Our Product is Explanation
All posts for “Social Design”
Note: This case study or "story" is from Nancy White of Full Circle Associates and I. We created it in part to document the birth of the Share Your Story community, in part to share what we learned, and in part for the Global PR Week event this past September. We are both posting it on our blogs as a sort of "collaborative" share!
In 2004, the March of Dimes created a new online community to support their mission to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth, and... Continue Reading
TheWorldIsNotFlat.com (TwinF) is a companion site for our trip around the world in 2006. It has been in the works since December of 2004, when we decided to do the trip and reserved the url: theworldisnotflat.com.
As you may know, designing social web sites is my day job and I wanted to take this opportunity and create a site for our trip that would be an example of my work. This entry documents the experience of building TwinF.
What TwinF Does, and Why
TwinF really only does two things:... Continue Reading
I asked Steve August of KDA Research to do an IM interview because he found an interesting and innovative way to use blogs to conduct ethnographic research online.
Lee: You mentioned how your new site would tell the KDA story better. What is the KDA story?Steve: KDA Research focuses on helping companies understand their customers' world - meaning we focus on understanding how a particular product or service fits into the wider context of peoples' lives. We use a variety of research methods to... Continue Reading
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the impact of rating systems on communities. It was a focus in the Online Community Summit, with folks from Yahoo and the Omidyar Foundation discussing different versions of reputation and ratings. Have you ever thought about reputations linked to accurate tagging? Something for later…
Our trip site The World Is Not Flat has a basic rating system and I spent some time trying to figure out the best way to do it for our purposes. The ratings are for the... Continue Reading
Below are some general observations about the state of online communities, according to the summit participants I've talked to and seen present:
Online Communities work. When I first came to this conference in 2003, it was on the heels of the dot-com bust and people were questioning the future of online communities. In 2004, the attitude was much more hopeful, social networking and blogs were adding a lot of interesting facets to the online community world. Here in 2005, the acceptance, value... Continue Reading
As of this morning, I’m at the Online Community Summit in Sonoma California. This is the 3rd summit I’ve attended and always look forward to it. There are a super-diverse group of people here that are all fascinated by online communities.
I just presented the March of Dimes Share Community with Patty Goldman from the March of Dimes. This was the first time I've met Patty face-to-face after working with her for over a year.
The presentation was a good chance to talk to people about the... Continue Reading
This is it, the rollout of the website that will be our home more than anyplace else as we travel the world in 2006.
The name of the site is “The World Is Not Flat�?, which easily translates to the acronym T.W.I.N.F. We call it “Twin-eff.�?
You can use the primary url: theworldisnotflat.com or the acronym version: twinf.com.
The Back-story:
When we started telling people about our plans for the trip, we found that people love to share their travel experiences. We would write... Continue Reading
Nancy White, Alan Levine and others are having an interesting discussion about the us vs. them attitude between users of blogs and message boards. Alan’s post Conversations: Tree People and Cave Dwellers offers food for thought via the attitudes shared by users of Moodle. They make Alan wonder if we’re all using the same Internet.
My perspective is that the relatively short life of blogs is at the root of the “Us vs. Them�? attitude. The idea that an individual can use a personal web... Continue Reading
In building new community sites, I think a lot about the new member registration experience. It is one of the only parts of the site that *every* new member experiences and making it friendly and effective gets things started on the right foot for you and the member. Here are some factors to consider, based on my experiences:
Usernames and Passwords:
The first thing a new member should do is create their own username and password. Don’t give them a random password and then make them hunt... Continue Reading
Ron Lichty put together an event in the Bay Area that I wish I could have made. He brought together about 150 people to hear a panel of online community folks to discuss community and collaboration, moderated by Eugene Eric Kim of Blue Oxen.
The panelists were: Sylvia Marino of Edmunds, Zack Rosen of Civicspace labs, Tony Christopher of community project for the FAA and NASA, Scott Wilder of the Quickbooks online communities.
Ron has posted a synopsis of the event that is almost like being... Continue Reading