The big difference that I see between projects thriving with GitHub and those where forking looks like more of a problem is that thriving projects have a “campfire” other than the source code for people to gather around. Often that’s a mailing list, other times it’s IRC and various other technologies but there’s always one common place where the community can build. GitHub by itself is unlikely to build up such a community because there isn’t a really good way to engage everyone in conversation. As such, you get a lot of forks and people making improvements, but not really working together and often the various forks never get folded back into the original.

The good news is that despite all the forks often remaining off on their own, it doesn’t seem to be detrimental to the original project. People find the main GitHub repository through other means, mostly links on the web, so there doesn’t seem to be confusion over which fork is the “main” one. On the other hand, most of those forks represent a wasted effort which could have pushed the project forward if only there had been some communication.

Finally, it’s interesting that the GitHub model of anyone creating a fork is far more successful for projects which don’t need a contributor agreement to be signed. In that case, any fork that looks promising can be pulled in without needing extra permissions, so even without the extra communication channel the effort can be utilised. With a contributor agreement, you have to reach out and get the author to sign, which is a significant barrier.

Upload a photo of yourself…

DON'T provide any identifiable information, like your name or email, since that's a violation of MTurk policy.

When did technology take over so much that our face, the single most important aspect our brains use in identifying people, become not personally identifiable information?

Yep, People@Ephox. Now, People@Ephox obviously includes the posts from all our official blogs so you get the hints and tips from LiveWorks!, the release notifications and the official company news but the majority of posts that come through are from employee’s blogs discussing random stuff from Guitar Hero, to rebuilding PCs, touring around the Australian outback and even sometimes talking about work. Add to that the fairly significant number of visits to the actual People@Ephox site as well and it’s even more impressive.

Personally, I think that’s fantastic. To be honest, when I put together People@Ephox, I didn’t really expect it to be that popular – almost just checking off the “hip company that cares about it’s users” list. We do genuinely care about our users and I’m always looking for ways to stay in touch with them and make sure they’re getting the most out of our products but I would have thought the majority of people these days would only be interested in the more official sites. I tend to subscribe to employee’s blogs for companies that I deal with, but everyone keeps telling me how unusual I am. At least in this case they’re not entirely right (though in many others they definitely are).

Companies spend a huge amount of time building up contact lists and trying to get clients to opt-in to receive newsletters and whatever else and while they certainly go out to far more people than People@Ephox does, there’s a really important difference.  People@Ephox really hasn’t done anything to make it easy to opt-in to. There’s no email subscriptions, no fancy Web 2.0 buttons to subscribe in a million different web based readers, not even the marketing department obligatory call to action, just an RSS feed, and people subscribe.  I’ll bet (hope) they’re far more interested in the content too.

So to all of our clients, partners and users who come to read this – thanks for taking an interest. I’d love to stay up to date with you and your companies too so please do post the URL to your blog in the comments whether it’s official or unofficial and even if it never mentions anything to do with EditLive!

UPDATE: Since it’s so easy to do, now you can subscribe via email. Just visit the site, put your email address in the box, solve the captcha and click the link in the email you get. Don’t forget to thank the spammers for making the internet such a pain…

I know I must sound like a broken record on this point, but the message just isn't sinking in. What's it going to take for people to "get" this? A million dollars or 10 million dollars. It doesn't matter. The people are not coming. You have to go to them. It's pretty simple actually.

The thing is, corporate thinking is all about owning stuff. So the natural tendency is to want a community that you “own” and thus you have to build a new community and get people to come. It’s nice to see some studies highlighting how rarely that actually works though.

Now this isn’t to say that you should tear down all your web properties and start using FaceBook pages instead – it just means that you have to go over to FaceBook or where ever your users hang out and interact with them there. You can still publish useful content on your own site and link to it as appropriate, just don’t expect your site to become the hub of the community.

I find the third key problem from the Wall Street Journal article Kevin references resonates a lot with me:

The third problem with online communities is how businesses go about measuring the success of their communities. Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site.

The thing about word of mouth is that it quite often is just that – words from people’s mouths. It’s not called spreading news by links to web pages or by visiting sites – it’s word of mouth and that’s incredibly hard to track. Unless you’re insanely caught up in the blogging craze you have to realize that people are more likely to recommend your products by speaking with others, or via email or IM than they are to actually publish a web page that links to yours and recommend people go join up to your community. Most companies focus on something other than creating a community site and it’s that original product that gets recommended, even if it’s because of the community site.

For example, LiveWorks! receives very little traffic when compared to the main Ephox website, but it’s still very high up the list of referring sites but more importantly when you talk to people and say that there’s a ton of information and early access to our products on LiveWorks! they think that’s fantastic and are far more likely to recommend our editors – which live on ephox.com.

Of course, LiveWorks! doesn’t really try to be a community site – it allows comments and provides a mailing list/forum but really it’s a great big collection of useful content about our product. You can’t create an account or a profile there even though we’ve talked about doing something like that. This kind of research makes me realize why that’s never seemed like an absolute must-do idea for me.

Now the question is, where is the community around our products and how do we best go out and join it?

Using any image consistently to identify a user makes such a huge difference to how people relate to each other because the human brain is so used to identifying people by the way they look. It takes another giant leap forward when people use an actual picture of themselves instead of some random muppet (even if he is cool and plays saxophone like I do - I even have a case and stand just like that). Your brain isn’t just tuned to recognizing visuals, it’s tuned to recognize faces. There’s not a lot developers can do to get users to upload a picture of themselves if they don’t want to but it would probably be worth trying to explain the benefits rather than just providing an image upload box.

All this brings me to Atomic’s Gravitar service which is a pretty cool idea. The basic concept is that you upload your avitar (shame they didn’t call it picture to encourage real faces…) to their site and then everywhere else you comment can just retrieve it from there. It’s like OpenID for your face. Here’s part of their description:

Gravatar aims to put a face behind the name. This is the beginning of trust. In the future, Gravatar will be a way to establish trust between producers and consumers on the internet. It will be the next best thing to meeting in person.

Here’s the problem with faces – your brain is tuned to match them with that person and assigns a level of trust based on how you recognize the face as. Yes, that instinct can and should be overridden when your surfing around on the public internet, but it’s very naive of the Gravatar folk to start talking about your avitar as providing trust. It got even worse when I went to sign up for the service.

The sign up looks simple, you enter your email address to start it all. Unfortunately, when I entered mine it said it was already in use. The problem is, I haven’t signed up for Gravatar before – the identity they’ve got listed is a fraud. If you’ve seen my comments around the internet accompanied by an offensive image, now you know why.

The reality of course is more likely that they just abused the privacy policy of wordpress.com and imported all those accounts. Since you can’t use Akismet without signing up for a WordPress blog that’s probably the chain of events that occurred. I’m sure in the normal case they send you an email that you have to click as well to verify that you have access to the email address, but email isn’t exactly a secure communication channel.

The reality is, it’s foolish to assume that anyone on the big, wild internet is who they claim to be because sooner or later it will be a phony and attempts to establish identity that don’t involve some serious encryption and all that jazz are always going to be flawed.

But hey, who can argue with cool pictures when you post comments? I certainly can’t resist shiny stuff, and I’d rather it be me that signs up than someone pretending to be me.

Coming back to Ning, it has lots of cool features and user management etc etc etc, but it doesn't seem to have any kind of mailing list at all. Ideally I'd like the forums to also have a mailing list option but if not, is it possible to just have a mailing list so people can join a group and they're automatically added to the mailing list? I can even host the mailing list software myself but it would need to be kept in sync.

It goes without saying that whatever solution I come up with would be clearly labelled as subscribing to a mailing list etc etc etc – it's not an attempt to fool people into opting into e-mail. All done in good faith and with all the nasty little details to be thought out in full before implementation, but right now I'm brainstorming.

From there it's back over to Lake Tahoe for a fancy corporate retreat and a whole lot of major planning which should be fun.

Finally, I'll be spending February in London to help kick our European sales along, so if people are around I'd love to catch up and meet some new people.

Since I'll be doing a fair bit more travel in the future, I've joined up with Dopplr to help keep track of it and succumbed to the horrors of widgets in my sidebar to display my upcoming trips. If you're using Dopplr I'm registered under adrian@symphonious.net (screen name ajsutton) so feel free to follow my trips and let me know if we're passing by. I'm really looking forward to meeting new people now that I'm getting around the world some more so don't be shy.

PS: Apologies to the Planet Ephox subscribers who have now had three posts about Lotusphere in rather quick succession.

I think the best way to highlight how seriously useless plain social networks are is to look at the 10 Best Facebook Applications For Business Professionals:

• Conference Calls
• Voicemail
• Asking Questions
• Posting Video Messages
• Introductions
• Business Cards
• Phonebook
• Recommendations
• Defining other people with a tag cloud
• Business directory

Anyone see anything new in there? Anything remotely likely to change the face of business? Nope. Gimmicks galore and sure you can make yourself look all hip and web 2.0. Yes it's very important to reach out, connect with your clients and be part of the discussion but social networks aren't suddenly making it possible to do that, they add the burden of yet another way you have to do it and most of them put up all kinds of walls to make it difficult to do so.

Now that's not to say that the idea of social software is bad – just the idea of social software with no point. What if instead of just building up communities for the heck of it, we built up communities to achieve a common goal or a series of goals? In other words, what if there was a point to it all? That's what LiveMocha is doing by building a social network of people who want to learn a foreign language. Dan Kaplan put me onto LiveMocha and he nails the key cognitive change between what we'll look back on as the hype of social networking and what actually stands the test of time:

The key is that, unlike so many of the wannabes in the social network game, LiveMocha’s social network is not the central focus of the site but simply a feature.

Social networks are not the point, social networks are the tool and it's about time we started realizing that and start putting it to work. There are two ways for this to unfold, either we'll start seeing really useful Facebook applications being built – I imagine it would have been possible for LiveMocha to be done as a Facebook application, or the explosion of different social networks will expand to the point where users simply demand openness and the ability to move their social network around.

Either way the time is coming where the social network will be a feature and a tool, not the entire system. Frankly, I can't wait.

Now getting great feedback from one client is satisfying but it's not the end game – of course we want to impress all our clients like this by whatever means it takes. What I find most exciting about this is that it demonstrates to the sales and marketing teams that our openness and even our engineering practices2 are actually valuable to clients, particularly OEMs where the relationship is more important and long term. The business users and product managers probably don't care about automated tests and early access, but the engineers that have to actually integrate our product do. If we can provide them with tools like the hints and tips on LiveWorks! or early access to new features, they can better integrate our products and get the most out of them for the actual end users. In the end, that's what everyone should be working towards and we can and will help out on multiple levels.

1 – Don't forget to let us know how it goes and how we could improve it btw….↩

2 – continuous integration, TDD and all the other things we do to ensure quality↩

Well, my friend I gotta say that whilst reading board papers a link to a blog is a welcome relief. I get the feedback I crave and welcome and also get a general sense of what is on the minds of your team.

I can set up blogs for Ephox employees in about 5 minutes, complete with an awesome editor :) – who's next?