Blog Posts About: event

I'm heading down to the Silicon Valley for the Online Community Unconference put on by my friends at Forum One.  If you're unfamiliar with an unconference, check out this wikipedia entry.  Basically it's a great way to get people together without all the baggage (and costs) of a "conference."

I've signed up to lead a session on "New Community Planning" as I often find myself in the position to help plan a community-oriented sites.  I'm not leading it because I have the answers - I'm leading it because I think there is a need for people in positions like mine to learn from one another.  There will be a ton of very informed people at the unconference and I hope that we can use the time to gather some consensus on what should go into a "community plan".  I'll report back here with what the session produces.

This coming Monday, May 21st at 6pm, I'll be the speaking at the Refresh Seattle event at the Ballard Library. My talk is brand new and called "Your Website is a Party Waiting to Happen". As the description on the site says:

Lee will decode the world of online communities and boil all the hype down to the basic strategies and elements that make online communities work. You'll leave this talk with easy to remember ways to host a successful online community and/or throw one hell of a good party.

As you may be able to tell, the talk is about what hosting real world parties can teach us about online communities. It takes a fun look at the 12 (or so) elements that make both successful.

I hope you can make it - you can RSVP here.

Refresh Seattle is part of Refreshing Cities, "a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas."

This was my second WebVisions - a conference focused on "the future of the Web" that has happened in Portland, Oregon for the last seven years. I enjoy Webvisions and was honored to speak there this year. My talk was about how blogs, communities and mobile devices are changing the travel experience. Of course, it was all based on stories from our trip last year.

The conference attracts a lot of designers and developers, along with business people working to get an understanding of the changes shaping the web. This makes for a strange but useful mix of talks from AJAX to effective communication. I sensed a real focus on communication this year. Here are a few I enjoyed.

David Pescovitz has a long list of titles, from being co-founder of Boing Boing to working for the Institute For The Future and being Editor-at-large for Make: Magazine. His talk was wide-ranging, but one small thing stuck with me. He is a constant observer - looking for things that indicate a shift in the way things work. He calls them "weak signals". I'm going to have to steal this phrase.

Kevin Smokler is a writer that is focused on something near and dear to my heart: plain language communication. His talk was all about the goofy ways that technology companies try to relate what they do. The key point from Kevin is that most customers are not engineers and product descriptions should recognize this fact if they want more success. Customers care more about the problem a product solves than how it solves it.

I enjoyed meeting Lane Becker and Thor Muller who have a new company called Satisfaction Unlimited (blog). Their talk was Let go! 8 Steps to Succeeding in a Post 2.0 World. One of their messages stuck with me and I'm considering a whole post about it. They encourage businesses to "be like the internet". This sounds a little silly, I know. The message is that businesses should reconsider their position in relation to other businesses and web sites related to them. In being more like the Internet, they should see themselves as a single part of a giant network as opposed to being the center of the universe. This orientation is a great way to think about communities of customers, where they participate and why.

All-in-all a good time. Flickr group is here.

Photo credit: Aaron Gustafson  

Webvisions is coming this week in Portland Oregon and I hope we'll see you there. From the site:

Join the rockstars of design, user experience and business strategy for two days of mind-melding on what's new in the digital world.

I'm going to be speaking on How Blogs and Mobile Are Changing World Travel at 2:45 on Thursday. The talk is based on our experiences in blogging our trip around the world in 2006.

I'm really looking forward to seeing some old friends and making some new ones. My friends Paul Ingram and Kurt and Douglas from Ask-a-Ninja are also speaking. Strangely enough, I recently realized that Douglas is the same Douglas with which I was friends in college.

If you're going, leave a comment and we'll hook up in Portland.

We've made it to Austin safely and ready for our first South-by-Southwest experience. Looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new ones and meeting old friends that I've never actually met in person. This should be a few days of fun.

We're both so bummed that we're going to miss the SXNW party that is sponsored by our good friends at Blue Flavor in Seattle as well as Bryght and Rain City Studios in Vancouver, BC. We are leaving Austin on Monday for the Community 2.0 conference. That party would have been a highlight I'm sure. Great Northwest Represent!

SXSW is going to be Twitter's coming out party - the buzz is amazing. I'll be very curious to see how it all works. I hope that people will consider using direct messages instead of "@" messages. Add me? :-)

Part of being away for 2006 was missing a lot of the un-conferences, like Bar Camp and Seattle's MindCamp, even though I was part of the early planning. Moose Camp, my first un-conference, is an un-conference in the same tradition as the others - relaxed atomosphere, open discussion, people focus, etc. My kind of event.

Before the conference started, I submitted a title on the wiki for a Moose Camp talk called "New Rules for the New Communities" - and then mostly forgot about it. This morning I found myself doing a 30 second pitch for a talk that had disappeared into the recesses of my mind. I think I said "Communities used to be based on message boards and listserves, now we're seeing a number of new forms of community tools that are changing the way we think about community on the web."

Thankfully, the whole idea of un-preparation fits nicely with an un-conference, where no one wants to see another bullet point or product pitch. Nancy White and I decided to co-host the talk (thanks Nancy!) and just let things happen. We wanted a discussion and not a presentation and people jumped right in. We started thinking about "community" in terms of tags and wrote the tags on a blackboard (yes - a real blackboard!), which quickly resembled a networked tag-cloud of community perception. He's a panorama I took of the board.

Original photo here.

I was so excited to see so many people get involved and make really insightful points. For example, Chris Heuer had some great things to say about the situational nature of community and how it's hard to compare one to another. At the end, Nancy had the great idea of going around the room and having each person say one word that they associate with community. The most popular choice? "Messy". How true.