For those in the Bay Area there is an event next week of particular interest to community managers, platform developers, researchers, marketers, and software developers: at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on June 10th is the 2009 Online Community Unconference.  This year 300-400 online community and social media professionals will attend with 50-60 collaborative sessions devoted to social media and online community topics.  

“The Online Community Unconference is a gathering of online community practitioners – managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors – to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities.”

I attended last year and found it to be a valuable use of time: many practioners in the social media space will attend and some will self-nominate and present on a wide range of topics of relevance.  I plan to be there again this year, hope to see you there!

A pioneer of the field, Randy Farmer was in attendance and spoke about lessons and categories of reputation systems.  Randy has experience in this field, having built what could be the very first graphical virtual world.  Some of his observations from those early days of virtual, online, interaction bear re-reading even in today’s megabit broadband world.  Looking back, it is amazing how much of the virtual world package of features could be constructed from Commodore 64s and dial-up modems and how quickly all the social issues emerged, even at 300 baud.  Randy is working on a book on the subject at http://buildingreputation.com/.

• The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat.(Morningstar & Farmer 1991)
• Habitat Anecdotes.(Farmer 1988)
• Oracle Layza’s Tales from Fujitsu Habitat.(Farmer 1990)

One of the best quips of the conference was from Bill Schreiner from Folio Investing who noted that in the “old days” you used the phone to get to the Internet and that today we use the internet to get to a phone call.  The technology is indeed disruptive!

Sylvia Marino has been managing the communities at Edmunds.com for more than a decade and had useful (if not flattering) things to say about the state of sentiment analysis.  Her preference is to work with moderators who personally do read nearly all messages and deeply understand the topics of interest and attitudes of the community.

A stand out presentation came from Jen Burton from Digg.com whose talk about the nature of managing a huge community of contributors was insightful and funny.  Her suggestion to treasure the happy moments when they come is sound, as well as the warning to avoid getting sucked into conflicts with a minority of users who have time on their hands.

Nova Spivack presented an overview of Twine and its stages of growth with its community.  Twine as I understand it is a kind of super charged version of a system like del.icio.us that uses natural language processing and a web crawler to build a more useful set of pointers to a web page than is created by a standard entry in del.icio.us.

More photos on flickr.

Online Community Business Forum 2009

March 19 – 20, 2009
Sonoma, California – The Online Community Business Forum — where top online executives gather to discuss the intersection of business strategy and online community, in Sonoma, CA.

Mobile Social Media Unconference

23 April 2009
Palo Alto, CA – The Mobile Social Media Unconference is a gathering of strategists, community hosts, device manufacturers, service providers, and content developers to discuss the emerging opportunities and challenges that mobile communities present.

Online Community Unconference 2009

10 June 2009
Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA – The Online Community Unconference is a gathering of online community practitioners – managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors – to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities.

Online Community Summit 2009

October 8 – 9, 2009
Sonoma, California – The Online Community Summit — where thought leaders in online collaboration gather to discuss best ideas for the future, in Sonoma, California.