Voice of Community

An event is not a community, but...

My wise friend and brilliant futurist Wayne Hodgins once told me, “never confuse an event with community” but there I was at Autodesk University 2011 the other week, surrounded by community.

Communities of mechanical engineers, automotive engineers, civil engineers: bridge builders, highway engineers, canal builders, “dirt movers”; architects – high rise and low density residential, hotel and stadium architects, institutional architects designing schools, hospitals, universities and prisons; multi-media designers, animators, games designers, and commercial renderers; mechanical engineers, automotive engineers, shipbuilders, mechanical parts, consumer goods, and parts designers. You name the design profession and there was a tribe for it.

An event might not be a community, but it is an incredible catalyst for community.



In a paper written in 1986 titled “Psychological Sense of Community”, McMillan and Chavez identify four essential aspects of the sense of community and why people join and stay in communities: membership, influence, fulfilment of needs, and emotional connection. 

Membership - a feeling that members have of belonging.
In these design tribes, there’s a camaraderie of profession (what they do), a camaraderie of industry (context in which they do it), camaraderie ofproduct (tools they use to do it), a camaraderie of experience - beginner intermediate, advanced, expert (level atwhich they do it), camaraderie of AU attendance (number of times they’ve participated in the past), camaraderie of association (user groups, AUGI members, and so on). There are so many intersections that it’s not surprising that these communities of practice have a feeling of belonging and find so many common purposes.

Influence - a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group.
In these communities of practice, participants are eager to learn, and eager to learn from each other – someone who’s been there done that and really knows your pain. These groups learn from being shown what to do by trainers in formal sessions, but learn much more from each other.

Fulfillment of needs - a shared faith that members needs will be met.
There is a definitel expectation by attendees that their professional learning and networking needs will be met, and will in great measure be met by members of the community. For example, the unconferences (small roundtable discussions of 20 to 24 people) rather than the lectures are proving more popular than formal training sessions. Also the fact that there are so many returning attendees (over 50%) show that needs have been met successfully in the past.

Shared emotional connection - a shared faith in their commitment to be together.
There is a great connection in terms of their shared professional experiences with product, issues with and as managers, different offices, and Autodesk itself. And although there are many different reasons that bring people to Autodesk University, everybody is here for similar reasons: to get better at their jobs and to network professionally. There is also the “shared history” of AU alumns some of who have been coming to this event for 10, 15, or more years.

An event such as Autodesk University serves to begin and extend community in several ways as face-to-face encounters interact with and compound the engagement of attendees online. People who have been in touch online (in forums, on blogs) finally get to meet each other and put a face and a voice to the email handle and the effect is transformative. People who meet for the first time at the event, can prolong that experience online long after the last session bell has sounded and the last beer consumed.

So, events might not be community, but they surely are an incredible stimulus for community.
Have you had similar experiences at other events? Or have you attended or put on events that were a complete wash in terms of community building? And have you figured out why and what you might want to do differently next time?

Brasil community spurs attendance at Autodesk University Brasil

The first Autodesk University Brasil was held in Sao Paulo last week and was a resounding success. Over 1400 people packed the conference for a full day of presentations and training sessions and partied into the early evening unwilling to leave.

 
Several companies, like PROGEN above,  brought many of their staff to take advantage of the training and the collective wisdom of the conference.

As I’ve said many times before, an event is not a community but it is a great catalyst for community and community activities:

• Before the event, Brasil Community members tweeted, retweeted, blogged, and  posted on the forums advertising the event extensively.
• During the event, community members presented many of the classes, manned the community booth, and answered many questions from participants, as well as running the raffle for an Invidea Quadro graphics board.
• After the event, the community continues to tweet, blog, and post about their experience and great learning they participated in.

I will be disappointed if we are not close to 3,000 people next year. Congratulations and thank you to the Autodesk Brasil Community and the Autodesk Brasil team!

Innovation, Community, and Social Networks (Part 2)

I attended a joint TEDx and Bay Area Executives Meetup a while ago on how customer social networks are making an impact on innovation, and how employee networks within organizations are helping to break out of organizational silos and cross organizational boundaries.
The conference was divided into two sessions with separate panels on:
• Engaging innovation externally
• Engaging innovation internally
This is the second of two articles about innovation, community, and social networks. This post is about engaging innovation internally. The first post discusses engaging innovation internally.

Susie Wee, CTO at HP, talked about the diverse vehicles for innovation at HP including the
• HP Garage (18,000 registered users, 5,000 ideas – all read, all answered)
• Techcon – technology conference
• Insiders
• Incubators
• Co-Creation/Co – Innovation

Wolf Cramer at IBM talked about “action” networks. Need to translate ideas into action. No problem generating ideas. Everyone can generate ideas. But what do you do with them. Need to connect  “idea networks” with “action networks”- who can get things done in the corporation. IBM provides seed money for 3 months and then must pass through various decision gates to pilot and before launch. He also talked about innovation hubs based on social media and collaboration.

Getting new features into a product is easier than creating a whole new product through crowd sourcing.
Rob Daniels at Salesforce talked about Chatter, their “Yammer. He found that Chatter was a great way to discover “hidden heroes” and celebrate their ideas. Top 25 influencers rewarded every 6 months.

Tad Milborn at Intuit talked about focusing on groups “already inclined” to be social and to talk about topics. Aim for the least barrier to entry. At Intuit, 10% of time is allowed to employees for innovation and creating new ideas. (Dan Pink in “Drive” points to Google employees who get “20% innovation time”, 1 day per week to work on a side project. Pink notes that Google News, Gmail, Orkut, and Google Translate, all came out of 20% time.) Their internal Brainstorm infrastructure has around 12,000 views per month.He pointed to “innovator fatigue” where after the bloom of the initial idea fades to be replaced by testing, business plans, marketing, and launch. Ideas need a whole ecosystem to bring them to fruition, not just an infrastructure for generating ideas.

Big takeaways for me regarding internal innovation were
• Innovation can’t be relegated or assigned to one group. It needs to pervade the whole organization if it is to be most effective. However, it does have to be driven centrally to ensure that diverse innovation initiatives are leveraged to their fullest.
• Need to translate ideas into action. No problem generating ideas. But what do you do with them. Need to connect “idea networks” with “action networks”- who can get things done in the corporation.
• Innovation needs to be made part of the corporate culture – “10% time” at Intuit, “20% time” at Google – time set aside for employees to work on their own projects.
• Rather than references to great articles (although these are useful too), need to Yammer more about what we’re doing, to create those serendipitous synergies.)
• Ideas need a whole ecosystem to bring them to fruition, not just an infrastructure for generating ideas.

To read my full write up of the Conference, see TCGen and Bay Area Meetup Social Innovation Conference

Innovation, Community, and Social Networks (Part 1)

I attended a joint TEDx and Bay Area Executives Meetup a while ago on how customer social networks are making an impact on innovation, and how employee networks within organizations are helping to break out of organizational silos and cross organizational boundaries.
The conference was divided into two sessions with separate panels on:
• Engaging innovation externally
• Engaging innovation internally
This is the first of two articles about innovation, community, and social networks. This post is about engaging innovation externally. A second post discusses engaging innovation internally.

David Cruickshank of SAP talked about their Labs Project which is open to partners and customers to try out their ideas and technologies.  SAP feels that it “get’s it” about innovation and has an Open Innovation office where innovation projects are shared and not “stolen” by the sponsor, which can be a big fear from external innovators. IP (intellectual property) is a big issue. 
New Ford site in Deerborn with its Open Innovation facility is another example of customers designing product rather than simply commenting on your proposals – “more than 100,000 applications created in just two years, mostly by individual programmers within the open source community, the spirit of “open innovation” has made the App Store an unprecedented success”
IP works best with complementary partners that have no interest in each other’s area of expertise, for example, a database application and a hardware company (although there are examples of these kinds of relationships not being as harmonious as they ought to be.)
My key take-aways:
• Crowdsourcing and customer involvement as a prime source of innovation is here to stay and is increasing
• Crowdsourcing can be very good for incremental innovation; disruptive breakthroughs, perhaps not so much for sustained development because he crowd might miss stuff.
• Need to position yourself to become the 'escape valve' of ideas
• Difference between consumers and enterprise with respect to innovation: consumers not generally about money, enterprise is ALWAYS about money
• Pain  points for external innovation are:
o Socializing the value of co-creation internally, and
o Negotiating IP
• “Technology has the life of a banana” (Scott McNealy)– don’t waste time on IP issues, get product to market
How have you attempted to encourage innovation around your products and services from your company? Have you been successful? Have efforts been sustained or are they isolated and intermittent? Do you even believe in customer innovation?

To read my full write up of the Conference, see TCGen and Bay Area Meetup Social Innovation Conference

Do influencers really matter?

There have been some interesting articles recently about the influence or lack of influence of so-called influencers. Some are claiming that it doesn’t matter who spreads the message, the well-connected or ordinary joe’s, the message will eventually reach the same number of people.

I was at LINC, the Lithium users conference last month, and while Dr. Michael Wu, Principal Scientist of Analytics at Lithium, conceded that this might be true, the major factor being ignored (apart from common sense!), is the speed or velocity with which the message is spread. Using the analogy of the tortoise and the hare, although both might cover 100 miles eventually, do you really want to wait for 2 months for the tortoise to get there? Similarly, in a social network, do you really want to wait 12 months for your messages to reach all 10,000 of your constituents, or do you want them to receive your messages in 12 days? This is the key value of influencers: the rapidity or velocity with which they can connect with your target constituents and beyond.

To read more see, Is the Tipping Point Really Toast? Do Influencers Really Matter? on the Lithosphere.

Community, ostracism, and the need to belong

Could community be biologically necessary? Is community an evolutionary imperative? These questions and more I immediately thought of when I read a report of a study titled The Pain of Exclusion in the Scientific American Mind in the January/February 2011 edition. The report was summarized in Delanceyplace, a brief daily email on interesting non-fiction mainly historic and occasionally scientific topics of interest

Starting with the opposite of community, exclusion, the article states that “ostracism - rejection, silence, exclusion - is one of the most powerful punishments that one person can inflict on another. Brain scans have shown that this rejection is actually experienced as physical pain, and that this pain is experienced whether those that reject us are close friends or family or total strangers, and whether the act is overt exclusion or merely looking away.”

This kind of reaction does have a function:” it warns us that something is wrong, that there exists a serious threat to our social and psychological well-being” and that “belonging to a group was a need - not a desire or preference - and, when thwarted, leads to psychological and physical illness.”

Ostracism may even be critical in an evolutionary sense. “Social exclusion interferes not only with reproductive success but also with survival. People who do not belong are not included in collaborations necessary to obtain and share food and also lack protection against enemies.”

Could it be that the need for community is built into our DNA? Is this the reason for the explosion of social networks, and the adoption of social media and “community”  made possible by the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies? It’s technology-enabled, but it’s just human nature? What do you think?

The Social Bowl – Super Bowl XLV

With over 100 million people tuning in to watch the ads on Super Bowl Sunday today (hey, only a minority is there for the game), but with 600 million Facebook members and 175 million people on Twitter it’s easy to understand why Advertising Age has dubbed Super Bowl XLV the “social” bowl.

Some of these eagerly-anticipated ads have already been aired, for example, the two VW ads for the Passat were aired on Facebook last week, and are available on Youtube.. It’s not hard to understand why, and it’s not just the fact of the arrival of the $3 million dollar 30-second spot, one of the ads has gone viral and has already had over 10.6 million views.

According to one study, over 20% of Americans  plan to be posting on Facebook during the game, and over 40% of young adults plan to be sending text messages. Tweets are also expected to be at an all-time high, and as I write this blog about 1 hour before the game, the Twitter servers are already showing the strain.

It’s not only during the game that social media has an impact, social media enables the conversations to continue long after the game has ended. Just like the Monday-morning quarterround the office water cooler, social media encourages conversations to continit helps establish brand loyalty and connections with different constituencies and communities in a way that a simple push-type ad on TV cannot hope to compete with. To facilitate this movement, sponsors are now starting to put their Facebook fan page addresses at the end of ads rather than their website URLs.

This year, after-game social activities may prove to be much more significant than the event itself. Something to consider as Autodesk heads into One Team Conference (OTC) in a few weeks and Autodesk University 2011 at the end of November. When the event becomes a step in the journey and not the destination, “what are you doing after the party?” starts to take on a whole new meaning. So after your major face-to-face events, what are you planning to do?

Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition – old style community

After the rigors of the Autodesk University (AU) 2010 in Las Vegas, entombed in the bowels of  the Mandalay Bay Hotel, I recuperated for a week with friends in Corrales, a small town in New Mexico about 10 miles outside Albuquerque and approximately 50 miles from Sante Fe.

It was a charming area made up of small holdings and farms, rural businesses such as nurseries, tree lots, horse breeding, and a few vineyards bordering the Rio Grande river. Many of the locals worked in nearby Albuquerque and in Sante Fe using the local train whose doors went ‘beep-beep’ like the Road Runner every time they opened and closed at each stop along the way. There were also several telecommuters like our friends who worked for Fortune 1000 companies, traveled regularly within the United States and internationally but chose to make their home in this rural area.

We managed to catch the annual evening Christmas parade consisting of a variety of tractors, vintage cars and trucks, and various styles and sizes of  wagons – over 50 vehicles of all shapes and sizes covered in a variety of illuminations, electrified Santas, and electrifying reindeer - over 60 floats in all. In fact, there were so many people in the parade, there were barely enough people to line the street and muster a decent cheer. Talk about 1-9-90 – it was more like 70-30 – we definitely needed more lurkers.

Although not religious, on Sunday we went to the local church with a congregation of about 30 and listened to a great sermon – anytime a vicar quotes Woody Allen in a sermon has my attention – something about the lion shall lie down with the lamb “but only one will get a good night’s sleep.” It was interesting as well as disconcerting to see members of this peace-loving congregation come to our friend’s house afterwards with gun racks in the back of the truck and in one case, a magnum 45 on the dashboard. Even though I live in one of the more violent cities in the US, Oakland, it took me back for a while, but of course when you think that when you call 911 out here, it can be 2 to 8 hours, not 2 to 8 minutes before the authorities arrive, you need to be your own police, judge, jury, and executioner. It was old time religion in an old style community. And long may it continue.

Happy New Year everybody, and all the best for 2011!

Community, community, everywhere

Community to the right of me, community to the left of me, community as far as the eye could see. Although you should never confuse an event with community, it was hard not to equate the two after 6 days in the bowels of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas at Autodesk University (AU) 2010, the annual gathering of many of our most committed Autodesk software users.

Communities of designers, architects, and engineers. Within the community of architects, communities of industrial, commercial, and residential architects. Within the community of residential architects, communities of high rise residential, single-family dwelling and residential institutional architects. The list  of differentiations is virtually endless. All using Autodesk design products but each tribe differentiated by its domain, expertise, and ways of solving their particular problems, in many cases, in their own language and unique cultural workflows and best practices.

Events are a way for communities to come together and continue and deepen relationships formed at previous events and maintained online. Events are a way to cement relationships out of conversations started online. Events are also a way to begin relationships with those elusive people,  people  “just like me,” to be continued long after the event has ended. Events might be expensive and time consuming, but what better way to start, cement, and celebrate community.

And only 352 online days to AU 2011!

Don't neglect your analog community

The other day, I heard the expression “analog community," and for a brief second was a little mystified until I realized, of course, the counterpart of “online community” – a new phrase for the original meaning and manifestation of community – face-to-face interaction.

We sometimes forget that in an ever-connected, online world, there is still space for good, old-style meetings, personal conversations, interviews, conferences, events, and all the other stuff we used to do before online community was cool. This is not to negate the reach, impact, and importance of online community, but let's not forget the importance of community councils, advisory groups, MVPs, focus groups, and face-to-face user groups.

As I head into Autodesk University (AU) 2010, to meet between 5 and 10,000 members and participants in the many and varied Autodesk communities, I would do well to heed my own words!