Twitter lists are a great way to group people into various categories, filter conversations, keep up with experts within a specific field and track a topic without needing to follow all of the relevant users — and can even be used as an RSS reader replacement. Despite being such a new feature, people are already using lists as a measure of influence.
I’ve spent the last few years working with online communities and collaboration technologies, and have come to expect to be able to collaborate with people when using online social tools. As a result, I wish that Twitter lists were more collaborative. Right now, Twitter lists and accounts have a one-to-one relationship. I create a list, and I’m the only person who can edit it. I started thinking about this limitation when Rael Dornfest created his Portland Food Cart list. I’m a huge fan of the Portland food cart scene, so I decided to follow his list instead of creating yet another one. The downside was that as there were some food carts missing from his list, I needed to send @replies to Rael to get him to add them — I couldn’t just add them myself. Read the rest of this entry »
Community has been a big focus for me for a long time. I’ve helped companies build and manage online communities, and I even co-founded a non-profit in Portland that organizes free events for the technology community here. I also try to help people with their businesses or ideas whenever I can, and I do a fair amount of match-making to help people find the resources they need for their projects. Some of this makes me money, and some of it I do for free because I believe it’s the right thing to do. Read the rest of this entry »
I often need to remind myself that the way I use Twitter is probably not typical when considering the population as a whole. Like many of you, I am online most of the time: sitting at my computer or checking in with my iPhone when I’m away from the laptop. Since I’m always connected and usually working in some form or another, I read tweets frequently and post many times per day.
According to some new Twitter research published on the Harvard Business Blog, my usage is unusual: Read the rest of this entry »
In an effort to better understand the inner workings of a coworking business, I spoke with Eva Schweber, co-owner of CubeSpace in Portland, Ore. 
Schweber is CubeSpace’s Chief Cat Herder, policy wonk and fount of obscure nonprofit information. She brings more than 15 years of collaborative facilitation and organizational management experience to her numerous paid and volunteer gigs. Her professional experience runs the gamut from managing an artisan goat dairy (she was a state-certified pasteurizer) to facilitating a strategic planning effort by an international environmental consortium. Her esoteric background has trained her well for running a coworking community.
In her spare time, Schweber serves on the Mayor’s Economic Recovery Cabinet and chairs the Small Business Development Workgroup of the City of Portland’s Small Business Advisory Council. She also sits on the City Club of Portland’s Research Board and in June 2007 was appointed by Governor Ted Kulongowski to serve on Oregon’s Commission for Voluntary Action and Service. Her blog is her attempt to reconcile her ever-growing interest in small business with her wonkish tendencies.
WWD: Why did you decide to open a coworking space in Portland?
Read the rest of this entry »
Every year when I make my yearly geek pilgrimage to Austin for SXSW, I struggle with how much time to spend at BarCampAustin vs. SXSW, because they usually overlap. I love attending SXSW, but I am also a BarCamp fan, so the choice is always a difficult one. This year, like most past years, I chose to skip SXSW to spend a day at BarCamp.
Previously on WebWorkerDaily, I talked about the differences in they way that the community conferences are organized and posted an interview with Audrey Eschright, a BarCamp and unconference organizer. This time I was interested in differences in content between traditional conferences and community-organized events.
Since anyone can propose a session at BarCamp, you tend to get more crazy ideas and niche sessions with great information that would never have an audience broad enough to justify a session at most traditional commercial conferences. You also get some terrible sessions and ideas that just don’t make much sense, but the beauty of BarCamp is that you can wander in and out of sessions pretty easily.
Some examples of interesting sessions at BarCampAustin included: How to start an online bacon business in a month, half-baked entrepreneurial theater (where people come up with crazy business ideas), air ships and more. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Selena Marie
In previous posts, I’ve talked about attending local events and meetups or scheduling new ones if you can’t find any that meet your needs. In this post, I wanted to talk about something bigger than the typical meetup: community-organized events. BarCamps, unconferences, and similar events have been popping up all over the world in increasing frequency. I’m an organizer for the local BarCamp in Portland, and I have attended many of these types of events. I’m planning to attend BarCampAustin this weekend, which is running in parallel with SXSW.
The organization of these events is very different from typical commercial events. While commercial events tend to be organized by professional organizers who are being paid to produce the conference, community organized events are often organized by unpaid volunteers from the community who are passionate about the topic. Both types of events have their strengths and weaknesses and their place in the industry, but both are also very different in both organization and attendance.
Attendance
I have noticed that many organizers and a high percentage of attendees of BarCamps tend to be web workers. Read the rest of this entry »
Image by lacie babenco
This is the fourth in a series of online community management posts. Earlier posts covered online community manager jobs, what community managers actually do, and what skills are required to be successful in the role. I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that community management is all sunny skies, unicorns and rainbows, though. Communities have their fair share of trolls under the bridge, wicked influences and other elements representing the dark side of the force, as Robert S. Robbins points out in a comment on one of my previous posts. Robert said:
“You seem to be ignoring the dark side of the profession. I’ve seen a lot of challenging issues come up in the online communities I participate in. For example: you’ll have to deal with trolls and other disruptive individuals, you’ll have to deal with copyright issues when content providers put up material they don’t own the rights to, and you’ll have to deal with security when women attract stalkers and kids are being preyed upon. YouTube started out as a video sharing site and then became a social networking site but they failed miserably when it came to managing that aspect of the business.”
The dark side can take many different forms. Here are just a few of them. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by semaphoria
This is the third in a series of online community manager posts over the past couple of weeks here on WebWorkerDaily. I’ve already talked about online community manager jobs and what community managers actually do, so I thought that we’d talk about what it takes to be successful as a community manager. There are skills to learn and work habits that are useful for community managers.
Here are just a few of the skills and habits that people have already mentioned in the comments of the previous posts.
Amber Naslund says, “it’s not a 9 to 5 gig, and it’s a hybrid of so many disciplines – communication, business development, online knowledge, customer or client service.”
Joe Manna says, “most successful community managers are those that come from a strong customer service background.”
Lex Friedman says, “If you like to listen and love acting on good ideas (regardless of their source!), you’re probably a good fit for the career path.”
I also have my own list of what it takes to manage an online community. Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
