Hiring a System Administrator

Sometimes I feel I whine too much in this blog about all the system administration tasks that eat up so much of my time, when my emphasis should truly be on community development. Turns out I had a case to be made, and it was good enough to get approval to hire a system administrator to take that load off my shoulders.

I'm very excited about having another dedicated resource working full-time on our community. I expect it to make a tremendous difference in what we'll be able to accomplish. It comes back to what I have been saying from the start: you have to invest in your communities if you truly want them to succeed. There is no such thing as a free lunch, nor a free functioning online community.

While we're most interested in hiring for this role from within, I think it would have been useful for me if I'd had model job postings to look at when I created this one, so I'll share the write up here. (Note: our Jive SBS instance is called the UBM Wiki and is commonly referred to as "the wiki.")

Jive SBS System Administrator

Job Role: Jive SBS System Administrator for United Business Media

Division: UBM head office

Reports to: UBM Wiki Community Manager

Location: Flexible, needs to be in a UBM office

To apply: Send your resume and cover letter to ted.hopton@ubm.com

Job Summary

The UBM Wiki is an evolving network of internal online communities that connects our people, enhances communication, and enables the development of a collaborative culture across UBM. Approximately 5000 employees in all parts of United Business Media (UBM) and the world use the UBM Wiki, and since it was launched in September 2008 they have created 18,000 documents, 4000 discussions and 1500 blog posts, plus tens of thousands of comments on all of those.

The UBM Wiki runs on Jive SBS, a rapidly evolving browser-based collaboration tool. Our system is hosted by Jive Software, the fast-growing market leader in social business software, and uses Akamai's CDN (Content Delivery Network).

The role of Wiki System Administrator is being created to provide the technical leadership and support needed to maintain and develop all aspects of the technology used for the UBM Wiki.

The role will require flexibility in working hours to accommodate a global organization, including but not limited to frequent interaction with the Wiki Community Manager (US Eastern time zone) and Jive Software personnel (US Pacific time zone).

Responsibilities

The Wiki System Administrator will be in charge of all technical aspects of the UBM Wiki, including the following major areas of responsibility:

Jive SBS Administration
System Maintenance

Our Jive SBS is hosted by Sungard for Jive Software. The system administrator is responsible for managing and maintaining aspects of the system that are within UBM control, to ensure:

• maximum system availability and uptime
• full utilization of system capabilities
• all aspects of the administration console are configured managed appropriately
• system processes are fully documented with appropriate controls

System Evolution

Lead the development of customizations to our Jive SBS instance to further meet the community's needs:

• customizing the look and feel of our application
• creating and modifying widgets to meet UBM-specific needs
  
• assessing the need for customizations and prioritizing projects
  
• managing the process of developing customizations (either in-house or contracted through Jive or other vendors)
• recruiting and leading an in-house team of volunteer developers

Technical Lead
Jive Software: Tech Support, Hosting and Engineering

Primary technical point of contact for the UBM Wiki with Jive Software, responsible for:

• bug tracking and resolution: file and follow through on bugs with Jive, tracking them until patched
• system upgrades: assessing whether and when to upgrade, planning and communication, monitoring upgrades, and conducting and managing acceptance testing.
• feature requests and improvements: identifying, prioritizing and working with Jive to influence the evolution of the software
• speed enhancements: making the user experience throughout UBM satisfactory in terms of system response time; working with users and UBM IT to properly configure PCs and networks; working with Jive to achieve response time improvements
• security issues: following up on, identifying and implementing security improvements, and working with Jive to influence the evolution of the software

Note: Jive headquarters is in Portland, OR and so meetings often need to be conducive to Pacific Time work hours.

Interface with UBM IT Departments

Coordinate and develop effective and cooperative partnerships with all of the IT Support teams throughout UBM:

• point of contact for issues needing divisional IT support
• developing processes within each department for appropriate wiki technical support
• encourage teamwork and knowledge sharing to collectively provide a reliable user experience with the wiki throughout UBM

Manage Wiki Administrators

Lead and interface with wiki administrators across UBM:

• communicate, educate and train
• enforce compliance with wiki policies and processes
• manage account set up for new teams and acquisitions

User Technical Support and Training

Help people use the UBM Wiki effectively and efficiently by:

• responding to user technical inquiries and issues, offering guidance where needed
• documenting how to do things in the wiki
• conducting "how to" training sessions: in-person, on the web and recorded video training
• reporting and tracking bugs, communicating with users about status and workarounds

The Wiki System Administrator will also be the primary back-up for the Wiki Community Manager and is expected to be an engaged and vital partner in furthering the development of UBM's online community in the wiki.

Knowledge Requirements

The successful candidate will ideally be an existing UBM employee, with an understanding of the range of UBM’s business activities, structure and culture and an ambition to progress their career further within UBM’s online businesses.

They will have general technical experience with websites (HTML, CSS) and working with web applications (database, network, apache, etc.), as well as a basic understanding of email and database systems. Ideally they will have had some exposure to or basic computer programming experience.

Current role and location matters less than a real interest in online collaboration applications, an appetite to learn and a commitment to delivering a UBM wiki that is not simply a technical platform but a tool to enable the development of a highly collaborative organization culture.

They will be energetic and excited about working with dynamic, cutting-edge collaborative technology. They will be an active user of wikis, blogs, social networking tools and other Web 2.0 technology in their professional as well as personal life. They probably have a budding reputation as a go-to technical person within their area of the business.

The individual will have excellent communication skills (written and spoken), proven experience helping others understand how to use systems, and will have successfully managed complex projects.

Some of the following experience would be helpful but is not essential:

• database creation and administration
• user interface design
• software development management
• information architecture

Going to Jive World 2009

I'll be in San Francisco at the first annual Jive World conference next week. Looking forward to meeting fellow community managers and Jive customers to network and exchange ideas. Hope to have plenty to write about from and following the conference. If you're going to be there, let me know!

Jive SBS Self-Registration Pros and Cons

This is going to be a rather technical post, which is fitting since I've spent pretty much the past month in nearly-full-time system administrator mode. It's not how I prefer to allocate my time, but there were things that just needed to be done.

During that time, I changed the process by which we create new user accounts for Jive SBS. For the first year, we manually created new user accounts (thousands of them). We didn't have a central directory across our company, so we couldn't use LDAP.

Now that we have used self-registration for a month, I'd like to consider the plusses and minuses of each approach. Spoiler alert: neither one is ideal.

What's Good About Manually Creating Accounts

1. Accounts get set up. You have a list of people who need accounts, a User Admin creates them, and they are done. This doesn't always happen with self-registration, as I'll explain below.
2. Usernames are consistent. Well, admins make mistakes, too, but in general your naming convention will be followed. There are a number of reasons this is important. First, we don't want goofy usernames like hellokitty or racy ones, either. Second, usernames in Jive SBS are case-sensitive, so we require them to be all lowercase. That is intended to cut down on confusion when people try to recall their username, and to avoid ridiculous scenarios where we could have two separate accounts such as TSmith and tsmith.
3. The User Admin adds the new user to whatever admin groups are needed to provide appropriate access levels.

What's Not Good About Manually Creating Accounts

1. Even though it only takes about a minute to create each account, that's a lot of minutes when you're creating thousands of accounts. It's a lot of admin work.
2. Because it's a lot of admin work, we spread it out by empowering many people as User Admins. That means a loss of oversight and control over the account creation process, and I don't like that.
3. Just because the account is created, it doesn't mean it's being used. We may have deluded ourselves in thinking that by creating all these accounts we now had that many people "in" the system. Activity reports suggest otherwise. Creating an account for someone doesn't necessarily engage them.
4. We only filled in the minimum profile fields. Even though we urged people to update their profiles with critical contact information, many did not (see the point above about usage).
5. There's no way to force people to agree to the site's terms and conditions when you create accounts for people. Since we didn't have our t&c ready when we launched, that didn't matter then. But it does now.

What's Good About Self-Registration

1. You can force people to accept the terms and conditions of using the site when they register. This alone is an important reason to consider this method.
2. You can force people to populate whatever profile fields you designate as required. This has resulted in much more complete profiles among our new users in the past month. I really like this.
3. It's less admin work. All I have to do is approve the pending registration. However, it's not all peaches and cream from an admin standpoint (see below).
4. The people who have new accounts have engaged. They have invested at least a few minutes of their time setting up their profile. I don't have stats on this, but I am guessing they will be more active in using the tool initially than those whose accounts were created for them.

What's Not Good About Self-Registration

1. Not everyone registers. We have a pretty large percentage of people so far who have been invited to register but they haven't done it, so they are not in the system. However, at least we have an accurate picture of who is not engaged. These people clearly are not.
2. Admin work has not gone away. In fact, there are a ton of headaches to deal with, and since for security reasons I've centralized the approval process with me, I am spending a ton of time dealing with lots of little things. I'll list the various issues here.
3. Employment verification - since people are submitting registrations instead of us working from an approved list of employees (ours is an internal community), the employment status of each applicant needs to be verified. When managers follow the proper process, this is pretty easy. But when they don't, it eats up my time and delays the process. (Note: email domain verification won't work for us, for a number of reasons.)
4. Permissions still need to be set up by an admin - I have to manually grant basic permissions to new accounts and their local admin has to give them any special permissions they need. Easy enough, but these steps take time and failing to do them causes problems.
5. People who have accounts apply for new ones. I wish I could magically make everyone read instructions and follow them. It says right on the login page what to do if you already have an account, but plenty of people still are going through the entire process of trying to create a new account (I guess this speaks to my point about engagement, earlier). So I have to check to see if they have an account and then email them with the directions they should have followed in the first place. Plus, I have to alter their registration form so the email address they used doesn't get locked in the database as "taken." Quite an annoying waste of time, and before we had the "create an account" link people couldn't get mixed up this way. Need a dummy-proof solution to this...
6. People are lazy and don't follow instructions and I end up editing their profiles before I approve them. I may have to give up on this, but I hate seeing it look unprofessional.Some don't capitalize anything in their profile, or they mispell things or enter information in the wrong place. Amazingly, some select the wrong division from the dropdown box (they don't know where they work). And my favorite is putting "Miss" or "Mr." in the Title field instead of their job title.
7. There's a bug that I discovered (and reported, but I don't know when it'll be fixed) which breaks the approval process if you change the username before approving the account. Some people don't follow the username naming instructions ("use your email address in all lowercase letters"). This forces me to leave inappropriate usernames as they are and simply approve the account. The only way around it is to approve the account, then edit the username, and then send an email to the user trying to explain what to do (when they've already gotten the automated email with the other username). I could reject the application and tell people to start over, but we have enough trouble getting people to register, so I am loathe to do that.
8. In Jive SBS, User Admins have permission to create accounts, disable accounts and edit user profiles -- and they can approve pending accounts. That's created a ton of extra work for me, as we have dozens of User Admins solely because they need to be able to promptly disable accounts of people who leave the company. But at least a couple of dozen times they have approved pending accounts inappropriately, and the clean up work I've had to do on the back-end is considerable and very time-consuming. It also makes us look like idiots to the person applying for an account, as they get an email saying they are approved but they don't have any permissions, and then they get an "oops" email saying we messed up.

So, Which Is the Best Approach for Creating New User Accounts?

I don't think one approach is clearly better than the other. That's why I spelled out all the pros and cons of each method. Choose for yourself which method you think meets your needs best.

Of course, we're still new at the self-registration process and it's possible (I hope!) that over time we'll figure out solutions to the problems we've encountered with it. If anyone has any suggestions in that area, I'd love to hear them!

What We're Struggling with in Our Online Community

I tend to focus on the positive, being an optimist. Most of my posts in this blog reflect that. But I'm preparing for a presentation about our online community, and I want it to cover both our successes and our struggles -- and that leaves me "struggling" to decide which of our struggles are worth sharing. It's also forcing me to decide what's "dirty laundry" that shouldn't be aired in public. So, while I want to be open, talking about what's not gone so well with our social media software deployment isn't as easy as telling our success stories.

Resistance

Our biggest struggle can be described as resistance. As in every organization, we have some people who resist change in their technology, their processes and their routines. Any organizational initiative encounters all of these. But saying that there is resistance doesn't really help us understand why, or how to overcome it.

Fear

There's a good bit of fear underlying some of the resistance, and fear can be tough to dispel, since it's not necessarily a rational response. But many fears are, indeed, grounded in solid experiences and so merit a thoughtful response.

What are some people afraid of? I think we can group the fears into several categories:

• theft, espionage, betrayal -- the tool will make us vulnerable
• legal liability -- people will use the tool in ways that expose us to legal penalties
• inaccuracy, errors, misleading information -- it will become a garbage heap
• chaos, disorder, sloppiness -- it will be inefficient and ineffective
• wasted time, idle chatter, not serious -- it will be a distraction
• making mistakes, being shown up, looking foolish -- it will expose people unflatteringly

Well, now that I have listed all of those out, that's a pretty scary list of fears! And there probably are more...

Lack of Resources and Time

One of the toughest struggles I face is the difficulty of getting people to commit resources and time when they are already stretched thin. It's a tough economy out there and we're running lean and mean like everyone these days. It takes time to learn to use new technology, more time to master advanced features and even more to really get the most out of it. And time is not something people have a lot of during their workday anymore.

It also takes resources to support this technology and develop online communities. Although we've found a clear correlation between having an effective community manager and getting real value from the system, we still have areas which have not committed sufficient resources to this role. That's holding back our overall adoption rate and the community's effectiveness for the enterprise. It's a tough challenge.

Misunderstanding and Misinformation

Another battle we're fighting is misunderstanding. Some people assume they know what social media is about, and that it has little to offer them. Some have "heard" one thing or another, assumed that was true, and have written off the significance of what we're trying to do as a result. But many others just don't have any idea what the full potential of this technology is, and lacking any experience with it or context to place it in, have simply tuned it out as yet another confusing computer system that may go away if they ignore it long enough.

Skepticism

I'm a skeptic, so I can relate to this sentiment. It's over-hyped. It's a fad. What's the catch? This too shall pass. It's not proven. And so on.

Just Don't Like It

Let's make one more catch-all category, even broader than resistance. It's not a very actionable category -- hard to know how to address people in this group -- but there are some people who simply don't like using the technology. It's not productive to call them names (Luddites!), and it's a real challenge to win them over, but they are out there. Some don't like aspects of the particular technology we've chosen (it's too slow, too confusing, it doesn't do this or that, etc.), but some wouldn't like any technology we selected for this purpose. I think it's fair and reasonable to say that social media technology simply is not for everyone.

All right, that's a longer and more comprehensive list of our struggles than I've ever come up with before. It's not as much fun to talk about the obstacles we're facing, but it's a necessary step in overcoming them. Time to get to work on addressing each of these!

Connect. Communicate. Collaborate.

We've chosen a tagline and logo for our internal online community. It has been a year since we began our pilot and will be a year in September since our official "soft" launch. And I think that means it's time for a communications effort to help us get to the next level, and we'll use our logo and tagline to get the message(s) across.

I wish I had a great metaphorical reason for choosing the logo, but really we just liked it best of all the entries submitted by our community members. I expect over time we'll endow it with all sorts of meaning and so retroactively explain the imagery. Wouldn't be the first time that happened.

The tagline (Connect. Communicate. Collaborate.) sums up what our social media software is for, and what we expect our community to do with it. Let's look at each point in turn.

Connect

We're seeing people connect in our community across geographical borders and divisional boundaries. Suddenly it doesn't matter so much where your desk is or which part of the company you work in. It has become simple to reach out to people you've never met (and perhaps never will).

You find them in all sorts of ways, too. Some are prolific or profound or funny bloggers. Some ask provocative questions that set off dynamic discussion threads, and others offer insightful and informed responses. Some publish documents that you find valuable. Others are members of groups that you have joined, whether on work topics (e.g., SEO) or not (e.g., Gardeners).

Still more are there to be found with a bit of effort through searching or filtering on topics that interest you, locations you're interested in, or offices you're visiting. Finding peers who perform the same role you do in other parts of the company has become practically effortless.

One's network of connections within the company is an important part of any knowledge worker's effectiveness. Knowing who to turn to can be just as valuable in solving problems as your own accumulated topical knowledge. The better connected our employees are, the more effective our organization becomes.

Connecting: it's the first fundamental factor in our online community's success.

Communicate

Can we all agree with the truisms about communication in organizations? Communication is important, there is rarely enough of it and getting people to pay attention to it is a challenge. Our social media software is just one communication tool for our organization to use, but it offers some powerful channels for improving the way we communicate.

The fundamental difference we're seeing is a change from one-way communication (top-down) to not only two-way (people responding to the writer), but to open discussions among many people, including follow up by the writer. Our managers have always communicated, but never before have their written communications invited response as they do now. People comment on the CEO's blog, triggering further comments and entire discussions about the topic of the blog (or the comment itself).

In order to engage like this, you have to pay attention, and when you see that others are engaged there's more incentive for you to engage, or at least pay attention, too. Communications become less about silently reading an email from the boss and deciding where to file it (or whether to delete it), and more about an invitation to think and join a lively conversation. Human beings are all about conversation, and it's making our communications more effective.

Of course, there are many other ways people are communicating within our community, and I am sure new ways will continue to evolve. We have people blogging about what interests them, and people who read and follow them based on the merit of their ideas and writing, not the author's job title. People are speaking up and sharing what they are thinking. It's satisfying to have a voice and be heard, and it's good policy for the organization to hear so many more of the ideas and opinions that otherwise might not have been shared. We are all the smarter for listening to each other.

Collaborate

Collaboration is the one-word answer I give when asked what our social media software is for and why we have rolled it out across the enterprise. Trying to quantify all the positive effects from "collaboration" is like trying to do the same for "learning." The possibilities are endless. The sheer multiplicity of potential from thousands of employees interacting one-on-one, in small groups and one-to-many can't easily be assessed by any tools or predictions.

But the value is real. We're seeing it already, and I believe far more collaboration is taking place than I can see. After all, who thinks to comment upon the fact that they just had a productive conversation with someone they met through the online community? Who bothers to point out that they just found the answer to an important question by searching and finding a document posted by someone in another part of the world?

In fact, I'll posit the Collaboration Iceberg Rule (as in, the tip of the iceberg): For every example of collaboration that comes to the community manager's attention, nine other examples go unreported. Of course, it's not exactly nine (really it's 9.27, but I know you won't believe I have calculated it that precisely) -- but you get the point.

Collaboration saves the company money. Collaboration leads to more revenue. Collaboration leads to new business opportunities, innovation and competitive advantage. When you think about it, collaboration is the reason that companies exist: companies are designed as ways for individuals to work together to accomplish the organization's objectives. Our online community is helping us work together better.

The Sunflower

I'll close by suggesting some associations we can make from the sunflower image on the logo. It's alive. It's growing. It's healthy, as indicated by the bright colors of the flower. It's vibrant. It contains the seeds of further growth. It responds to light, an image of openness. It requires nurturing, as well as weeding and occasional pruning. It develops strong roots that hold it steady in the face of adverse weather.

All of this applies metaphorically to our online community. And we've only just begun to plant the seeds. But we're already blooming and reaching higher. And just like a magnificent sunflower does, that brings a smile to my face.

Great Discussion on Social Media ROI and Metrics

This will be a first for me: I'm recommending the comments on a blog post more highly than the post itself. I just came across a promising blog that I plan to return to frequently, The Brandbuilder Blog by Olivier Blanchard. After reading just a few posts I was struck by this one about measuring the ROI for social media: Impossible? Think Again.

The blog post itself, and the embedded video, are essentially a teaser for future posts and a book. Olivier promises that measuring the ROI of social media is, in fact possible, as well as fairly simple. But neither the post nor the video reveals how.

But the comments delve into a number of tactical and strategic examples, in which questions, ideas and suggested solutions are debated by Olivier and his equally capable readers/commenters. I learned far more from the comments, so don't miss them. In fact, by following a link to another blog written by one of the commenters, I've found another promising site which I plan to explore further: Metrics Man. I can already recommend the latest post, The Difference Between Value and ROI.

And I suggested you bookmark The BrandBuilder Blog or add it to your RSS Reader, as I did, if you're interested in social media metrics. Really good stuff there!

Jive SBS Training Course Is Now FREE!

I'm really loving this move by Jive Software: they just made their online training course for Jive Social Business Software (SBS) free for the first time. Like so many organizations today, we're cutting costs everywhere we can, so paying extra for this kind of training was never going to happen with us. And that put the burden of developing training materials on me!

No surprise that I haven't found time to develop a nice training package around Jive SBS's nifty new features, even though we have already upgraded. Making the Jive SBS training free is a huge win for us, as it has saved me days or weeks of development work and it means more members of our community will learn how to better use the system.

Thanks, Jive!!! Now we just need to get everybody to take the course...

UPDATE:
Thanks for your comments, Claire and Rick. I'm also going to share the links you sent me, Claire, since people who find this blog post likely would find them valuable, too.

Finding people and Content--> http://www.vimeo.com/1620741
Finding People via Filtering --> http://www.vimeo.com/1304560
Connecting--> http://www.vimeo.com/1555432
Organizing Yourself -->http://www.vimeo.com/1622605
Collaborating--> http://www.vimeo.com/1621749
Sharing Files--> http://www.vimeo.com/1516195

Tackling Technology vs. Community Building

As a community manager, my mission is to build and develop our online community. Yet I am also the system administrator, and at times technology issues consume more of my time than I'd like. The past month has been an especially tough one for our technology.

Change is the enemy of stability when it comes to technology, I am learning. Last month we started preparing for two major changes: upgrading from Jive Clearspace 2.5 to Jive SBS 3.0 and also implementing Akamai's Content Delivery Network (CDN). In the middle of all of this, we suddenly experienced a major loss of system functionality (no one in our largest division could download file attachments from the system).

It took more than a week to resolve the file download issue, and it got worse before it got better. Meanwhile, our upgrade date rapidly approached and we kept our commitment to get that done. Now we are doing our best to thoroughly test the Akamai integration -- which promises to finally resolve our long-standing complaints about slow system response time outside of the US -- and hope to be ready to cutover the entire site by Friday.

The trade-off for all of this focus on the technology is clear: our community has been neglected. I'm looking at usage statistics for April and May and see downward dips after months of upward movement. We've taken our eye off the ball (community development) so it's not surprising that growth and progress have stalled. Still, it's frustrating and discouraging.

The plan now is to maintain a stable technology situation for as long as possible once we get through this push. We'll likely wait until November to upgrade to Jive SBS 3.5 (it's due out in September), both so we can avoid inevitable early-release bugs and so we can extend our focus on community development for a five-month stretch.

There are so many steps we are ready to take with our community. We have raced ahead for nine months now. We've lost a bit of momentum over the past two months, but lulls are to be expected, especially after the new-ness of the technology wears off. I'm hoping we are just catching our breath, so to speak, and with the new features of Jive SBS 3.0 plus the speed enhancements from Akamai's CDN we'll start a new push toward the next levels of community maturity.

That's my mission. Now, if we can just get the technology issues wrapped up so I can get to it!

Facebook: It's The Little Things that Count

I resisted Facebook for years. What a waste of time, who cares, why should I bother, a bunch of trivial non-news -- I had lots of reasons.

Now I find myself logging on daily, even more than once a day sometimes. I update my status and check the status of my Facebook friends (not all of whom are "actual" friends, of course). I even comment on the status of others, look at photo albums and give a thumbs up now and then, and once in a while take one of the stupid quizzes.

So I'm asking myself now, why the shift? What has changed my mind, or at least my behavior?

Well, it wasn't really a conscious decision, so here are the reasons that I can think of off the top of my head right now:

1. A number of my Facebook friends are clever and interesting -- reading their status updates is amusing and informative. Good content draws repeat readership.
2. It's making me feel more connected to people I rarely or never see in person: people from my distant past (high school classmates, long-ago neighbors), work colleagues in far-flung offices, people I've met once or twice socially and those I've only "met" online in some way. Facebook friends aren't *real* friends, but being part of a virtual conversation with them on Facebook is a form of social interaction that I enjoy.
3. As a full-time telecommuter/home office worker, I miss out on the routine office chatter with all the day-to-day chit chat about colleagues' kids, weekend adventures, the ups and downs of single and married life, and career successes and setbacks. Facebook status updates fill that gap shallowly, true, but broadly. I'm current on many more people's status than I would be via in-person contact alone, even though only on a surface level.
4. People like to talk about themselves, and I am no exception. I find it mildly satisfying to share simple thoughts, observations or insights by updating my Facebook status. And when someone comments upon it or gives it a thumbs up, I like seeing that someone is listening. There's a connection that has been made or strengthened, even if only so slightly.
5. I am constantly seeking out and learning about news and ideas, and I like to share what I have found. I use FriendFeed as well as Facebook's own system to post links to articles and occasional videos. I used to do this in my personal blog, but I don't find time for that much anymore. It's much faster and simpler to share the link and make a very brief comment -- plus, it's going to be seen by a much wider audience than it would be on my personal blog. It's fun to spread the word about things that interest me, and I like it when people comment upon or even debate my views.
6. Just about everyone seems to be on Facebook. Resistance is futile. It has become a commonly accepted way to acknowledge and continue even casual acquaintance-ships. Why be anti-social?

There are probably more reasons, but that's enough for now. It seems to come down to the little things that have sucked me into the Facebook universe. But all those little things do add up.

In the end, Facebook is one of the largest and most well-known social media sites, so lessons learned there should be considered for our own online communities. My Facebook lesson for today is that it's the little things that count.

Accentuating the positive

Online communities and marriages have one big thing in common: They take work to be successful.

Actually, I think they also need positive attitudes to remain successful. I don't know about you, but I have those days when I look at our online community and get a bit discouraged. The reasons? You name it -- not enough time, not enough help, limits to the software, user complaints, etc.

I'm a huge fan (and user) of Ubuntu, probably the world's most popular flavor of desktop Linux. I'm also a huge fan of Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community manager, and what he has done to make the Ubuntu community such a big part of Ubuntu's continued success. (Jono has a must-read new book coming out this summer called The Art of Community, and he's releasing the content for free under a Creative Commons license.) Here's how he answered an interview question about the Ubuntu community culture and why it works:

I am a firm believer that positive culture is largely driven by positive personalities. Communities are vessels of dependent relationships: we have thought leaders for the entire project, sub-communities with their own thought leaders, people who follow those leaders and people who listen to those followers. At each step in the chain we need to encourage positive participation both in the cogs of the machine, but also in the personality and outlook of the those who drive those cogs. It has been an explicit desire of mine in the Ubuntu community to not only ensure that the machine is simple to interact with, but to encourage people to bring their positivity, excitement and enthusiasm to the machine so the community feels like a fun and inspiring environment to be part of.

It takes what Jono calls lots of "care and feeding" to make this happen. In online communities, as in the rest of life, success doesn't come without sweat.

As Ted mentioned, our wiki -- our online community -- has reached critical mass, and the next step will be working hard not to rest on our laurels, but to think harder and more creatively than ever to make our wiki community "a fun and inspiring environment to be part of." What additional value can we deliver?

I'm looking forward to the creative challenge and opportunity. Are you part of the Ubuntu community or another online community at work or in your spare time? What challenges is your community facing now, and how will you overcome them? Please comment to share your thoughts.