC/Mac and thence to the iTunes store. Other companies had made nice MP3 players, but none had put together a seamless system for getting music from CDs or online retailers on to them. Apple did and the rest is history.

The evolution of the ebook business reveals the same kind of pattern. First up, in 2006, was Sony, with a beautifully crafted device that had one crippling drawback: the difficulty of getting stuff on to it. A year later, Amazon launched the first-generation Kindle, a device inferior to the Sony product in every respect save one: it had wireless connectivity to the Amazon online store, which meant that purchasing and downloading books on to the device was a breeze. After that, it was game over for Sony and, indeed, for all the other companies that had piled into the e-reader market.

There are a number of cool things about the Kindle, some of which are unique to it, some that aren’t. Here are my top three.

1. Instant books

As John points out in his article, the iTunes-like ability to buy books right away is remarkably powerful. It’s like the difference between ordering a CD online or downloading an MP3 – why wait a day for it to be delivered when you can have it now?

2. Social reading

One thing the Kindle allows you to do is to set bookmarks in your e-books, and also to annotate them with notes. In addition to this, you can also highlight passages to make sure you remember them.

A social layer has now been added to this, in that you can now see what other people who have that book on their Kindles have highlighted. It’s a bit like seeing how many other people have saved a web page in Delicious, and is very cool.

3. Syncing

As well as the Kindle e-reader device, Amazon make applications available for other hardware to read books on, including Mac, Windows, Android and iPhone. This enables you to download books to other devices and keep reading even when you don’t have your Kindle on you.

Most obviously useful for phones, the really great thing with the Kindle is the way that when you open a book in one of the apps, it opens on the last page you read on your Kindle. Likewise, when you then open the book on your Kindle, it catches up to where you got up to on the other device.

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Holiday

Dave — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:29:11 +0000

I’m officially on holiday now, so don’t expect to see much here over the next 7 days. I was hoping to get some posts written up and scheduled to publish over the week I’m away, but in the end found better things to do.

We’re off to the Suffolk coast – the weather looks dreadful so I doubt we’ll be doing much sunbathing. Fingers’ crossed though that the Met Office have got it wrong!

If anything interesting happens while I’m away, be a dear and leave a link in the comments to this post so I don’t miss it. Ta!

See you on the other side…

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Android thoughts

Dave — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 09:40:44 +0000

So, I was lucky enough to be given a Nexus One by my wonderful employers a few weeks ago, to have a play with and possibly replace my iPhone (3gs) if I liked it. I thought perhaps folk reading this blog would be interested to hear how I’m getting on with it.

Well, the short answer is that I really like it.

Here’s the longer answer:

The Nexus One uses the Android operating system, which is developed by Google, and is a competitor to the iOS of the iPhone and the Blackberry OS, which appears on, yes, Blackberries. Instead of being limited to one company’s hardware, though, Android is open and can be used by any manufacturer.

Here’s a video about the latest version of Android:

This has led to Android being described as a more open system that, say, iOS and this is backed up by the open source nature of Android, based as it is on Linux. The Nexus One is a bit different though, as it is made by HTC, but is to Google’s specification. This has a number of advantages: you get operating system upgrades before anyone else, and the phone is free of any of the crud often automatically installed by carriers and manufacturers. It also means you can stick any sim card you like into it and it should work fine.

Android is therefore often compared with Windows in the 90s, on desktop computers. Apple’s MacOS was only available Apple computers and was tied to the hardware, resulting is a very high user experience but limited sales. Microsoft’s Windows, on the other hand, could be installed on any computer running on an Intel processor, and so was significantly more popular as a result of its portability.

This openness has a number of effects, some good, some not so good. One is that the Android app store doesn’t have the same rigorous checking regime that exists for the iPhone, which means it is easier to get apps listed in the store, but that inevitably brings down the quality somewhat. Indeed, Google are so keen for people to develop for the Android platform that they are making available the Android App Inventor – a drag and drop authoring tool for mobile apps (this reminds me a great deal of the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit on the Commodore 64, but I digress).

Another form of openness is the way the phone integrates with other services. On an iPhone, when you choose to share a photo, you can usually just email it somewhere, or upload it to Apple’s MobileMe service. Choose the share option on the Nexus One, though, and you can email it, or send it to a service like Twitter or Facebook. It also knows if you have installed apps, so on my setup the options to share to Evernote and WordPress are also available. This is in addition to Google’s own services like Picasa and Goggles.

In a similar vein, external service are integrated to your contacts – so I can, if I choose to, add all my Facebook contacts to my phone, where they are added to existing contacts where possible. This is a nice touch, so for instance all my contacts with whom I am also Facebook friends have their Facebook profile picture added to their listing. I can also access people’s Twitter and Facebook pages straight from their contact listing, which is handy.

The camera is a 5 megapixel one, with a flash, and it seems to take excellent photos, as I found on my recent trip to Ireland:

As someone who uses a lot of Google services, not least email, one thing that works as brilliantly as you would imagine it would is the integration with Google stuff. The native email application is a joy to use, and various other Google services have their own apps, or just work extremely well in the browser.

Battery life is pretty good, slightly better than my iPhone 3gs but with things like wifi, 3g and gps turned on all the time.

The downside is mainly the touchscreen, which simply isn’t up to the standard I have come to expect with the iPhone. It’s not as responsive, and typing on it can be tricky. I’ve no doubt I’ll get used to it in time, but for switchers it’s an obvious thing.

So for now I’m sticking with the Nexus One. I’ve had a quick play with an iPhone 4 and didn’t see enough in it to make me want to switch. The Android platform may not be as polished at iOS, but it appeals to my tinkering nature and I’ll forgive some of the user experience let downs for having better control over my phone.

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Learning Pool on tour in September

Dave — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:02:53 +0000

September is promising to be a busy month already, with Learning Pool having scheduled in some exciting events for you to come along to.

Firstly, Elaine from our Modern Governor service is hosting a breakfast meeting in Birmingham. Find out what the latest good practice is in supporting school governors and with e-learning:

Birmingham, 21 September, 9am-12pm – more details and booking

Second are a pair of breakfast briefings in Scotland. The details are:

Glasgow, 22nd September, 9am-12pm – more details and booking
Edinburgh, 23rd September, 9am-12pm – more details and booking

At these events you’ll be able to hear all about how learning technology can help your organisation improve and innovative in a climate of budget cuts. Carol Woolley from Worcestershire County Council will be telling her story of how she has used Learning Pool’s services to make her life easier and her colleagues’ lives better; and I’ll be wittering on about something or other too.

Last, but undoubtably not least, is Learning Pool’s fourth birthday party in London. It promises to be a rip-roaring afternoon of networking and interesting presentations, followed by an evening of getting mullered by the Thames. You know you want to!

London, 28 September, 2pm-throwing out time – more details and booking

It’ll be great to see some DavePress readers there!

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Boring system announcement

Dave — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:58:47 +0000

If you can see this, it means I have managed to successfully rehost DavePress!

Do me a favour and leave me a ‘hurrah!’ in the comments. It will a) make me feel better and b) help me to know everything is working ok.

Also, various bits might be broken. If you spot something, do let me know.

Thanks!