Back when git and GitHub were relatively new to the mainstream, there was a big discussion about how it promoted forking and was potentially bad for community building. Since then GitHub has well and truly proven that it can successfully support significant community and very successful projects. Looking around GitHub though, it’s clear that not every project successfully builds community there and the tendency to fork can still become a problem.

Ephox provides a bunch of different sites with feeds to help people keep up to date about what’s happening with our software and the company.  For example, LiveWorks! helps you learn more about our products and get the most out of them, the releases blog keeps you up to date with the latest stuff and the official Ephox blog has all the company news. Then of course there’s a range of blogs by Ephox employees like this one and they’re all gathered up at People@Ephox. So guess which feed is the most popular by far?

Kevin Gamble:

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.

So if I build a social network on Ning I can add forums which are kind of cool except that noone actually knows that new stuff has been posted and don’t bother checking back in. It doesn’t seem to matter what options you provide – RSS feeds, offers to email notifications of new threads etc – people drift away from forums very quickly once their question has been answered. On the other hand, mailing lists tend to be harder to get people to use in the first place because you have to subscribe, but then they tend to stick around longer because they’ve already subscribed. If in that time you manage to teach them a few things they didn’t know they needed to know they hang around permanently and the community grows.

I’m setting off on a fairly major trip, firstly to Lotusphere in Orlando (20-24 Jan) where I’ll be facilitating a BOF session (BOF112) titled “Mashup Web 2.0 with Web Content Management”. Sadly it’s been scheduled for 7am Thursday, 24 Jan which seems like a rather silly time to expect people to be up, out of bed and ready for intelligent discussion. So if you’re around I’d really appreciate you getting out of bed early and coming along to make sure it’s not an empty room. Ephox will have a booth on the show room floor and cosponsor a couple of parties as well (details here). I’m really looking forward to actually getting to meet some of our clients and partners – they don’t tend to drop by Australia very often and pretty much never come as far north as Brisbane.

It’s a common question – what’s the point of social networks? The most common answer is basically none. Most social networks provide yet another way to get in touch and keep in touch with people which is great but lets face it, there are about a billion different ways to communicate and leaving messages on someone’s wall only looks good compared to sending smoke signals. Some people might argue that it lets you map out and visualize your social network but seriously I know who my friends are, why don’t you? The address book has been around a long time and it still works seriously well.

I got some really positive feedback on the various community/openness projects that I’ve been spearheading within Ephox from one of our OEMs today. Apparently they’ve discovered our early access program and are already trying out our brand new Express Edit functionality1.  It’s really nice to actually hear from clients that these elements are useful as we haven’t really managed to build up a community, even if we are seeing gradually increasing traffic. For a while now we’ve had potential new employees commenting on Planet Ephox which is great, but we haven’t really heard from clients taking advantage of it, even if we’ve seen some of the indirect effects via analytics and support cases.

One of our board members left a comment on Brett’s blog this morning and I love the way it meshes with my thinking that employee blogs is a crucial tool for senior management to keep up with the directions, understanding and thoughts of the rank and file:

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’m sitting here in Auckland airport transitioning through to San Francisco and there’s an interesting synergy to the stuff that’s coming through. First of all, I see that my rash of Twitter subscriptions (my twitter page) and my mentioning twitter in my last post has caused a few people to add me to Twitter and check out my blog.

In turn, at least one of them read a post mentioning Planet Ephox and posted it to their delicious account. That in turn prompted someone else to invite me to CommunityOne (a lead-up event to JavaOne which I’ll try to get to if I can – my flight arrives about 1pm so I’ll miss half of it). What’s most interesting there is that these extra contacts, invites and awareness of Ephox are completely impossible to track. Even if you had a sophisticated cookie system across all the sites involved, you really need to know what the people are thinking to see if you’re having any effect or whether they see good things or bad things etc. If and when you get to the point that someone makes a purchase, there is likely to be a huge range of influencing factors that caused them to get there.