Andrew Spittle » community

WordCamp Philly: Building Community

Andrew Spittle — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:57:10 +0000

The first session of the day at WordCamp was with Patrick O’Keefe who talked about building a community around your WordPress publication. Patrick is from iFroggy Networks and has written a book entitled “Managing Online Forums.”

Patrick believes there are 3 key things to do to create a strong community. You need to have quality products and content. You should appreciate your readers, commenters, and followers. Finally, you must create a respectful and healthy culture around your content.

Quality content, email, and comments are the three types of “community by default” with any site. They let anyone come in and participate on your site. To encourage more people to get involved it helps to shine the spotlight on commenters sometimes. Forums, comment plugins, and social networks extend your community and allow more people to get involved.

With forums and lots of other social aspects of your site Patrick says, “If you don’t set it up to be successful then it won’t be.” It’s not enough to just have a forum linked on your homepage. You need to feature it, highlight content from it, and more. You cannot launch something and leave it alone, any community needs a significant time investment.

Key to anything you do though is ownership. Patrick emphasized that you need to own your content and your community in a tool that is truly yours. He also talked about things like edge rank which is Facebook’s algorithm for surfacing content in your news feed.

Ultimately, “people want to engage with you in spaces they already are.” The less friction between discovery and participation the better for your community’s growth.

Let’s meet and work

Andrew Spittle — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 01:59:33 +0000

Let’s meet and work. An index of places to freelance and co-work around London. Sounds like an NYC map is also in the works. Somewhat related to and idea I wrote about earlier this month. (via swissmiss)

Status

Andrew Spittle — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:11:44 +0000

I was going to comment with WordPress theme and code tips on a blog post today. Instead, the only option was Facebook comments with no fallback. It makes no sense to me that you’d control publication of your content while simultaneously making interaction with it contingent upon a single, corporate platform.

The Software is Wrong, Not the People

Andrew Spittle — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 18:35:27 +0000

The Software is Wrong, Not the People. Good observations about the approach the WordPress community takes toward building software. Listening to users and understanding the validity of their frustrations helps foster a passionate community.

Gina Trapani on community

Andrew Spittle — Mon, 16 May 2011 06:24:23 +0000

If you can create a culture of teaching and learning within your community like what went on when Greg showed us git, your project will take off. Those moments are more important to the humans involved than any app feature.

Gina Trapani – Your Community Is Your Best Feature.

Automattic’s WordPress 5K

Andrew Spittle — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:54:44 +0000

Just got back from a 5K run for Automattic’s World Wide WordPress 5K. The weather wasn’t as nice as yesterday, the last mile was in sprinkling rain, but it was still a good workout.

Like Nick mentions, it’d be cool to set up a counter next year to see how much distance people log around the world. That combined with a map of where people are running, walking, biking, or swimming their 5K would be a cool visualization of the WordPress community in action.

12 characters and 12 months later

Andrew Spittle — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:24:51 +0000

Andrew Nacin recaps his first year spent contributing to WordPress. Pretty cool story. The energy he brings to WordPress is tremendous, I’m definitely looking forward to the next 12 months of code from nacinbot Nacin.

How Mobile Devices Could Lead to More City Living

Andrew Spittle — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:43:10 +0000

Living in an urban area with public transportation beats driving in from suburbia. Productivity can start once you leave the house:

That first hour of the day, Apple and Google employees are banging out emails and getting ready for the day, not sitting in traffic carrying out a set of repetitive, low-level, and occasionally dangerous tasks to maneuver their exoskeletons southward…in the broadcast world, being in your car wasn’t so bad: you listened to the radio for fun at home, so the car was kind of a couch on wheels.

WaPo tries to seat TBD.com at the kids’ table

Andrew Spittle — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 04:15:42 +0000

The article published today by The Washington Post about TBD.com, is pretty sad. It is rarely a good thing when make your childish attitude clear in the first 8 words. That’s not a lede, it’s a put down.

Also, who the heck decided to put the term community engagement in scare quotes? Perhaps it’s more depressing that The Post does not even know what that idea means. If the company had cared about community maybe they wouldn’t have had to sell Newsweek for a dollar.

Mark Pesce at Webstock

Andrew Spittle — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 17:01:40 +0000

http://www.r2.co.nz/clientbin/player-licensed-viral.swf

Mark Pesce’s blog the human network is a must read and he just published the full video of his talk at Webstock. The transcript was posted back in February but the video is well worth watching.

Here are some scattered annotations on what Pesce discusses:

The arrival of the web as appliance (14:00)
The depth of a universally connected world is the individual (~18:00)
Once meaning is exposed it can be manipulated (20:00)
Books are standing on a threshold (23:30)
Personal health and medication management (or, the concept of a device as an interface to ourselves) (28:00)