Saturday, November 19, 2005
Jenny Preece rides the ClueTrain...
Jenny Preece's book, "Online Communities" focuses on what she believes are the most important aspect of creating online communities: Sociability (Purpose, Policies, and People) and Usability. Her advice is both helpful and practical for organizations trying to figure out how to communicate with their constituents in ways that will promote a sense of community.
Sociability to Preece is how the purpose, policies and people come together "to influence social interaction in the community (p. 7)". To me, sociability is the culture of the community--the distinctiveness of the people who participate and how they interact with each other to form a new collective group.
In viewing Sun's website, their homepage highlights the importance of community, not just for their blogs, but for many communities. At both the top of the homepage and the bottom right, their communities are listed. They include: Developers, System Administrators, Partners, Investors, Education, and finally, my focus: employee blogs. When you click on the communities page, you actually find three more communities: press, newsletters, and java technology.
To be more specific about the purpose of the Sun blogs, a statement at the top of the page says,
Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.
Sun does have a specific policy for public discourse, with respect to the employee blogs, as outlined by COO Jonathan Schwarz and is available from the front page of the employee blogs. Basically, he reminds his employees that they are engaging in a conversation, that they should not reveal their "secret sauce", that they should be interesting in how they write, that they should write about what they know, that they should rememeber to "link", and basically to use common sense.
Finally, when you see the list of blogs on that page, you can tell that people are motivated to participate in this conversation. Word is that there are approximately 1200 or so Sun employees currently blogging. That is community.
Usability is a focus on "developing computer systems to support rapid learning, high skill retension, and low error rates (p. 8)." This is a very technical definition. I would translate usability as the way that the community software is created so that users can easily operate the software, find what they are looking for, and will come back to community again and again. Even though I don't understand most of what I read on the Sun website, I would rate usability overall very high. It is easy to get around the site--navigation is easy, and the site looks consistent from page to page.
One other aspect of Usability that Preece mentions is Community-Centered Development. In the case of Sun, Dave Johnson created the Roller blogging software even before he worked for Sun. Dave has been very community-centered, right from the beginning, by blogging about his development work and taking into consideration the suggestions and questions from others all along the way.
Sociability to Preece is how the purpose, policies and people come together "to influence social interaction in the community (p. 7)". To me, sociability is the culture of the community--the distinctiveness of the people who participate and how they interact with each other to form a new collective group.
In viewing Sun's website, their homepage highlights the importance of community, not just for their blogs, but for many communities. At both the top of the homepage and the bottom right, their communities are listed. They include: Developers, System Administrators, Partners, Investors, Education, and finally, my focus: employee blogs. When you click on the communities page, you actually find three more communities: press, newsletters, and java technology.
To be more specific about the purpose of the Sun blogs, a statement at the top of the page says,
Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.
Sun does have a specific policy for public discourse, with respect to the employee blogs, as outlined by COO Jonathan Schwarz and is available from the front page of the employee blogs. Basically, he reminds his employees that they are engaging in a conversation, that they should not reveal their "secret sauce", that they should be interesting in how they write, that they should write about what they know, that they should rememeber to "link", and basically to use common sense.
Finally, when you see the list of blogs on that page, you can tell that people are motivated to participate in this conversation. Word is that there are approximately 1200 or so Sun employees currently blogging. That is community.
Usability is a focus on "developing computer systems to support rapid learning, high skill retension, and low error rates (p. 8)." This is a very technical definition. I would translate usability as the way that the community software is created so that users can easily operate the software, find what they are looking for, and will come back to community again and again. Even though I don't understand most of what I read on the Sun website, I would rate usability overall very high. It is easy to get around the site--navigation is easy, and the site looks consistent from page to page.
One other aspect of Usability that Preece mentions is Community-Centered Development. In the case of Sun, Dave Johnson created the Roller blogging software even before he worked for Sun. Dave has been very community-centered, right from the beginning, by blogging about his development work and taking into consideration the suggestions and questions from others all along the way.
