The Online Community Unconference was held this Wednesday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

How was it? In a word? AWESOME.

We had 250 participants from a diverse range of organizations, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Linden Lab, SeeqPod, Flickr, LinkedIn, Cisco, Sun and Current TV.

We had a jam packed day (started @ 8:30 and ran until 5:30). The energy was palpable. Check out the short video I shot below of folks reviewing the session grid shortly before session 1.



Over the course of the day, participants held over 50 sessions about community strategy, UX, management, member engagement and technology.

Session topics included:

• How do we motivate empowered users to participate positively
  
• Worst Case Scenerios - What to do when things go terribly wrong
  
• The Numbers Behind Trust - The hidden numbers that govern group dynamics
  
• Internationalizing content & community
  
• Meet them where they are vs. If you build it they will come
  
• Building the Collaboration Ecosystem - All components for community building success
  
• Cross Networking Madness - How are niche communities using data portability
  
• Community Management 101: How to get started in this big wide world
  
• Web 2.0 Components to build B2B Collaborative Communities
  
• Community Year One - Phases, Activities, Successes
  
• Community Management 2.0 - Success & Failures
  
• The platforms for community are SH*T. Discuss
  
• Effective Ambassador programs
  
• Pulling the plug - how/when/why?
  

My observations:

It's 2 days later, and I have to admit my head is still spinning. The quality of content and conversation was high, and there is still a lo of processing I need to do. My genreal impressions were:

This was the "Community Community" coming together. This was not an event where a few talking heads lectured the masses. This was a gathering of the tribes for those who manage communities and set community strategy on a daily basis.

The conversation has matured. There were far fewer folks that wanted to talk about community 101 this year as compared with last year's Unconference. Topics were fairly sophisticated and most of the direct feedback I got was that participants were pleased to discover the level of experience represented by the other participants.

The lack of standards is REALLY starting to hurt. Focus is (finally) beginning to shift from islands of communities to the larger community ecosystem. A general lack of standards around nomenclature, metrics, data schemas (including profile structure), profile accessibility and community UX (to raise just a few issues) is starting to come up as a real issue more often. I think we are finally mature enough as an industry to have the discussions as a body of practice (and contribute to and help direct discussions on tactical problems, like Data Portability).

The best resource about online communities is the community of practice. This statement is actually a common thread in all of Forum One Network's activities. We believe the best and most valuable source of information about building and growing healthy online communities is the body of practitioners.

We will be opening up the Unconference wiki in about a week, and will post highlights of the session notes. In the meantime, lot's of folks were twittering and blogging. I've posted highlights below.

Other Unconference highlights:
http://twemes.com/ocu2008
http://summize.com/search?q=ocu2008
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ocu2008
http://www.grimwell.com/?p=211
http://talk.lithium.com/lithium/blog/article?blog.id=lithium&message.id=139#M139

PS: Tasty Snacks = Accomplished!

Are you a community manager or are you in charge of online community at your organization? Are you in the Bay Area?

If so, you might find the Online Community Roundtable of interest. This is a small netowrking group / event that meets regularly to discuss issues, opportunities and trends with online communities, and represents leading organizations (large and small).

Our next meeting is Tuesday, June 10 at Cyworld in SF. The session will last from 5:30 to 8:30. Please email me if you are interested.

We have had an unbelievable response to the upcoming Online Community Unconference to be held June 18th. Registration numbers are just shy of 200 people, and we expect to hit 250. We think this will be the biggest event, this year, focused on online communities.

We have a wide range of organizations, industries and personalities coming, including: Adobe, Autodesk, BabyCenter, CafePress, Cisco, Civic Ventures, Comcast, Digg, eBay Research Labs, EdgiLabs, Flickr, Forrester Research, Google, Intuit, Jive Software, Link TV, LinkedIn, NetApp, Omidyar Network, O'Reilly Media, Six Apart, Social Edge, Sony Online Entertainment, SRI International, Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation, Sun, VMWare and YouTube.

To see the full list of folks coming, check out the registration page:
http://ocu2008.eventbrite.com

If you are charged with managing online communities or community strategy for your organization, this will be a fantastic event for you. The agenda is participant driven, the networking is fantastic, and the content will be fantastic.

The Online Community Unconference is coming together nicely. We are on for June 18th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I expect about 250 folks to attend, and Kaliya Hamlin is helping us out with facilitation.

Current organizations attending include:

• Autodesk, Inc.
  
• BabyCenter
  
• CafePress
  
• Cisco
  
• Civic Ventures
  
• eBay Research Labs
  
• EdgiLabs
  
• Forrester Research
  
• Google
  
• Jive Software
  
• Link TV
  
• NetApp
  
• Omidyar Network
  
• Social Edge, A Program of the Skoll Foundation
  
• SRI International
  
• Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation

You can see the full list of org and people attending on the conference registration page here:
http://ocu2008.eventbrite.com

We expect the Unconference ot be an action packed day of networking and sharing about issues and best practices in the online community and social media space.

Friend of Forum One Networks, Kaliya Hamlin, is helping organize two important events about online identity and data sharing in May.

If you are thinking about online identity issues or data portability, these sessions will be valuable.

Internet Identity Workshop -
We are going into our 6th Conference it is amazing to see this all happen. With OpenID proliferating and the next generation of tools - card selectors etc. being innovated.
May 12-14 in Mountain View California.

The Data Sharing Summit,
May 15, at the Computer History Museum.
There is a lot of activity in this space - with the buzz around DataPortability.org (who we are collaborating with). Our first event in this space was in September 2007. Our purpose is to provide gathering spaces in which all parties interested in working on the challenge of data sharing can work together. We create the agenda the day it happens. It is about getting things done and figuring out the tough problems – there is no committee deciding who does or does not get to 'present' it is about breaking up and really diving in figuring out the solutions and building the consensus to get adoption.

One of the more interesting things that happened at the Online Community Business Forum last week didn't happen during a particular session, but rather, happened to several participants as the sessions of the first day went on. This is a real shift in behavior for these particular participants, as I generally see them using IRC as a back channel, and a few of them live blogging. Twitter was serving both purposes at the OCBF.

Both the conference back channel as well as the live-blogging mostly shifted to Twitter. You can check out the end result of the "Live Tweeting" here: http://twemes.com/ocbf2008

The main benefit I saw of using Twitter during the sessions was that it allowed (at least in a small way) lots of participants who weren't at the conference to participate.

The main downside is that it's really hard to pay attention, be present, and full process a conversation while cramming thoughts in to 140 characters per tweet.

In particular, Shara Karasic of Work.com did an awesome job of live tweeting (wow - did I just write live tweeting?) the event.

Thomas Kriese shares his thoughts about the live tweeting phenomenon here.

Do you Twitter? Follow me @billjohnston

First, apologies for the radio silence on the OC Report blog folks. The Online Community Business Forum was a huge success, but also a massive undertaking, and I took a couple of days to unplug from the socialmediosphere.

The good news? There is a ton of great content about the event online. I'll be posting highlights over the next few days, but I wanted to point folks to several great summaries of our opening sessions.

Two of the highlights of the conference for me were Alan Webber's opening remarks, and Rohit Barghava's session on "Thinking beyond your community site". I've been a huge fan of Alan's since becoming an avid reader of Fast Company in the late 90's. Alan did a great job of setting the tone for the Business Forum with his inspirational remarks about founding Fast Company with Bill Taylor in the early 90s. Alan was followed by Rohit Bhargava, who provided perspective on thinking beyond "your" community site, and gave case studies of community building using an ecosystem approach, including one that covered the launch of his new book "Personality Not Included."

Thomas Kriese of Omidyar Network did a fantastic job of capturing both sessions:

Alan Webber at Online Community Business Forum

Rohit Bhargava speaks at Online Community Business Forum

This was an exceptional two days of content, conversations and networking. Look for more content to follow as we get the presentations and notes added to the wiki. And I haven't even mentioned all the Gorbie sightings!

We are just a few days away from the Online Community Business Forum in Santa Fe, and the final agenda is in place. You will find the speaker and topic lineup below. In addition to the awesome lineup of speakers, we are planning a 1/2 day of Open Space on Tuesday afternoon.

We will be posting highlights from both days on the Online Community Report.

Monday, April 14th

Opening Comments
Alan Webber – Co-founding Editor of Fast Company

Session 1 / Thinking Beyond The Community Website
Sometimes the best thing you can do is to build your community by focusing instead on the ecosystem around it. Using two interactive case studies as a framework, this session will kick off the day by challenging your perceptions about your online community, and getting you to think beyond your own sandbox.
Session Lead: Rohit Bhargava – Senior Vice President Digital Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy

Session 2 / The Business of Community
Case studies on planning, managing and articulating value from two leading brands.
Session Lead: Rachael Makool – Senior Director, Ebay
Session Lead: Mark Williams – Manager, Support Communities, Apple

Session 3 / Community Metrics & Reporting
An overview of online community metrics models, methodologies and techniques.
Session Lead: Matthew Lees , VP - Patricia Seybold Group
Session Lead: Robert Dell’Imagine, Director of Communities - VMWare

Session 4 / Break Out Sessions -

Breakout: Influencers & Evangelists
Session Lead: Alan Crosby, Director of Global Community Relations - Sony Online Entertainment

Breakout: Community Management Best Practices
Session Lead: Scott Moore, Social Media Strategist
Session Lead: Gail Ann Williams, Director of Communities - Salon.com / The Well

Breakout: Getting Beyond Not “Getting It”
Session Lead: Shara Karasic, Community Manager - Work.com

Session 5 / Real Value from Virtual Worlds
Many organizations and finding real value in virtual worlds. Gain perspective and hear case studies from 2 experts dealing in the business of virtual worlds and virtual goods.
Session Lead: Robin Harper, VP of Marketing and Community Development - Linden Lab
Session Lead: Ravi Mehta, VP, Publishing - Viximo


Tuesday, April 15th

Session 6 / Community Value & Revenue Techniques
A leading VC, and a leading social media expert give perspectives on the dimensions of value of online communities, as well as specific examples of revenue techniques.
Session Lead: David Silver, Author, ‘Smart Start-ups’
Session Lead: Aaron Strout, VP Social Media, Mzinga

Session 7: On the Horizon - Panel Discussion
Moderator: Kellie Parker, Online Community Manager – PC World/Mac Publishing
Panelist : Mary Furlong, CEO - Furlong and Associates
Panelist : Jenna Woodul, Chief Community Officer - LiveWorld

As I mentioned before, we are also going to have a mini Unconference On Tuesday afternoon will likely have about 12 sessions.

The Online Community Business Forum is coming up in less than 2 weeks. We are holding the event at the lovely Inn & Spa at Loretto, and we have a great lineup of speakers and attendees.

The lineup for both days (april 14th and 15th) is strong.

We just confirmed this afternoon that Rohit Bhargava will be leading the opening session. Rohit is coming to Santa Fe fresh of the launch of his new book Personality Not Included, and will provide insight in to how social media and online communities are transforming business.

We also have great sessions planned, including:

• Community Strategy: Rachael Makool – Senior Director, Ebay
  
• Community Metrics & Reporting - Matthew Lees , VP , Patricia Seybold Group, Robert Dell’Imagine, VMWare
  
• Support Communities - Mark Williams, Apple
  
• Real Value from Virtual Worlds - Robin Harper, Linden Lab, Ravi Mehta, Viximo
  

Other speakers include Mary Furlong of Furlong and Associates, Aaron Strout of Mzinga (the Twitter Mastah!), Tessie Topol of MTV, and David Silver, Author of Smart Startups.

There will be several wine tasting receptions (of course) in and around Santa Fe. We actually had to fight with the Inn & Spa at Loretto to keep the Presidential Suite open, because Michael Gorbechav tried to bump us. No kidding.

And, as icing on the cake, we will have a mini Unconference on the afternoon of April 15th. The two days in Santa Fe promise to be packed with plenty of good session content and plenty of networking all held in a beautiful setting.

We do have a few seats left. If you are up for a last minute trip to lovely Santa Fe, please drop me a line: bjohnston@forumone.com

I just made the wiki for the Mobile Communities Unconference live.

http://www.socialtext.net/mcu2008


Some folks are still in the process of uploading their session notes.

In particular, I thought the session about Mobile Social UX Design was particularly good:
http://www.socialtext.net/mcu2008/index.cgi?mobile_user_experience_design

Also, you can see a photostream from the event here:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=mcu2008&w=all

We still have a few seats available for the Mobile Communities Unconference, this Thursday, March 20th in Palo Alto.

Want to join the conversation? Register here:

http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com

Groups coming include:
3jam, Active Path Solutions, AdMob, AOL, Cisco,Digital Chocolate, FunMobility, Google, HP, Intel, Lithium, LiveWorld, Microsoft, Mixer Labs, MobiHand, MobileLife Inc., NextNow, Nokia, Omega Mobile, Inc., Quest Software, Ribbit, SAP, VMWare, Yahoo!, You Tube

Questions? Call me @ 415.299.9638

We had a fantastic group of people at the Online Community Roundtable Wednesday (3/12) evening on Microsoft campus in Redmond.

Bob Rebholz of the Windows Live team was our host, and we scored space in the MS conference center (which rivals SAP Labs as the nicest space we have Rountabled in).

We had folks from Microsoft, Forum One, Intel, Full Circle Associates, OCLC, The Gates Foundation, Telligent, Trusera, VML and the University of Washington.



A few highlights from the evening:

User Experience: Categories vs. Folksonomies
The folks from the OCLC were struggling with the issue of wanting to introduce folksonomical content structures in to their site, and how to either compliment or replace hierarchical category structures.

Invitation and Community Growth
Trusera asked questions around growing community membership via "invitation". Specifically, they are struggling with balancing growth velocity and member quality. The invitation process ensures quality by inviting "known" potential members and assuming members of their network are trustworthy. The problem is that this i generally a slow way to grow a network (gmail is an obvious exception to this statement).

Internal Usage Adoption
How do you incentivize internal staff and organization members to use new social tools? This question was posed by a non-profit foundation that is trying to roll out a new collaboration toolset, and is trying to asses the best path forward. Feedback from the roundtable group was: start small, test & get feedback (but pay attention to what they do as well as what they say), and ensure that the tools actually facilitate and enhance existing workflow, not disrupt or add overhead to it.

Qualifying and Representing "Activity"
The last session started as a conversation on incenting users, but to me, one of the most interesting dimensions was around tracking, qualifying and representing activity in a social system. The example given was tracking what help and training content someone read on a community, and then representing this as a level of "knowledge" via a widget on that persons profile on various social systems.

After every roundtable (including this one) I'm always struck by the caliber of folks working in this space, the level of real-world knowledge they posses, and they generous nature and willingness to share.

My notes are short, but we had two superstar notetakers (one was also a super-tweeter) in the room. For a play by play (and thanks to both Nancy and Teresa), please check out:

Notes from the Seattle Online Community Meetup - Nancy White

A Vertitable Online Community Smörgåsbord - Teresa Valdez Klein

Would you like to be invited to the next roundtable, or are you interested in hosting? Please drop me a note.

Want to keep up with Roundtable activities? Join the Facebook group.

I've had a couple of questions about why we (Forum One) are putting on the Mobile Communities Unconference.

In a word? Growth. Analysts are predicting revenue from mobile social networks to climb from US $1.5 billion in 2006 to as much as $52billion dollars a year by 2012. The following graphic is a chart from Christine Perey's report on Mobile Social Networking.


Another? Scale. The number of mobile handsets in use just dwarfs the number of PCs.

Another? Experience. You can take it (your network) with you. With the user experience that advanced handheld devices like the iphone bring, you no longer signifignanty compromise your online experience when using a handset.

And last but not least: Location. Locative experiences and media are going to explode soon. I got a taste of this when I worked at Autodesk, but just the simple fact of knowing where you are geographically, and where friends, family and potential contacts are relative to your position adds a whole new layer of meaning and experience to social networking.

Want to join the conversation? We have an AWESOME group of folks lined up to discuss this next Thursday, March 20th in Palo Alto.

Groups coming include:
3jam
Active Path Solutions
AdMob
AOL
Cisco
Digital Chocolate
FunMobility
Google
HP
Intel
Lithium
LiveWorld
Microsoft
Mixer Labs
MobiHand
MobileLife Inc.
NextNow Collaboratory
Nokia
Omega Mobile, Inc.
Quest Software
SAP
VMWare
Yahoo!
You Tube

and more.

Want to join the conversation? Register here:

http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com

Hot on the heels of the Unconference East, we have the Mobile Communities Unconference coming up March 20th in Palo Alto.

The intention of the Mobile Communities Unconference is to explore the opportunities with building community via mobile devices.

Several factors are driving the importance and relevance of this topic, most notably the fact that the number of mobile handsets in use globally dwarfs the number of personal computers.

The shear number of mobile devices, combined with the increasing sophistication of mobile devices, increasing speed of data flowing on mobile networks, the increasingly robust web experiences available via mobiles, and the explosion in interest around social networking begs the questions:
- what impact will mobile have on pc-bound online community experiences?
- what are the unique opportunities for mobile-only experiences that transcend voice and leverage text and mobile internet access?
- when will the US catch up to the technology leaders in the mobile space, like Korea?

Mobile is such a juicy topic right now. Combine that with an Unconference format, and you have a very interesting day of discussion.

We have a great group of folks coming already. A sample of the partcipating organizations include:

- SolutionSet
- YouTube
- 3jam
- SAP
- FunMobility
- Microsoft
- CollabNet
- Liveworld
- Google
- TechSoup
- VMWARE, INC.
- Gatheringpoint Digital LLC
- Omega Mobile, Inc.
- Yahoo! Inc
- Lithium
- Digital Chocolate
- itsmylife Labs
- Alta Partners
- MobileLife Inc.

Again, we just extended early bird pricing of $145 until the end of day on Friday, 2/29.
To register, go here: http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com/

We had a fantastic OC Unconference East in New York City last Thursday. Over one hundred online community and social media professionals were in attendance, and we had over 40 collaborative sessions. I've captured highlights below. I've also just opened up the Unconference wiki, so you can check out the session notes for yourself.

Organizations in attendance included:
AOL, MTV, Consumers Union (consumer reports), Cyworld, Business Week, Socialtext, IBM, Mzinga, Spinvox, Twing.com, Salon.com, Harvard Business, MediaBistro, KickApps, HP, TV Guide and Zagat.com.

Sessions ( a partial list)
- What is necessary to start a successful social network?
- Social Movements/Communities with a Cause:
- Enterprise And Large Organizations Meets Community
- User Managed Communities: where users make the rules
- Community Building: Resources and Considerations
- Virtual Goods 101
- Social Media Optimization
- Customer/Consumer Communities for Co-Innovation
- Twitter Strategies for the Enterprise
- Culture vs. Community: Intention-based content
- Community Analytics: measuring success & failure
- Social Networks: Likes/dislikes and what you want to know
- Virtual Goods and Virtual World Interactions
- Building Enterprise IT: Colloboration & interface to internal systems (using wikis)
- Open ID & other user-centric identity technologies (Higgins, Infocards, SAML)

You can see pictures from the Unconference here:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ocue2008&w=all&s=int

Wiki
Again, the wiki is now open to the public for reading. We do restrict the right to edit / post to Unconference attendees.
http://www.socialtext.net/ocue08/

Blog posts about the Unconference

Online Community Unconference East - KickApps Blog
Online Community Unconference 2008 - Updates - Modern Metrix Blog
Live Blogging at ForumOne's Community Unconference 2/21 - Aaron Strout / Mzinga

Next Unconference:
Our next Unconference is the Mobile Communities Unconference March 20 in Palo Alto. If you are interested in exploring the opportunities with community building via mobile devices I would encourage you to come check it out.