“Nurturing Online Communities”
Speaker: Simon Maple
For more blog posts from JavaOne, see the table of contents
Runs VJUG (virtual java user group)
Events
- Talks
- Book club – then talk to author of book online when done
- Forum
- IRC chat – mainly used during sessions
- Conference – 24 hour conference Oct 25th – https://virtualjug.com/vjug24/ – borrow other’s physical meetups by holding viewing parties for vgug24
Metrics
- Page views
- user counts
Benefits
- Easier to find speakers – no travel so speaker can say yes more easily
- Diversity – anyone on planet can join. Also, talking to a handle so not influenced by race/gender
- Can view session while working from office
- Can view recording after the fact – have all 4 years of content. Recording important for time zones. Find 5pm UK time to be best
- The core center of the community is online rather than in a place
- No cost for venue, food, drink
Negatives
- Speaker interaction not as detailed
- Easier to accidentally offend someone/be disrespectful
- Hard to recover from assholes in the community
- Speaker can’t see audience
- Lag on questions as people type
Best practices
- Youtube and Google Hangout make recording sessions trivial
- Ensure same experience regardless of device
- Google analytics for website and youtube analytics for videos
- Need to invest time (vs money)
- Getting a company involved helps. Company trades employee time for sponsorship
- Have a team of people to help run
- Want a self managing community
- Twitter worked best of all social media attempts
- People attracted by content and/or a known speaker
- Meetup doesn’t like virtual events, but ok because big
Other notes
- 100-200 people watch live and 1000-2000 within a week. Benefits of live are IRC and questions.
- members from 120 countries
- 500-700 people signed up in first month
- Looking at replacing IRC with Slack because more people use it. Wanted to lower registration bar so can be anonymous.
My take: Good discussion of online specific beneits and constraints