We’re counting down the days here at the mothership, getting ready for the 5th Kiwi Foo Camp. It’s hard to believe this is year five already, the time’s flown by. I’ve had a few people ask for more details than are on the web site, so I thought I’d explain how it came to be and how it works.

In 2005 I returned from 10 years in the US tech world. We moved to the country because I wanted a bucolic NZ life for my kids, but I also wanted to find a way to help NZ. It’d done a lot for me and I wanted to give back. One of the things I’d seen work really well in America was the way O’Reilly Media’s “Foo Camp” brought together people from different fields who might not ordinarily meet to spark collaboration between them.

Text of notes for a talk given at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the New Zealand Computer Society in Rotorua, 17 September 2010. I will link to video when it’s posted by the conference organizers.

Hello everyone. Thank you for the kind introduction, and thank you to the New Zealand Computer Society for having me here.

Let’s get nostalgic for a bit. It’s the 50th anniversary, we can afford to be nostalgic a little.

Our local newspaper, Mahurangi Matters, had this great piece of short news (sadly not online yet):

Local firemen recently responded to a 3.30am call “power causing concern”. The homeowner could hear a humming sound seemingly coming from her bathroom wall. The firemen were all set to knock down walls to find the source when the officer in charge found a “personal item” vibrating in a stainless steel dish on the vanity. Not realising what it was, he picked it up and took it out to an ultimately “very embarrassed” lady.

Haegwan is interviewing famous and interesting people to talk about what they do and advice they might have to people wanting to be successful. He interviewed me earlier this month. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’m flattered by the company I keep: racing car drivers, famous technologists, novelists, and astrophysicists.

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.

You can listen to my Nine to Noon emerging technology slot from 8 April 2010 in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats. The links for the show appear below, followed by some notes I wrote beforehand to figure out what I thought and how to explain things like network neutrality. We varied from the notes and I got to tie this into the UK’s grim Digital Economy Bill, our Copyright Act abuse, and the upcoming ACTA trade agreement, which left me feeling very happy.

I talked today about cryptography, China, and Facebook’s billions. My apologies for how rushed it was on air, but we had less time than usual. I’ve written up below what I was going to say. Listen in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

Links

The Code Book, Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese, and Facebook on Track for $1B Revenue This Year.

Cryptography

I’ve read this fabulous book on cryptography by Simon Singh, “The Code Book”. It’s easy to read and full of the little anecdotes and trivia nuggets that I love.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an agreement between countries around IP rights and enforcement. The negotiations have been happening in secret, with every country saying “well, we’d love to reveal what we’re talking about but those other countries just won’t let us”. Fortunately there have been leaks, and the latest is a fascinating glimpse at how these things are put together and where the parties stand.

It seems bizarre at first, but the draft is laid out like a spreadsheet: one article per row and with three columns, one each for the US/Japan version, the EU version, and comments. Inside each sentence square brackets mark the attributed proposed alternatives for language. From this we can tell some very interesting things about the New Zealand position:

You can listen to my Nine to Noon emerging technology slot from 18 Feb 2010 in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats. The links for the show appear below, though we didn’t get to the media scares story:

Computer Engineer Barbie, Digital Books and Your Rights, and A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook. The author of the latter writes the excellent Mind Hacks blog.

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!