- Your Community is Your Best Feature — Gina Trapani’s CodeConf talk: useful, true, and moving. There’s not much in this world that has all three of those attributes.
- Metrics Everywhere — another CodeConf talk, this time explaining Yammer’s use of metrics to quantify the actual state of their operations. Nice philosophical guide to the different ways you want to measure things (gauges, counters, meters, histograms, and timers). I agree with the first half, but must say that it will always be an uphill battle to craft a panegyric that will make hearts and minds soar at the mention of “business value”. Such an ugly phrase for such an important idea. (via Bryce Roberts)
- On Earthquakes in Tokyo (Bunnie Huang) — Personal earthquake alarms are quite popular in Tokyo. Just as lightning precedes thunder, these alarms give you a few seconds warning to an incoming tremor. The alarm has a distinct sound, and this leads to a kind of pavlovian conditioning. All conversation stops, and everyone just waits in a state of heightened awareness, since the alarm can’t tell you how big it is—it just tells you one is coming. You can see the fight or flight gears turning in everyone’s heads. Some people cry; some people laugh; some people start texting furiously; others just sit and wait. Information won’t provoke the same reaction in everyone: for some it’s impending doom, for others another day at the office. Data is not neutral; it requires interpretation and context.
- AccentuateUs — Firefox plugin to Unicodify text (so if you type “cafe”, the software turns it into “café”). The math behind it is explained on the dataists blog. There’s an API and other interfaces, even a vim plugin.
"community" entries
The future of community
Jono Bacon says the community renaissance has just begun.
We're at the beginning of a community renaissance, says Jono Bacon, and we're soon going to see a repeatable body of knowledge that will allow us to push communities forward.
OSCON subcultures
Fun observations about the Open Source convention, and a few comments on the Community Leadership Summit
From app to meetup: A new kind of running route
How RunKeeper is using meetups to bridge the physical and app worlds.
The line between online and offline is further blurring thanks to apps. Case in point: RunKeeper is now bringing users together for in-person group runs.
The long road toward the Community Leadership Summit
A series of unexpected experiences culminated in the Community Leadership Summit.
Community development is an organic process full of unique experiences and turns. So it should be no surprise the Community Leadership Summit followed a similar path.
Four short links: 18 April 2011
Community, Metrics, Sensors, and Unicode
Can open source reinvent the music business?
San Francisco band Severed Fifth wants to create a new template for success.
Chart success would be nice, but Severed Fifth has a loftier goal than most bands. They want to use hallmarks of the open source movement — specifically, community involvement and free distribution — to change the music business.
Four short links: 6 January 2011
Q&A, Phone Numbers, CoffeeScript 1.0, and Open Source Community Building
- Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions (Joel Spolsky) — StackOverflow has mechanisms to remove the need to reask common questions. The editing feature is there so that old question/answer pairs can get better and better. For every person who asks a question and gets an answer on Stack Overflow, hundreds or thousands of people will come read that conversation later. […] This is fundamentally different from Usenet or any of the web-based forums. […] it’s actually a community-edited wiki of narrow, “long-tail” questions. Joel then goes on to plead, When you see a question that seems like it might reflect a common problem, don’t just answer it to get a few points. That doesn’t make the Internet any better, which sounds like a broken incentive system (get points for reanswering common questions, not for merging). The Wikipedia reference reminded me of Benjamin Mako Hill’s comment to me at dinner several years ago, that Wikipedia’s invisible advantage is the naming system where each concept has a single name. Stack Overflow’s content-matching smarts will have to substitute for the naming scheme, and that could be tricky.
- libphonenumber — Google’s Java and Javascript libraries for parsing, formatting, storing, and validating international phone numbers. (via Hacker News)
- CoffeeScript — a little language that compiles to Javascript. Just went to v1.0.
- Open Source Community Building: A Guide to Getting it Right (Dave Neary) — The history of free & open source software development is filled with stories of companies who are disappointed with their first experiences in community development. The technical director who does not understand why community projects do not accept features his team has spent months developing, or the management team that expects substantial contributions from outside the company to arrive overnight when they release software they’ve developed. Chris Grams once described the Tom Sawyer model of community engagement – companies who expect other people to do their job for them. Make sure you don’t fall into that trap. (via Glyn Moody on Twitter)
Join us for Global Ignite Week: February 2011
Global Ignite Week returns for a second year.
Global Ignite Week returns Feb. 7-11, 2011. Last year, more than 600 Ignite talks were given in 67 cities on six continents. The bar is set even higher for round two.
Why blogging still matters
Anil Dash on the enduring power of blogs.
During an interview at Web 2.0 Expo NY, Anil Dash's response to an offhand question hit at the heart of blogging's continued importance.
Open source givers and takers
Taking without giving isn't the problem. We need better open source contribution metrics.
We need better metrics to adequately gauge corporate participation in open source. For example: How many companies have employees who work on open source projects on their own time or company time, unbeknownst to the managers who fill out surveys?