Twitter is the first communication mechanism I've been a part of that actually helps me build new relationships without any preexisting knowledge (or trust) with the other party.   Much hoopla has been made about the microformat of Twitter and how it enables new forms of communication, but the amazing power of Twitter comes from it's ability to allow people to connect and develop new relationships seemingly out of nothing.

My Twitter relationships may lack the depth of trust that I have in the "Friend" model (in some cases :) of Facebook, LinkedIn, or email but they're still relationships that I've come to value and that provide me with a sense of community.

How this happened surprised me.  I had sporadically used Twitter for about a year but wasn't finding it very useful until I started using the search feature of Twitter to discover people that I shared a common interest with.  I've talked about this in the past but in a nutshell to get an action (or Twitter usage in my case) requires the following...

• Find people that share a common interest, motivation, or problem.  This commonality is the building blocks of relationships (aka community).
• When relationships form around a shared interest excitement is generated from the freshness of new ideas and finding people that share your passion.
• Excited users are users that take action and in my case that was Twitter usage.

In essence by discovering people that shared my common interest for open source, community, and collaboration I discovered pockets of  users that shared my passion, and by Following these people and interacting with them I developed new relationships that drove my adoption and usage of Twitter.

It then dawned on me that Twitter wasn't about micro communication it was about Macro Community and bringing people together around the things that matter most to them, in essence a ginormous community organizer.

I must admit, I'm excited at the opportunity for community that Twitter has created and if you're interested in joining in on the fun you can find me on Twitter as @emcconne

My how things have changed!  Just a few years ago companies and organizations could buy multi-million dollar television ads and make a mediocre product successful.  People trusted companies to produce great products and would rush out to buy the latest and greatest gizmo because they knew it was going to work as promised.  Unfortunately, most companies violated that trust by producing crappy products or products that didn't solve user needs.  Fortunately for us this is changing thanks to inventive companies that are taking advantage of social media and it's ability to let them talk directly to the customer.  Companies that talk directly to their user communities and produce products using more customer focused agile methodologies are finding success through LISTENING. What a novel concept, talk to your customer and incorporate their feedback in everything you do.

21st century marketing is about connecting people together around your product and creating Fans.  In this new era of connectedness companies that understand this are going to be successful... very successful.  It's not about making a company's products look good in some contrived tv or radio advertisement.  It's about making your customers look remarkable.  Customers that look remarkable become Fans and fans will carry your message into their networks, not because you've made a great product but because you've made them successful.  This should be everyone's goal in today's connected world.

Today companies and organizations of all types need to ask themselves a simple question...

"How can I make my customers look remarkable?"

The customer role can take many forms based on the type of organization you're in but the essence of the question is the same regardless.  What are you going to do today to help someone else be successful?  The only way to effectively answer this question is by opening up an ongoing dialog with your organization's users and constantly asking for input.  This is where organizations that understand community and  social media will have a HUGE advantage over even the largest of companies.  Now go find someone to talk to :)

I recently had occasion to go to CollabNet headquarters in Brisbane, CA.  My flight from Chicago to San Francisco was on a totally full Boeing 777.  As the plane was loading in Chicago,  I witnessed from my choice vantage point in seat 22E (yes, that’s the middle seat in coach of a 2-5-2 configuration) a dynamic that I couldn’t help find analogous to a smoothly running community site in action. 

The cattle call that is the boarding process of the economy section of a wide bodied airplane is always good for some entertainment value if you get there early enough and are willing to look for it.  My favorite part comes as the overhead space starts to get tight and people decide that the laws of physics are for chumps and decide that their 3 cubic feet piece of luggage will indeed fit into the 1 cubic foot of space available to them.  I certainly wasn’t disappointed on this flight.  The entertainment factor for me comes when the owner of the luggage just starts wailing away on it trying to make it fit as if it’s going to magically turn into some sort of blow in foam instead of the hard sided luggage that they brought with them.  Of course the entertainment value diminishes quickly when my bag is already in the compartment being asked to accept the extra piece, but I’ll leave that for another time.

This situation usually results in one of many solutions, all of which I witnessed on this recent flight:

1. The owner will finally realize they he can’t defy the laws of physics and take the bag elsewhere on the plane
2. Perhaps a more experienced (or just plan brighter) passenger will offer some help, such as rotating the piece 90 degrees, that will actually make it fit
3. A refactoring of the current distribution of bags in the immediate area occurs to free up the required space for the later arriving bag resulting in room for everything to fit harmoniously
4. The owner will just leave the bag there in the hopes that the flight attendant will make the problem go away, which will definitely happen with the flight attendant:
   • Employing one of the strategies mentioned above
   • Putting the bag in some location only known to the crew as a possibility for storing passenger luggage
   • Removing the bag form the passenger area altogether and checking it much to the chagrin of the bag’s owner who probably should have done that in the first place

So what’s all this fun have to do with community sites?  Well, like most flights, community sites give a diverse population a vehicle for reaching a common goal.  The common goal on my flight was to get to San Francisco.  As the repeated announcements stated, however, we couldn’t get there until all the overhead storage compartments were closed.  This brought into action the collaboration of the folks on board to make the goal possible with 3 distinct roles emerging:

1. The Active Contributor:  While all the passengers had a stake in what was going on with the overhead space (it needed to be sorted before we could go anywhere), not everyone was actively involved in getting things sorted out.  Perhaps some of the passengers who were involved didn’t have anything to store in the overheads, but were nonetheless active in helping others who did either through offering their experience or just a brand new observation on the situation.  Thriving community sites see this all the time.
2. The Observer:  This is the role I was playing as I had nothing to put into the overheads and, from my center seat, wasn’t really close enough to the action to offer any physical assistance and didn’t observe anything that I felt needed my commentary.  Nonetheless, I somehow know what the options are for a bag that won’t fit.  This knowledge has come to me more from observations I’ve made on other flights than from personal experience.  In other words, my observer role on other flights has benefited me even though I wasn’t necessarily an active contributor on those flights.  At any given moment, community sites certainly have plenty of members just soaking in the action and becoming more knowledgeable as they do so.
3. The Community Manager:  This is the role the flight attendants were filling. In the early going when the storage space was plentiful, people were able to fend for themselves quite easily within the confines of the limited space available.  That’s not to say that they didn’t plan for the future by storing their luggage in the most optimal way they could, but even if they didn’t things fit pretty easily.  As the plane filled, the situations and reactions described above took hold.  Most of the problems were mitigated by other passengers helping out before the flight attendant was needed.  This isn’t to say that the flight attendants weren’t monitoring the loading process as it was happening and offering assistance where needed, but on rare occasions were they needed to be arbiters of the situation.  When they were, they had the authority and knowledge to act in that role.  On community sites, this role is handled by the Community Manager.  Note that the flight attendants didn’t dictate what luggage was brought on board, but knew what to do with it when the other passengers couldn’t make it fit.  Likewise, Community Managers need to guide the evolution of their sites with proper oversight of the site’s activity. 

While this analogy doesn’t rank with splitting the atom for the first time, I do find examples of community and community management in the “natural world” to be interesting.  If “community” can just happen on its own, should we be able to create highly optimized communities with a little intervention?

 

It's amazing how restricting the amount of space you have to express a concept crystalizes what is truly important about that idea. Recently, in my 'community' Twitter list, Holly Seddon asked a very good question which helped give me one of those 'A-ha' moments:

'In one word, what should using an online community feel like or give you?'

I loved the challenge of coming up with a single word to describe a key benefit to participating in community. After some reflection, the word that popped into my head was 'perspective'. When communities are functioning at their peak (and I think this is true even of 'development' communities), one of the most powerful things you can glean from your participation is the perspective of one or more of the other community members.

Being able to look at business problems, source code issues, or any other medium within a community from a different angle is incredibly powerful. As an engineer, I used to get some of my most inspired ideas from listening and reading what others in discussion forums were posting. If you have a specific problem, a direct approach to soliciting help from your community gives you (sometimes) multiple different ideas & perspectives on your issue. Throwing these thoughts into the mix as you work toward a solution can be an invaluable step in the problem solving process.

There are a lot of reasons why people or companies start communities, but I believe a large portion of those reasons can be traced back to the need to get additional different perspectives - developers looking for ideas, companies looking for consumer input, social groups looking to connect with other like-minded individuals. I'll admit that not everyone in the corporate world always understands this - mainly because asking for and reflecting on a different perspective requires the kind of humility that some companies (and even some governments) don't always possess.

We've all participated in groups where we've felt our opinions didn't matter, and I'm willing to bet you probably disengaged pretty quickly if that's the experience you encountered. I urge companies and their individual employees to strongly consider this when setting up your own internal or external communities. Ask yourself the question: 'Is this a place where I'd want to participate - is my perspective going to be welcomed and celebrated?'. If the answer is 'no', it's time to go back to the drawing board in the plans for building out that community. If you are already participating in a well-oiled community, remember to appreciate the different perspectives you get - even the ones you might not necessarily agree with. :)

A recent Forrester research noted that 40% of the developers in Europe use Subversion.  At CollabNet, we have been pegging worldwide Subversion usage somewhere between 4-5M, so it was interesting to get an external survey to validate our own projections.  I compared this information against other data I gathered from a job site called Indeed.com.  They have a nice feature that allows you to look at trends in the use of words in job postings over the last 4 years, and compare multiple queries at once.  Please take a look at:

that compares the job postings for software developers with specific SCM skills (I searched on Subversion, ClearCase, Git, Perforce, StarTeam).  Basically, Subversion has jumped to the number 1 most submitted SCM job skill listed by companies posting openings at job sites as of the beginning of 2009.  Score another one for open source, and CollabNet’s continued sponsorship of Subversion. 

 

Back in 2000, when Brian Behlendorf and I first discussed sponsoring and open sourcing Subversion on Tigris (http://subversion.tigris.org/)  as a "replacement for CVS", we also had the longer term, and more quiet goal, of ultimately displacing ClearCase as the most popular SCM tool on the planet.  Of course, we knew this would be a long road in which we’d have to i) build a vibrant community of the best developers on the planet – both ours and those outside of CollabNet, and  ii)  listen well to the needs of the market and our enterprise customers to build a enterprise class and high quality SCM tool.   As ClearCase is licensed through traditional proprietary mechanisms, it's hard to measure whether we achieved this goal by looking at traditional business terms such as revenue, and bookings.  As a result, CollabNet has relied on other means, such as the aforementioned Forrester report to validate the industry usage of Subversion, and to validate the nearly 9 years of energy and passion by CollabNet and other talented open source developers.

 

So, I found the above chart from Indeed.com particularly interesting – as the validation of Subversions’ usage is not just by CollabNet, and not just by independent analysts like Forrester.  Instead, this validation of CollabNet’s original goal of displacing ClearCase as the most used SCM tool is by the technical and program management hiring managers that are looking for the best engineers with specific skills and tool set capabilities – and hiring managers are choosing Subversion over ClearCase……  Interesting….

It has been quite a while since I've blogged specifically about Forge.mil and what we've been up to as a team. My silence here in the blog has nothing to do with a lack of things to talk about - it's actually quite the opposite. There's been a ton of work going on, and some interesting achievements/recognition given to the project team. I'll summarize below & share some pictorial highlights as well.

Achievements

• Information Week 500 - 'Government Innovators Award'
• Government Computer News Honorable Mention for 'Great dot-gov Web Sites 2009'
• Featured Article in 'Whose Who in DISA'

Progress

• Multiple outreach presentation efforts, including Potomac Gov 2.0 Summit and GOSCON
• Software.forge.mil migrated to DoD production data center
• Project.forge.mil system operational in production data center (still sorting out costing models)
• Initial integration planning/prototyping for certification.forge.mil

While these four bullets may not look like much, they've monopolized the majority of the team's time in terms of paperwork, accreditations, and working with the many other teams involved to get us to this point. A lot of good and hard work went on, and we are excited to see some of the additional capabilities starting to take shape.

Future Directions/What's Next

One of the things I want to reiterate (after hearing some comments at GOSCON that indicated a lack of understanding) is that unlike a lot of other systems in DoD, Forge.mil is not static - what it is today is not what it will be in the future. I heard several people say they couldn't see how forge.mil could be used because it doesn't have 'feature x'. My response: "Put in a request for feature X - the requirements aren't locked down in cement". This resulted in a confused look: "You mean the requirements weren't set months ago?" No, and that is an important piece of what we are trying to accomplish with ALL of the Forge.mil capabilities - an agility of development, test, certification, and deployment that let's the DoD field systems in a much more efficient fashion.

If you ask the Forge.mil project director what our executive sponsor (General Cartwright, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff) thinks is the most important aspect of Forge.mil, he'll tell you that it isn't delivering new tools just for the sake of wrapping up bad processes in new skins. General Cartwright wants to see Forge.mil push the edge of the comfort zone with regard to how software and systems development is currently done in the DoD. Our team at CollabNet is working hard to assist in making this a reality.

There are some exciting things the entire team is going to be working on here in Reston, VA for the next 2 1/2 days as we plan for Release 5 - tentatively scheduled for full rollout at the 2010 DISA partner conference in May 2010 - our overall theme is most likely going to be 'DoD Agile', and it will have to encompass both new features and cultural changes.

It should be an exciting and rewarding ride for the next few months - stay tuned for more details...

One of the stalwarts of Subversion, Ben Collins-Sussman (a Googler and former CollabNetizen), remarks

Not that this should shock anybody, but in case you didn’t know, now you do. The overlap between Apache and Subversion communities has always been huge since day one — with essentially identical cultures. We’ve talked about doing this for years. It means we can finally dissolve the ‘Subversion corporation’ and let ASF handle all our finances and legal needs.

via blog.red-bean.com

Observers may not realize just how true this is. This announcement is a great thing for Subversion, for ASF, for CollabNet, and all other companies who depend on Subversion for their work and products, because it means that the supporting details are in good hands, and the contributors can get back to their contributions. But in another sense, it's about as "un" an event as it well could be.

One anecdote from the press conference yesterday really drove that home for me. John Mark Walker, of OStatic, and Paul Krill, of Infoworld, asked how this change will affect Subversion developers and users. Everyone around the table leaned forward to answer, but the winner was the current President of the Apache Software Foundation and a major Subversion committer, Justin Erenkrantz, whose response began "In the Subversion community, we've always operated in the Apache way." This was echoed and reinforced by Sander Striker, past President of the ASF and another major Subversion committer, and Greg Stein, several-time past Chairman of the ASF and one of the most active Subversion committers of the moment.

So there you have it: if Presidents and Chairmen of the ASF think of themselves first as members of the Subversion community, how much change could we really be talking about?