Issue/Topic: Are We a Community Too? (5E)

Convener: Gail Ann Williams & Scott Moore

Notes-taker(s): Daphne Rocha (Please edit, expand and clarify if you took part)

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:
What is going on?
Professional Organization is emerging
(www.community-roundtable.com)
membership-based - $750-$1k/yr
no vendors
twitter: @thecr

Online Community Research Network - broad definition of research and learning
(www.onlinecommunityresearch.com)
Membership-based - $795 / yr (w/ group licensing available)
twitter: @ocreport

Conferences (face to face) put on by Forum One and other organizations, of various kinds
Online facilitation Friendfeed groups
Connie Bernson facebook group
Linkedin groups are spammy
#cmtychat – Fridays - Twitter - short format but dynamic

What do we want?

• Thoughtful writing by our community experts
• How do you tap into the expertise? (avoid curation costs but enable us to be curators for one another)
• Make a really good and complete Q&A of the 200 most asked questions with good thoughtful answers – similar to an FAQ perhaps, a reference to from experts/practitioner
• easy access to Forms/templates/surveys to make use of what’s been talked about and to share how it worked – something lightweight to make it helpful to engage.
• Community support among community managers – areas to help problem solve, peer venting.
• No successful tradition has yet been established for thoughtful, long-form folllow-ups and extension of the conversation from these live meetups and conferences/unconferences. How can we do that?
• Book can come from live conferences?

What else is there?
More models of interest, resources:

• Journals/publications/podcasts – journal of community (i.e.”First Monday”, Jerry Michalski, podcast/talk shows)
• ReadWriteWeb
• ID community aggregate blog -- Identity Commons
• Community Management group through Linked in – spammy
• Aggregation (curated, or open tagged?)
• Why are Community Management groups through LinkedIn.com so spammy?

(Next point is an item I do not understand from these notes, can anybody clarify or make a link? -GW)
“Social media super phantom” planet

Possible action items were discussed.
The idea of a "blog carnival" or monthly topic session for long form comment on a specific topic was explored.

Encourage attendees to write a blog topic: “Big Aha from this OCU2009?” and use as a conversation starter to test the concept but importantly get the involvement started of trying to aggregate the information (tag) (on the other hand, the Aha moments will not be on a sindle important topic of interest, and the one month lag time makes this less good for reports on events, better for Big Ideas or questions.)
Another proposed topic was What would you tell a new commnity manager of a destination community when they say "my site was hit by the Twitter-Bus" (i.e., my best posters have gone off into that space addressing a different audience and diluting our community dynamics)?
(However, this theme is hard to explain, and was used instead for a kickoff for a Twitter #cmtychat that week anyway. -GW)
Gail Williams cited an example of a long-form blog conversation that started in a decentralized state and later got an index page as an anchor for it, committed to post that and tag it #OCTribe along with a suggested first date and first question. See http://tinyurl.com/octribe

The most concrete outcome of this conversation was the proposal to create a tag - proposed to be #OCTribe - for items, events and articles of interest to the broader community of community practitioners across time and organizations. This is actionable by anyone, and can be used both going forward, and even to surface older useful information, research, posts and writings that have current relevance.

Twitter search to save/bookmark is: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23octribe Delicious: http://delicious.com/tag/octribe and et cetera.