Last month I was honoured to join Silverstripe as a director. Silverstripe makes an open source Content Management System backed by Sapphire, an elegant PHP framework, builds websites for NZ and international customers, and has a new performance monitoring product that’s rapidly gaining traction. I was on their advisory board as they hired their first external CEO, made the Deloitte Fast 50, expanded internationally, launched the developer programme, and built their product, and I love how they’ve approached opportunities and challenges with the same thoughtful equanimity. I’m joining a group of experienced and knowledgeable folks on the board, and look forward to learning a lot from them. Most importantly, though, Silverstripe is great people: smart, thoughtful, caring, and passionate about employees, customers, and open source. I couldn’t ask to work with a smarter company and I’m delighted to join them on their fantastic trajectory.

I attended a workshop on community management at Webstock, and at the end asked the attendees to write down some words of wisdom for a new community manager, maybe something they wish they’d been told or something they learned at the workshop. Here’s their collected advice:

• Networking is important—often there are other groups doing similar things that are happy to piggy-back on projects or contribute resource. Before you start, understand your resource requirement and allow for growth, especially if updating/collecting info for the community. It’s easy to contact and update for 60 organisations, a lot harder for 3,000.
• Depth of relationship allows for more engagement and vulnerability.
• Keep raising the bar!
• “Personal” rewards from community involvement translates to professional reward and back again.
• Always have a back-up person—don’t be your own single point of failure.
• It can be important to reward people for participating in your online community.
• Go where your community already is, rather than expect them to come to a new ‘community’ that you just set up.
• Forums take 6+ months to establish momentum.
• Wikis suck.
• Comments at the bottom of pages of content fail to engage passive readers.
• Whatever you’re doing—whether it be in the online or offline world—you need to provide an “authentic” experience or voice for your audiences and community.
• You need strong reasons to make building a community worthwhile. It can take a lot of time and resource.
• I like the idea of incentives for users. e.g., points and rewards. For example, in our wiki originally we got a lot of new users to contribute through making the stats viewable. They could view numbers of changes made by users and a top 10. This lead to a competitive environment, especially with the boys. I had forgotten about that so am thinking how we can get that going again. Am interested in Shelley’s “submit a tag”, how that works. A problem we have is meaningless tags.
• I learned that preparation and planning should play a more important role than technology.
• Exposure to a wide range of online communities can teach us a lot about how people interact online.
• We had great success and learned a lot by piloting community interaction with small self-selected groups before trying to interface with the wider community. Benefits: tools are tested and tweaked; people from the pilot are great at kicking the wider community off.
• Be very proactive about responding to criticisms/suggestions by pointing out ways that the commenter/critic can get involved in doing something with their suggestion and solving their problem.
• Why? Social capital; information; value; connections. How? Authentically; where they already hang out; on their terms; multiple (appropriate) platforms. Who? By the community; for the community …
• Go to where your community are already hanging out to engage with them.
• Decentralise your community management by using your community.
• Who the customer is, what they want, what they need is key. Once the purpose is clear, that drives every other decision.
• Do you really need to do this? What will work best for your users? When will you stop if it isn’t working?
• Take-away: you need a community manager; build it and they won’t come!

Thanks to everyone who took the time to write down their advice!

NZICT is an industry lobby group, representing the NZ ICT industry (software, hardware, services, networks, education, and training). They’ve just released a “Near Future Digital Priorities” paper. Here are my first thoughts.

1. First, I have to applaud the industry getting together to try and figure out how it can help the rest of NZ grow. The most exciting conversation at the short-lived Digital Development Council was when agriculture and manufacturing and other industries had an honest conversation with representatives of the ICT industry without being sidetracked into the failures or benefits of particular products or vendors.

Just a heads-up: over on the O’Reilly Radar blog, I posted about the opportunities for businesses in the future based on Stephen O’Grady’s predictions for 2010.

The New York Public Library and Wired Magazine have collaborated to bring a set of evening lectures on how new technology is changing the economics of art with speakers Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Johnson, and the dude who did the Obama poster. I’d love to see something similar in New Zealand: Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington, all with a few tech-literate artists, academics, journalists, etc. telling it how it is.

There hasn’t been a lot of action from the new Government on broadband (or anything, really, yet) but this Economist article is food for thought about spending priorities:

When it comes to promoting economic activity, it is easy to see why having broadband is better than not having it, but most benefits are likely to come from wiring people up in the first place rather than making existing connections hum faster. In Japan and South Korea over 40% of households have fibre links capable of blazing speeds, but that does not seem to have resulted in more rapid economic growth, or the emergence of new applications unavailable to consumers with ordinary broadband.

SUBMISSION ON THE TRANSPACIFIC STRATEGIC ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES

To: Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade

Introduction

This Submission is from Nathan Torkington, an author, musician, and software professional whose address is […].

Summary

I strongly oppose any proposals to extend the term of copyright, entrench digital rights management, assign investigation or enforcement powers to rights holders beyond those already in law, or otherwise use copyright law against consumers and artists. I also strongly oppose any interference with parallel importing.

My friend Aaron Swartz writes about the increasingly-evil OCLC:

Not satisfied with controlling the world’s largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It’s now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.

James McGlinn emailed me a great reply to my piece on the business cofounder shortage in NZ, and he’s finally posted it. You should read it because I agree with everything he says.

In this Ziff-Davis Australia article, the leaders of Australia’s three largest ISPs declare network neutrality to be an American problem and explain why. It’s an interesting argument, but I think there are some key elements unstated in the article.

In America, largely for historical reasons, residential customers have “all you can eat” plans. Buffet bandwidth is the order of the day, every day. As the number of people online continues to grow, and they do more bandwidth-intensive things (YouTube movies vs all-text web pages), telcos must buy new hardware. “How do they pay for it?” the article asks, and offers up three solutions: charge heavy consumers more (the Australian and New Zealand “metered Internet” solution); charge the people serving lots of data rather than we who consume it (which pisses Google off and starts a “network neutrality” war); or just suck up the costs themselves.