I recently had the pleasure of attending the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in San Jose, and it gave me the opportunity to listen to 2 very contrasting approaches to what amounted to the same thing: university outreach. On one side was Jean Elliott, discussing how Sun was going to approach (reach? eclipse? fall just short of?) 900,000 university program members by this summer. In that session, she discussed the various ways Sun had put themselves in that position - it was a tour de force of grassroots outreach featuring open source communities that target life-long academics and students. On the other side was Bruce Carney from Nokia, who delved into a myriad of metrics and measurables in an attempt to define success and track how far along they were towards reaching it. During this session, an inch-thick booklet of tiny font statistics was passed around the room.

It was grassroots outreach vs. statistical analysis. Really, it was inspiration vs. perspiration. Of course, this is not to say that Sun doesn't expend significant energy planning these programs and measuring their success, or that Nokia doesn't engage at a grassroots level, but it was clear which parts each company emphasized, and I started to think about the role of inspiration in online communities.

It comes down to the age-old question, "Why does anyone participate in your community?" There's nothing to force someone to come to any community or make them stick around. Ultimately, someone sticks around because it's in their own self-interest to do so, but there's something "squishy" about how community members self-select, and I can't honestly say that it's 100% about the product or technology that forms the basis of the community. In fact, I'm pretty sure that in addition to a community's core offering, there's an element of culture or "soft" product, if you will. If you run a community and want to engage with your community, how much have you invested in your soft product?

This post introduces the series, which I'll continue for a few days. Tomorrow, I'll continue with a post about "zen and the art of community development" - it's about the engagement, not the direct ROI. It's about the conversation, not simply providing an answer.

I'm on my way back to the San Francisco Bay Area from my trip to our nation's capital for both the 'Introduction to Forge.mil' webinar, as well as Government 2.0 Camp, a 'barcamp-style' 'unconference' focusing on collaboration and social media in the government sector. Side note - WiFi on Virgin America is completely awesome! Of course, the temptation is to always work instead of sleeping, but I know I've been more productive in the travel time on this trip than ever before!

So, first, let's cover the webinar - not only was I in town to speak during the event with Rob Vietmeyer (DISA's Forge.mil Project Director), but it was also a chance to physically meet other members of the DISA team and discuss things we'll need to do as we move toward the official launch of Forge.mil in mid-April. I'm happy to say that the webinar went off very smoothly (with the possible exception of trying to find a working VOIP-enabled headset to use on one of the computers at the DISA facility). The slides had come together nicely through several iterations, and the presentation handoff between myself and Rob went smoothly. There were a TON of good questions after the webinar, including everything from how to get started, to licensing and acquisition policy thoughts. Best of all, I didn't feel like I tripped over my tongue too much. :) The recording isn't quite ready to put up yet - but we do have slides available. We were very pleased to have 277 registrants and 162 attendees, which gave us a 58% attendance rate (I'm told anything over 50% is excellent).

The afternoon after the webinar was supposed to be a chance to work with Rob and his team. I did meet several team members, but unfortunately, Rob was called away to give a review/briefing to senior DISA leadership about the project progress. The good news about this was that the review went extremely well, and General Pollett (DISA Director) was very excited, and has asked for additional demos at future reviews!

After the webinar, I was prepared to just 'relax, listen and learn' at the Government 2.0 Camp conference the next day. Oh, how little did I know. ;) Not having ever been part of a 'barcamp' conference, I was a bit skeptical of the 'planned on the fly' agenda concept. The first morning started with the entire auditorium at the Duke Ellington School for The Arts introducing themselves and being given 3 words to describe their interests, or 10 words to propose a session. I used 'developer, collaboration, community' as my three tags and didn't propose any sessions.

My colleague Kevin Hourihane and I then decided to attend the morning session on 'A-Space' (best described as 'Facebook for Spies'). It was an interesting discussion, but at the end of the Q & A period, Gunnar Hellekson from Red Hat asked the presenter if the development system for A-Space would eventually be tied to Forge.mil. Needless to say, that caught our attention, and the ensuing 15 minute conversation brought a lot of questions about our system. In true barcamp fashion, someone asked if we were going to present on Forge.mil. Since I had my copy of the webinar slides, I agreed, and set up a time on day 2 to talk about it.

Despite the fact my session was up against the White House media team's talk (including Macon Phillips), there were about 10 folks who showed up to hear me give a condensed version of the webinar talk. I loved that this was very interactive (the webinar format makes it a little more difficult to interact, since you are doing it strictly via text chat), and I got several really good questions, especially around the acquisition process for software, and how adding government contractors into the mix of SoftwareForge.mil could prove cumbersome, especially in light of time and materials contracts that most software projects use. One contractor mentioned that his company would be thrilled to have more time on a contract to do more testing, or do a more complete engineering job (assuming they found a component on software.forge.mil to re-use for part of their project). However, that was not universally accepted by the other contractors in the room. This cultural issue is one that is going to have to be solved for effective re-use within major projects that the DoD bids out to contractors. The good news is that I came away from the session much more aware of some of the hurdles we'll face in building out the community with DoD contractors in the mix.

There were several interesting sessions I took part in during the conference, and I'd like to highlight two:

• What's the Big Deal?
• Building an Open Source/Federal collaboration (i.e. - 'Forge.gov')

The first one dealt with how governments could deal with outward-facing social media tools, and what policies they should have in place to deal with 'bad' content. I liked this session because it was a group of community managers (even if some didn't have the title), who realized that allowing social media in government (and even corporate) spaces is not a big deal if you have some sane procedures in place to deal with the occasional unprofessional comment/content. This echos what I've posted about in the past - you have to trust your interview process to hire people who are professionals that know how to properly utilize social media tools.

The second session above took place when the 'techies' got together to talk about Open Source Community and Federal collaboration, and these were extremely interesting, and quite informative. In a nutshell, the techies in the room wanted to know when (or if) a 'Forge.gov' site could be stood up to allow collaboration between the Federal (non-DoD) space and the greater Open Source world. I know that there are some discussions about this very thing going on between several companies (can't say more just yet), so I hope it comes to fruition. The main thing I cautioned the people assembled about was understanding that culture would have to shift to get the Federal IT folks (especially project managers) to embrace such an effort, especially around things like acquisition policy and information assurance (IA).

One final technical note on the conference - this was the first event I've been to in the 'Twitter Age'. There was a lot of live blogging going on, but far and away Twitter was the primary means of putting out information, links, thoughts & notes on the proceedings. Since Twitter 'streams' are preserved after an event is over, and time stamped, it makes it very easy to go back and view what happened during the event. Here are some 'streams' you can check out if you are interested:

• All Gov20Camp Tweets (LOTS of content)
• My Gov20Camp Tweets
• Forge.mil Gov20Camp Session Tweets

All in all, it was a very successful trip - now, if I could just get Virgin America to fly everywhere else I might need to travel, life would be perfect... :)

Join me at EclipseCon March 23-26, in Santa Clara. I'll be on a panel, Controlled Chaos - Version control in the Twenty-first Century, and at the associated BOF, both on Tuesday.

And also, catch me at the SDForum Global Open Source Colloquium, Monday, March 23, in San Francisco.

The Forge.mil team is very excited about the progress we've made in a short time (about two months of 'Beta' availability), and we are working toward our launch window of early April (prior to the DISA partner conference in Anaheim CA on 20 April 2009). The first of our five community properties (software.forge.mil) is online, with nearly 1000 registered users, and close to 40 hosted projects.

We've received a lot of questions and requests for more information about what Forge.mil is (and isn't), so, we've decided to put together a 'webinar' on 26 March 2009 at 1100 EDT. The webinar is titled (not surprisingly), 'Introduction to Forge.mil'. It is a free registration to listen in, and we hope we'll get a lot of folks to attend, and then hopefully disseminate the information we cover. Briefly, we are going to touch on:

• Vision, goals, objectives of Forge.mil's five communities of interest
• Benefits of participation
• How to participate
• The platform technology behind Forge.mil
• Capabilities and Timeline for new features
• Experiences/success stories from teams participating in the Beta period

Please feel free to pass this along to anyone interested in listening in - we look forward to some good questions during the Q&A session afterward.

There has been a ton of information (both positive and negative) written on the concept & theory of the 'Digital Water Cooler.' You can check Google for the proof of that. What I think is interesting from a business perspective is how some companies are capitalizing on the positive aspects of this phenomenon through effective use of social media, while others subscribe doggedly to Taylorist management principles, which suggest that all such activity must be frivolous because it can't be measured.

Although I'm involved in community management, I still consider myself an engineer (or, at least I haven't lost my engineering mindset completely). I like data and measurements as much as the next linear thinker. However, I've experienced first-hand how utilizing social media in proper amounts has benefited cycle times, increased worker productivity, and generally moved projects along in a more efficient fashion. The problem is, it's usually difficult to measure the actual effect using these technologies has had on the work. That may still be the case, but recently, Matthew Hodgson wrote an excellent article on 'The ROI of being social at work.'

In this post, he cites research from MIT (full text available in Harvard Business Review) that showed "40% of creative teams' productivity is directly explained by the amount of communication they have with others to discover, gather, and internalise information. In other MIT studies, research shows that employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7% more productive than their colleagues." The study showed some interesting traits and differences between what are termed 'creative teams' (marketing, PR, etc.) and 'implementation teams' (engineering, IT). It isn't too surprising that teams charged primarily with implementation focus less on social interaction than do their creative team counterparts. However, from personal experience, I've found there are people who have to live between these two realms. Sometimes they are called project managers, technical marketing, pre-sales, or services. Now that I live in this space in my current role, I can see much more clearly how judicious use of 'Digital Water Cooler/Hallway' technologies like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed help provide a competitive advantage (if used properly) in the enterprise.

The potential for abuse of these tools is always there - I remember a time not too long ago in my career when I would factor in whether a company had open email, web, and Usenet feeds (wow, I'm showing my age there) before determining whether to take a job. A lot of these things were banned or severely limited not long ago, but now, access to these kinds of tools is taken for granted, and I believe most progressive companies realize you have to put some guidelines in place for use of social media, but at the end of the day, you have to trust that you've hired professionals who will use the tools wisely.

What's next for social media? Who knows, but I think it is critical that collaboration tool providers (such as CollabNet) determine how to integrate the data provided by such tools into their own platforms. The company that can figure out the most comprehensive way to coalesce all of this information into an easily synthesizeable format is going to have a large competitive advantage in providing enterprise users who fall into the middle ground between 'creative' and 'implementation' teams with access to tools that increase their productivity and ROI.