Monthly Archives: April 2009

Best practice for professional communities

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Came across this nice Slideshare on Community 2.0: The Business of Online Communities, and spotted HBO’s Standards page on slide 29 with these examples of acceptable and unacceptable comment:

  1. Be respectful and civil to other members, even if you disagree with them. Differences of opinion are OK; personal attacks are not. ACCEPTABLE POST: Member X, what you said is stupid and irrelevant. Why would you believe that? UNACCEPTABLE: Member X, you are a stupid idiot. Only a jackass would believe that.
  2. Any unacceptable content (posts, member names, or subject lines containing profanity, sexually graphic or offensive language, etc) will be deleted. ACCEPTABLE POST: Wow! The shit sure hit the fan on The Wire last night! UNACCEPTABLE: Member X, I can’t believe you didn’t like last night’s episode, what a dumb shit you are!

While we wouldn’t consider using examples like these, it got me thinking what would be good examples be for professional online communities?

Likewise we wouldn’t have a line which talks about “reserving the right to remove any material that does not (in our judgment) comply with these standards and to revoke posting privileges at our discretion and without warning or explanation” as per HBO’s. But what would be best practice on professional communities?

The Business of Online Communities

View more presentations from Bryan Person.

Startups and amplified individuals

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Looking forward to We20 in Leicester on Saturday, meeting people who want to make the city a better place to live and work!

I’m taking this great BusinessWeek piece about creating jobs by supporting start-ups in the US to the meeting in the town hall, and hope to get the chance to discuss  its relevance to Leicester in beating the recession.

Video from NESTA We20 event above also sets the scene.  Note the connection with NESTA’s Amplied City Leicester in creating a network of amplified individuals who might benefit from such entreprenurial support?

Budget coverage using CoveritLive to capture tweets

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Dennis Howlett deployed CoveritLive to good effect on the ICAEW’s online communities today to cover the UK budget as it unfolded, as caught (via hash tags) by individual tweets. His reflections on the project here.

Budget day twitters

Transcript of the budget speech on Hansard online.

Go to say that in the circumstances that this extremely political budget was in one sense well played by Labour.

Be optimistic about growth, and push green tech and digital investment; up the tax on the rich as if anyone but the rich care (and the rich can get accountants to evade these hikes);  and push funding cuts till after the general election.

Labour Party supporters ethic of progressive blogging

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Interesting statement of ethics by pro-Labour bloggers setting out their ethic which informs their blogging. It includes this call to Government to see online engagement as a cultural change worth engaging with. Maybe a little blogging training would go along way in providing Ministers with the tools for the job?

We believe that attempts to transfer ‘command and control’ models to online politics will inevitably fail. Labour must show that it gets that – in practice as well as theory – if we are make our contribution to the progressive movements on which our causes depend.

The government and the political parties should use their official spaces to contribute to and enable these conversations. We also want to see Ministers and MPs having the confidence to engage in political debate and argument elsewhere, while being clear that there is no value for anybody in seeking to control independent spaces for discussion.

Brent Hoberman is busy

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Lastminute.com founder @brenthoberman & Bebo’s Michael Birch launch investment fund for tech start-ups http://is.gd/tkZY

A little more detail on TechCrunch which adds a European dimension to the news.

Interesting timing with news in today’s DT that the Chancellor is due to postpone the launch of a rescue fund for technology companies that investors say are being starved of venture capital.

Leicester amplified

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NLab Social Networks Conference 2008 – Andrea Saveri from IOCT on Vimeo.

At e-mint last night WordFrame’s David Terrar reminded me that next week NESTA is interviewing people who’ve entered proposals to be the learning partner for ‘Amplified City Leicester’. What’s Amplified City Leicester I hear you say? Watch the video above to get a conceptual idea, then read below…

In terms of an overall project overview here’s what I’ve extracted from the ITT:

Amplified City is a city-wide experiment designed to grow the innovation capacity of Leicester by networking
key connectors across the city’s disparate and diverse communities in an incentivised participatory project,
enabled by social media:
• To develop a transferable model for amplifying a diverse city’s grassroots innovation capacity through
connecting diverse communities through key individuals
• To generate practical examples of how collaborative technologies can be exploited in a city context

It clearly has a lot of potential in a city which is set to be the first city in Europe where the BME population is 50% or higher:

Informed by research conducted by the Institute for the Future; de Montfort’s Institute of Creative Technologies’s work on transliteracy; the NLab regional social media network and the IOCT’s visiting professor Howard Rheingold, the project will build on the participants’ existing understanding of their working styles, motivations and expertise.

The aim will be to create new structures and processes that bypass traditional constraints and stimulate innovation for social and commercial benefit across the city.

Watch this space Leicester!

PS: Talking of amplification it’s great to see plans for a new music project, ‘Lock 42‘, to open in a Victorian Mill on Frog Island in Leicester in October, out of the ashes of the famous Princess Charlotte, where I saw the Dandy Warhols play.

John Pearce explains the ICAEW’s ion community plans

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I like the point where John says: “It’s a learning curve,and a cultural change, and (in response to a question from Dennis Howlett) …we are not frightened to fail”.

Interesting to see how it’s developing after my involvement working as community manager from December 07 to January 09 to help set up the ion communities. Nice indicator of popularity that 1,500 folk have joined the top level community which is essentially an entry page; I guess they all get an invitation or e-newsletter to follow that up marketing wise.

With CIMA about to launch it’s own global community in the next few months, I wonder if ACCA will follow suit with its own initiative?

P2 for WordPress?

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Nice post from Sitepoint on a new microblogging service for WordPress. Looks like I’m gong to have to give it a try:

Last month saw the announcement of P2, a special theme for use with WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress installations that makes a regular blog look and act more like a microblog. It’s an upgrade of the Prologue theme that was released early last year, and if you’re comfortable with WordPress you’ll certainly find this is easy to understand.

For those of you who are running your own WordPress installation, adding P2 is as simple as activating a theme: just upload the P2 files to the appropriate spot on your web server, and activate it in the WordPress administration panel. At the time of writing, the P2 theme is only available from the Automattic Subversion repository, but it should appear on the Theme Directory any day now. If you’re feeling adventurous, grab it with SVN:

svn checkout http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/p2/

Otherwise, you can try P2 on a free WordPress.com blog right away.

P2 features a number of Ajax enhancements that make browsing and posting extremely fast. Keyboard shortcuts are available that make navigating your P2 microblog as fast as typing; posts and comments can be added and edited without a page refresh; and there’s even a heads-up notification area that lets you know immediately if fresh content has appeared since you first opened the page. If you’re looking for Twitter-like features such as marking an item as a favorite or the ability to befriend other users, these are unavailable by default, but WordPress’s wide variety of plugins can help you add those features. New users are able to become blog authors right away, so if your aim is to create a new free-for-all microblog, you’ll be able to achieve that with P2.

WordPress’ installation requirements are quite straightforward and should be available on most web hosts: you’ll just need PHP and MySQL. Both WordPress and P2 are free.

The Difference Between Good And Bad Moderators?

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Nice post from FeverBee on the difference between good and bad moderators. Don’t just shooot first and ask questions later in other words, as a moderator your job is not to police first and foremost, it’s too help encourage people to take part in a real community, which allows for disagreement and conflict. It’s a tough one for some organisations setting up their own community as there are risks both ways. Be too safe and you end up deleting without explanation, and sending out the wrong message; on the other hand leave politically sensitive content on which is read by powerful players like national governments and it could harm your corporate reputation.

MySpace’s real names = full names

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Real name use on MySpaceInteresting to see the emphasis on real names is also picked up by MySpace; see the reasons in Tom Anderson’s blog piece below:


Current mood:  grateful
Category: MySpace

You know how you can change your display name or default picture? You know how you have some friends who change it everyday or 10 times a day? You know how you can never find or identify them beacuse they change it all the time?! Well that’s the thinking behind the “display my full name” on MySpace.

We put this feature out there almost six months ago, but people weren’t really noticing it, so I wanted to put up this announcement to spread the word.

You’re now able to show your full name on MySpace under your picture, while your display name stays on top. Look at my picture to the left, you’ll see “Tom” above my picture and “Tom Anderson” underneath it. It’s that simple.

To turn it on for myspace/profile, click here.

The idea is that your full/real name should never change, even if you decide to give yourself a new nickname for a few months (or an afternoon). This makes it easier to find your friends in search, or in any of the places where you can type in your friends name to do something:

Tagging them in a photo
Finding them on your friends list
Inviting them to an event
Composing a mesage
On the status history page when you just want to show ONE person’s status history

We have some rules around this. If you’re going to display your full name, it must be your real name. If you don’t want to display it, that’s fine. But if you are going to choose to display it, then it must be real. This to avoid confusion, and to make sure the purpose of the feature isn’t ruined by people putting goofy stuff in there.

Finally, just to let you know, we’ll be adding this in more places–you’ll just be able to type in a friends name to find them in other areas where it makes sense. Instead of searching a list of friends, you’ll be able to type in a friends name to create a preferred list for a blog, to put someone in a friend category, or to select your top friends, etc.