Peter Friedman, founder of LiveWorld, has a nice interview (and handsome head shot!) in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

He offers community builders both encouragement (participants in online community have "a 45 times increase in loyalty") and sound advice:

One thing we tell our customers is if they are going to say something bad about your brand on your community, you can be sure they are saying it someplace else. You might as well get your arms around it, address it, listen to it and know what it is.

The materials I was writing for CXO magazine have made it to print (and screen).  An "ask the expert" article describes how online collaboration tools and approaches are affecting our work at Forum One.  We have found ourselves using more tools in more settings and becoming more reliant on them.

In an editorial, "The collaboration revolution is coming here," I argue that we are in the beginning of the "collaboration revolution".  The thesis is that collaboration will change our economy as dramatically, but in better ways, than the assembly line changed the industrial revolution.  It talks about the motivation for online collaboration, the tools we are seeing, changes we can expect to see, and steps to take to "get in the game".

Let me know if you have any reactions, quibbles, or quarrels with your comments here.  Thanks!

ProjectSpaces now offers a WYSIWYG online document creation and editing tool called "Shared Documents".  Shared Documents are very handy for keeping joint notes, building collaborative lists, and co-authoring papers and reports.  A revision history is maintained automatically so you can always look back at older versions.  Shared Documents can be organized within the ProjectSpaces document library and are full-text searchable.

The interface for Shared Documents maintains our objective of keeping ProjectSpaces very easy to use and intuitive while supporting powerful collaboration. 

Test drive Shared Documents yourself by editing this shared document (use "guest" as the username and password) or sign up for a free trial.

Why is Save the Children asking knitters and crocheters to make a baby hat and send it to the President?   Well, the inspiration came from people who heard about baby hats through press coverage of Save's Mother's Day State of the World's Mothers 2006 report and contacted Save to find out how they could help.

It turns out that simple things like keeping newborns warm with hats can make a big difference to their chance of survival.  Two million newborns die within 24 hours of birth.  Many of these deaths can be prevented with low-tech, low-cost measures including immunizations, clean delivery, and exclusive breastfeeding.  Save the Children's Saving Newborn Lives project improves and promotes these measures.  

Encouraged by the response to the report, Save, partnering with the Warm Up America! Foundation, has called for knitters and crocheters around the country to use their skills to make a cap and use their voice to influence policy.  This is a great model of collaboration initiated by research, inspired by volunteers, and tied to advocacy with agile facilitation by a non-profit.

Get your action kit now and start knitting!

Jim Cashel, Online Communty Report editor and my long-time business partner, politely asked what my post "911 Blotter: News from a community" had to do with "online community".  (I suspect he was trying to keep me on task.)  My first answer was "not much, but I thought it was funny." 

My second, more considered, reaction is that newspapers have a lot to do with community, online and otherwise, and we often refer to them in our work.  Examples of recent newspaper-related posts include about a NCLR marketing campaign in the funnies, the Albuquerque Journal's success with online interviews, and an online firestorm at the Washington Post.  We observe and learn as newspapers figure out the web -- they need to engage with their communities, generate user-created content, and promote collaboration as a business response to flagging print subscriptions.  We get ideas from them for content, tools, marketing, and more.

Even more important though, Forum One is particularly interested in civic engagement -- online community that produces social value.  Newspapers have long been central to structuring issues and informing readers so that citizens can organize.  Benkler gives some background to the history and importance of papers in the US:

A combination of high literacy and high government tolerance, but also of postal subsidies, led the new United States to have a number and diversity of newspapers unequalled anywhere else, with a higher weekly circulation by 1840 in the 17-million-strong United States than in all of Europe with its population then of 233 million.  By 1830, when Tocqueville visited America, he was confronted with a widespread practice of newspaper reading -- not only in towns, but in far-flung farms as well, newspapers that were a primary organizing mechanism for political association. (p. 187)

So, my rationale for recounting tidbits from the police blotter?  -- it is the press capturing "community" at work.  We will certainly have more about newspapers as we go forward.

 The Albuquerque Journal is running a series of online interviews, letting the public interview their staff, using our hosted Live! Interviews Online tool.  Last week's interview with Rory McClannahan about a local property issue was particularly successful in generating community discussion.  Especially encouraging to us is that the text of the interview was then run in the print paper.  The opportunity to repurpose user generated online content in multiple media is a great way to create value online. 

Donn Friedman Assistant Managing Editor with ABQjournal.com explained that Live! Interviews Online "allow us to easily create an interactive, online community for our readers to speak up and talk back to us. As journalism evolves into a multi-channel conversation, the Forum One tool lets us easily reverse publish the results of these interactions."

Here's an image of the interview in print. 

I was lucky enough to get to spend a few days last week outside of Winthrop, Washington where I got to read the Methow Valley News.  The quality of many large-market, newspapers has declined so much that it is refreshing to find a small, local, paper that still has imagination and pop.  I particularly appreciated the "911 Blotter" column which mixed the not-too-serious:

• 6/22/06. Sheriff, DEER: A number of vehicles on Poorman Creek Road seemed to have been part of a collision which seemed to have involved a deer, which seemed to have died.
• 6/23/06. Sheriff, Winthrop Marshal, MIP:  Several minors at a party at Bear Creek campground were arrested for being in possession of whatever it was they were in possession of that they weren't supposed to have.
• 6/26/06.  Sheriff, ROCK: A car hit a rock in the road near Harts Pass.  The car was damaged; the rock uninjured.
• 6/26/06.  A 1-year-old baby in Twisp called 911.  It was apparently a wrong number.

To the extremely serious:

• 6/24/06.  Sheriff, SEARCH AND RESCUE: A woman slid about 500 feet and was injured in a climbing accident near Blue Lake Trail.  After an all-night rescue, she was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, and is in satisfactory condition.

Reporting the police blotter seems like a good way to create transparency in government as well as keep people abreast of local issues.  And it makes for good reading.  Now if only it was online so I could follow from Virginia...

The potential for the internet to transform how people coordinate our shared lives is very exciting and just beginning to be explored.  Yochai Benkler, in his book The Wealth of Networks talks about the potential for growth of "social production" enabled by new technology.

The Washington Post has two articles today that are examples of what we will see.  The first talks about using the internet for public shaming.  The title implies that this is mostly in commerce -- customers trying to "shame" firms.  We'll definitely see more of that, but intriguingly, a number of the examples in the article have to do with people holding others responsible for their personal behavior.  Will we see internet shaming as a more widespread response to public misbehavior?  A litterer's hall of shame?  A road-rage driver's facebook?

The second article reports on MySpace and Seventeen magazine launching a campaign to encourage teenagers to create public-service announcements.  MySpace is hugely popular with teens and this campaign demonstrates how community sites can engage their membership for paid promotions at the same time that it tries to get teens more engaged in social issues.  Getting wired teens more involved in the issues of the day has great potential not just for today, but for the decades to come.