The State of Online Community
A webinar sponsored by the Online Community Research Network
December 11, 2008, 11:00 am PST

Register at http://ocstate.eventbrite.com >>

Join online community expert, Bill Johnston of Forum One Networks for highlights from the Online Community Research Network 2008 research series and a discussion of trends on the horizon for 2009. Session highlights will include:

• Online community strategy and ownership
• Community as an ecosystem
• Budget, headcount and compensation
• The evolving role of management and moderation

Please note: Attendance is FREE but limited to 200 people. Register early to reserve your spot!

President-elect Barack Obama has launched the website change.gov, where you can find news about the transition and inauguration and information about his agenda. Interestingly, the site also has a place for people to share their ideas for government and their stories about the campaign. This might be an early answer to the question I raised in my last post...

What a wonderful day! And plenty of observers have already noted the key role that the Internet and social media played in the successful campaign of Barack Obama. But the question that strikes me is: when he’s President, how will he utilize the hundreds of thousands of MySpace friends, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, My.BarackObama.com members, and SMS opt-ins, just to name a few, to advance his policies and­ ­­politics­? Are we on the verge of a new era of eParticipation in politics?

Interesting, wonder what this could mean for facilitators:

People who want to improve their communication skills may one day have an unusual helper: software programs that analyze the tone, turn-taking behavior and other qualities of a conversation. The programs would then tell the speakers whether they tend to interrupt others, for example, or whether they dominate meetings with monologues, or appear inattentive when others are talking.

The inventor of this technology is Alex Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has developed cellphone-like gadgets to listen to people as they chat, and computer programs that sift through these conversational cadences, studying communication signals that lie beneath the words.

If commercialized, such tools could help users better handle many subtleties of face-to-face and group interactions — or at least stop hogging the show at committee meetings.

in NYTimes, read full article >>

I've played around with Youtube's video annotation but not until recently did I discover that it actually allows users to include hyperlinks (why wouldn't it, duh?). In the meantime there are a couple of great examples where filmmakers have put together a series of short movies where the viewer decides the course of the story. The concept is obviously not new, but all of a sudden available to anybody and really taking 5min bite-size online video to a different level.

I really think this would be a great way to present information in civic engagement projects, where participants make trade-offs and see a different course of action depending on the choices they make. Will put a demo together shortly...

I'm a subscriber of Barack Obama's text message alerts and have been impressed by how the campaign makes use of it so far. The messages usually alert subscribers to current events, like "Watch Barack speak from Berlin at approx 1pm ET. The speech will be live on CNN & streamed at http://barackobama.com/live. Please fwd this msg.". The advantage of sms over email is clearly that it alerts or reminds subscribers immediately, while they might not check their emails until later. I was fascinated to hear the news that the campaign would first announce Obama's running mate via text message in order to grow their pool of subscribers. And even though it turned out the news was leaked by CNN first and the exclusivity of the hastingly created sms two hours afterwards was lost, the campaign now has more than 3 million text message subscribers (according to this source), which might prove to be helpful going into crunchtime. Read a more in-depth discussion about the edge that text messaging might give Barack Obama in the upcoming elections >>

Great roundup of the Community Conversation process in the Achieving the Dream initiative. 

I stumbled over a Chevy ad on the front page of the New York Times today, announcing a dialogue about alternative energy with the headline "We share a planet, why not share a dialogue".  While I appreciate the offer to talk openly about their alternative fuel efforts (and realize I have to do some more research about the seriousness of their efforts), I disagree with their choice of words. After navigating to the microsite, I had to realize all they offer is a Q&A section. The answers seem to be pretty open and address the issues, but technically a Q&A doesn't qualify as a dialogue:  Users can only submit questions, neither are they able to respond to the answer nor are other visitors able to leave their response to the answer or the initial question - Chevy has the final word!