Many of us have come across companies trying to sell a product that they themselves don't use, because unfortunately this is not uncommon.

It's unsettling when companies don't think enough of their own products to actually use them. I understand not all companies can use their own products within the business because of the nature of some products. But, by and large, many, if not most, can be integrated into the business. And should be when they can.

That was one of the things I really liked about CollabNet. We actually do use our own platform and tools, and in a variety of ways. Yes, we eat our own pet food, and that has many benefits:

• You discover the strengths and weaknesses of your product
• You are better able to help customers understand the product and why they should use it
• As your needs grow, you build those solutions into the product, giving you much better empathetic understanding with the customers
• Everyone benefits from the companies product, because everyone makes requests to improve its quality

The CollabNet platform has evolved greatly over the years, and we have used all iterations of it along the way. The CollabNet site resides on the platform, as do all of OCN projects, and all of our internal projects.

For instance, our group of community managers use a CollabNet TeamForge (CTF) project called community-management. Having this project allows us to share documents, use a wiki to share links and miscellaneous stuff, and have discussion areas we can use to help and advise one another, brainstorm, and discuss various topics of interest. Monitoring enables us to receive changes and discussions via email.

I set up a similar project for CollabNet bloggers. With 16 of us, and growing, it's just a pain to email, attach documents, track changes to those docs, etc. through the mail program. This CTF project allows us to do that and more. If we want to set up trackers and project folders, we have that available to us as well.

In addition our web production team, marketing, sales, etc. all also use our platform similarly. And, of course, so does our engineering team. They use it for their development of CollabNet platform and tools.

Recently, with the acquisition of Danube, we'll incorporate more Agile processes and scrum into our work flow. CTF was always Agile-ready, but now we'll be using it more and learning scrum for our own business tasks. It's exciting to have the product evolve in a way that is not only useful to our customers, but to us as well.

Eating your own pet food, or rather using your own products, adds empathic understanding to customer needs, but also adds a great amount of sincerity and enthusiasm, assuming you have a good product. When a company uses it's own product or platform, that product is bound to improve because there is more invested in the quality of that product.

As community managers go about each day with a multitude of tasks from providing product and site support, managing various programs and projects, creating slide shows and webinars, to answering reams of emails, we don't always stop to see the whole picture of what's involved in creating and sustaining community. Yet, CollabNet has over 10 years of experience now doing just that, and each of the community managers have at last that or more years working with online communities.

We've had a good deal of success in creating and maintaining both open source communities and Enterprise communities, so it seemed only right that we share what has worked for us with other community managers. The question then was how do we go about pulling all that information into one place, and break down our experience in an easy-to-understand format?

Community in Box services was conceived to help software development teams establish and nurture the collaborative culture characterized by the most successful open source communities. As a part of that service, we wanted to offer a free Community Cookbook, full of our expertise and wisdom, outside community managers could use, and so companies could see what is involved in creating and maintaining Enterprise and Open Source communities.

So, back in June '09, five CollabNet community managers and several executives met on the east coast for two full days to cook up, brainstorm, all that was involved with Enterprise and Open Source community management. Carey O'Brien had the wonderful foresight to bring big wall size sheets of paper, and over the course of the two days we each contributed our experience to specific categories and areas of community management.

Of course, sheets of paper can't be shared with the public, so we wrestled that data into a TeamForge project. The Community Management Project contains the Enterprise Community Cookbook and the Open Source Community Cookbook. You need to register and log in to view the pages.

Some of the community components we covered in the cookbooks are represented in the image below:

There are, of course, many topics within each of these components, including why a community is so necessary to have.

This has been an exciting project to work on for all of us in the Enterprise and in Open Source. To see the differences in how we handle and support each of these communities is interesting and important.

While all businesses would like large communities to flock to their platforms, software, and products, it's essential to have made the right preparations for community support and management, and to understand the nature of those communities so they can flourish. Then everyone wins in the end.

Enjoy the Community Management Project!

We know that using an open source model for software development drives innovation, reveals bugs and fixes more quickly, and allows for creative minds to collaborate in ways that just can't happen with proprietary code. Because of this, we have been seeing more open source software projects emerge over the past few years. That's not to say that there aren't issues. Businesses are still working out the kinks in how they can sponsor and encourage open source software while trying to figure out how to pay the bills and profit. After all, few can volunteer all of their time. In addition, credit needs to go where credit is due.

In the science fields, sharing research and data has been the norm, but the process differs from the open source software model. Typically a scientist starts his/her research, makes discoveries, writes up the findings, and then publishes in leading journals. Then, and not until the creator's name is firmly attached, do others get the data. Eventually, the code or data gets shared. Now, however, various branches of science are looking more closely at the open source software model.

The main concern of scientists has been getting credit where credit is due. The introduction of licenses, similar to those we use for open source software, will protect the discovery process, while encouraging collaboration, and verification. The added benefit is that there is no need to wait for publication.

Personally, I find this exciting. It means more minds can get in on the research from the very beginning, and is not academically exclusive. The more variety of people and the larger the set of eyes looking at a project or problem, the great the likeliness that it will speed up the discovery and testing process.

Transparency is a huge bonus in software development, and I think we'll find the same is true in the world of science.

There is much concern in the science arena that someone will swoop up the public research and take credit for it, that people "undeserving" will water down the reputations of those more deserving. I think just the opposite will happen. And it's sad that the importance of reputation manages to rise above the possibility of improving processes and increasing the likeliness of discovering error or new information.

Apparently many science researchers are resistant to sharing data, even after the publication in a journal. Science should not be allowed to be a closed system. All the processes, the procedures, the data capture methods, and the data itself should be exposed at the earliest possible moment.

I'm excited to see sites and resources like the following:

• Open Source Science
• OpenSourceScience
• The Open Source Science Project
• Victoria Stodden: Open Source Science-Open Research License
• Open Source Science Experiments

There is currently a lot of resistance from scientists to open source their projects, but as awareness increases about the benefits of transparency emerge, I think we'll see more and more scientific research on the web along with special licenses to protect the originators through the discovery process.

This weekend I attended the Community Leadership Summit in San Jose. Before it even started, I had an interesting discussion with Jack Repenning and a man who was investigating various community models for a homeschooling organization he's working for. As we talked about the needs of the parents of homeschoolers, I realized how much they had in common with open source community members:

• They are joiners and have need of connecting with other parents like themselves
• They do not want an overt governing body controlling the way the community interacts
• They have need of shared resources and discussions
• They want to stay away from institutionalized or corporate rules and pressures, and instead want the community members to have roles emerge organically

There are likely some similarities I'm missing here, but I realized in this discussion that these types of communities can benefit from the open source community model. In an open source community, it's important that creativity is encouraged and unbound, that community members are treated equally, and that any roles assigned are appropriate and emerge out of needs rather that what an official overhead dictates. This type of community is self-regulating for the most part, if not entirely.

The parents of homeschoolers, and many groups like them, are rejecting conventional methods of education, but that does not mean they don't have a driving need for support, communal togetherness, or collaboration.They do join groups, parenting, educational, as well as many others, but they want to avoid the school "feel."

Additionally, I can see how a project model and platform would work for homeschoolers and their parents. Homeschooling often involves collaboration similar to software development. Needless to say the Subversion and TeamForge platform would be ideal so that children could work together on various projects, keeping all versions of a project and adding to it, while parents could make use of collaborating on resources, documentation, and discussion forums.

Both the open source community model and the CollabNet platform and tools would work well for the homeschooling crowd, and no doubt many other non-developer types.

I'm noticing more communities wiggling out from "the man" and opting for an open environment in which community drives and guides itself. Everyone seems to be tiring of corporate or institutional pressure and dictates. I think we'll be seeing the open source community model becoming more the norm than not over the next few years. And it will be interesting and fun to see what kind of creativity emerges from these communities of free thinkers.

For two days last week myself and the other CollabNet community managers brainstormed ideas, shared experiences, and drove direction for an Enterprise Community "Cookbook". Over the course of time, it has come to the managers attention that written processes were needed, problems shared, and solutions derived and pulled together into a single resource area, not just for ourselves but the community at large.

Communities should, after all, be based on collaboration to be successful and healthy. No single person can accomplish this, nor should they. At CollabNet, collaboration has been its theme and foundation from its inception, so it only made sense that we share our processes and findings with anyone who can benefit from our experience and knowledge. The flip side of that is that we hope to get input and feedback, and have collaboration with other community managers.

We started our discussions by comparing the Open Source community with the Enterprise community, and identified the commonalities. This turned up some fascinating information about the nature of the communities themselves, and their needs. Next, we discussed community goals, and what right kinds of questions would provide intelligent types of metrics. So far, I was seeing the value of our strategies not just for Enterprise communities but for Open Source communities as well.

Over the course of the two days, we had covered the walls with large sheets of paper, which contained many sticky notes from each of us. All of this now has to be distilled into formats that would be easy to understand to outsiders.

We realized that before any community, Enterprise or Open Source, can be built, a community plan must be written out. This would help our sales people communicate to customers what they get when they request community managerial support, but also what we hope to achieve with our Open Source community and what we are to give in return.

Our first document to take shape that others can use is Best Practices and Steps to Creating an Enterprise Development Community. Many other documents will emerge from our meeting. As we complete them, we will add them to our public project where you can glean from what we post there.

We also agreed that all of this information is fluid, subject to change, and must be rejiggered with various clients and communities. None of these documents are intended to be written in stone, or will be the last word on the topic. It's an evolutionary process, and we decided to meet at least once a year to reassess and rewrite process as needed.

As the openCollabNet Community Manager, I would like to distill the useful information and processes that are specific to creating Open Source communities, so we end up with "cookbooks" for both Open Source communities and Enterprise communities, or we may create branches off of the other information.

However we decide to present the information, watch this blog space and Twitter for links to these documents as we make them available.

Last week I attended the Virtual Edge Summit, which  focused exclusively on providing education, training, and solutions for planning and producing virtual events. I attended the first day in person, and the second day virtually.

It's not surprising in this economy that virtual conferences are becoming more popular. What I did find interesting was the number of virtual conference vendors out there, and the quality of their software and services. In addition, it was fascinating to listen to some of the top dogs, such as IBM and Oracle, speak about their experience with virtual conferences, the mistakes they made, how they corrected, and what expectations should be.

Conferences are at heart about community. You aren't bringing together hundreds or thousands of people just for the heck of it. Every conference must have a purpose, a goal that is wrapped up in intention to better serve that particular community with services, products, and communication. After all, this is not a one way street. Companies need to find out what their communities need from them and how they can better serve them. Conferences are a great opportunity to do just that.

So, when considering a platform for your virtual conference, it's vital to make sure it's going to satisfy the social aspects of a conference. All the speakers at the Virtual Edge Summit made it clear that virtual conferences do not replace face-to-face contact and in-person conferences, but rather they extend and enhance the typical conference. Businesses need to make sure the virtual experience is every bit as satisfying as the in-person experience.

Most of my experience with virtual conferences and meetings has been in Second Life (SL). I like SL a lot, and use it way too frequently for my personal fun, but I have found professionally that SL has a steep learning curve for many, has big computer requirements, and therefore some attendees are less likely to join that platform. What is great about SL, though, is the 3D environment lends to a feeling of "being there" and having avatar-to-avatar contact gives more of a face-to-face feeling than does 2D.

The Virtual Edge Summit did a great job of uniting the in-person experience with the virtual. While in sessions, we could see the virtual session while they had us on a screen, so we could see each other. Virtually folks entered their questions and comments through text, and chatted with each other, commenting on what the speakers were saying, while listening to our in-person questions and comments.

The Virtual Edge Summit used VirtualU, a virtual universe created by Digitaltell Inc. This platform provides a 3D and 2D experience, which I really liked. First you download the software, which has a small footprint, then select an avatar. Navigation buttons are at the bottom of the screen at all times. The virtual environment is on the left, while a small panel of 2D features is on the right, giving you access to any file downloads, such as PDFs, text chat, etc. It was nice to use the software in a real conference to see how it worked. Other vendor software there worked similarly, some using only 2D and menuing systems, which offered a lot of nice features.

For CollabNet, since we are a smaller company, some of these platforms are going to be out of our budget. I'm researching less expensive alternatives, while being careful that the platform gives as "real" a conference experience as possible. Community is important to us, and one big attraction to having a virtual conference is that more people can attend since travel is not an issue.

I would love to hear from you on your experiences with virtual conferences, how likely you would be to attend a CollabNet virtual conference, and what some of your expectations would be.

Another interesting use of this platform is that some companies are extending their websites with this software so that folks can visit virtual chats and 3D forums year-round. Sites have had text discussion forums for a long time, but it seems our online communities are getting 3D face lifts, such as extending into places like Second Life or platforms like VirtualU. I welcome your thoughts on this topic as well.

Dana dnourie at collab.net

As the new Community Manager for CollabNet, I wanted to say hello and introduce myself. I come from a 10-year stint at Sun Microsystems, having worked in their Java forums, on java.net, writing for java.sun.com, and as developer represenative in Second Life. In working with each of those communities, it was important for me to understand, communicate with, and represent the developer to the company every bit as much as representing the company to the community.

The openCollabNet community is well-established and focused on great projects, such as Subversion and various integrations. I’ve been impressed with how the members of this community help one another, and the over all politeness in the discussion forums. Of course, no community occurs within a vacuum, nor can any company force a community to develop. Developers, the people, create community through interaction over common interests, needs, and accomplishments.

As Community Manager, I hope to learn just what those interests, needs, and accomplishments are, and to discover how CollabNet can better serve you through the site, the projects, and the interactions of everyone involved. I am eager to be the bridge between the community and the company, making sure CollabNet understands how we can help foster this community, while leveraging the wonderful technologies and social networks available, and seeing to it that your needs are met so that you can accomplish the development that you need to do in less time with less fuss.

In order to understand you better, I welcome hearing from you, discovering how you interact with the CollabNet community, what areas you’d like to see grow, what improvements you hope to see on the site, and ways we can help you be involved with open source projects. I look forward to encouraging and promoting a thriving community, and meeting the important people involved . . . you.

If you're not familiar wtih openCollabNet, or it’s been a while since you last visited, I’d like to encourage you to visit, see if there are areas you can get involved in, and let me know how I can help initiate improvements:

• Discussion Forums
• CollabNet Products
• Follow CollabNet on Twitter
• Facebook Page
• Submerged Blog
• On CollabNet Blog

Dana Nourie, dnourie @ collab.net, (no spaces when you write the email address)

Community Manager

CollabNet