Tag: conferences

WordCamp Philly: Adding a social ‘stache

Doug Stewart wrapped things up before lunch at WordCamp Philly talking about bbPress, BuddyPress, and more. He also wins the award for first WordCamp talk to pass out handouts with mustache stencils on them while simultaneously playing some techno on the speakers. 🙂

As Doug put it, “Like a good mustache, bbPress and BuddyPress can add that social element to your site.” Social tools like bbPress and BuddyPress can increase user engagement, encourage contribution, and lower the barrier to entry for creating content. Most of all, they add a community around your site and your content.

bbPress is WordPress-native forum software. With version 2.0 it’s now a plugin that, once activated, adds forums to your site. Best of all, it’s dead-simple to install. bbPress is the software that powers the WordPress.org, WordPress.com, Dropbox, and Stephen Fry’s forums. There’s lots of ways to extend it and create support forums, selectively use it in lieu of comments, send email notifications, and more.

BuddyPress gives you social networking in a box. Through friends, private messaging, activity streams, groups, and forums you can really set up anything you need. It’s fantastic for internal corporate networks where you want some of the social features without all of the risk inherent in more public networks. One thing you want to do with BuddyPress is install the theme compatibility check plugin.

With all the power that BuddyPress offers you may want to progressively introduce features to the community. You may not want to introduce them to all the features at once, it can be a bit overwhelming.

For those behind-the-firewall situations BuddyPress allows for things like document collaboration, classified ads, and courseware. These can improve greatly upon more traditional tools for company intranets.

Doug’s going to post all of his slides on Slideshare later so there’s lots of links in those worth checking out.

WordCamp Philly: WordPress & Version Control

Dave Konopa talked about how to get control of WordPress with version control in the second session at WordCamp Philly. Version control gives you a safety net you can step back to at any time. It allows you to manage different streams of development work. This lets you simultaneously develop new features while still patching existing bugs.

By creating a documented history of code changes it makes synchronization and collaboration much easier. It all requires commitment, though. You need to do it every day so that you don’t end up with a haphazard project.

The two big options: subversion and git. Subversion is a centralized repository system while git is a distributed version control tool.

With git, when you’re ready to share you code you can push all your changes to a remote repository. You can clone a repository and also create a staging area for intermediate work.

The easiest implementation of version control for WordPress is custom plugins and themes. While you could use version control to manage your entire site it’s probably more than you need unless you’re working on a significantly large site.

If you’re a git fan but want to stay up on the recent changes to the WordPress code base it’s all mirror through a Github repository that Mark Jaquith set up. It’s synced every 30 minutes so you can keep up with anything that’s coming down the pipe.

Dave’s last bit of advice was to learn by trying. The best way to learn how to use version control effectively is to use it. Get a plugin up on Github, experiment with things, and have fun. The slides from the talk are all available on Github.

WordCamp Philly: Building Community

The first session of the day at WordCamp was with Patrick O’Keefe who talked about building a community around your WordPress publication. Patrick is from iFroggy Networks and has written a book entitled “Managing Online Forums.”

Patrick believes there are 3 key things to do to create a strong community. You need to have quality products and content. You should appreciate your readers, commenters, and followers. Finally, you must create a respectful and healthy culture around your content.

Quality content, email, and comments are the three types of “community by default” with any site. They let anyone come in and participate on your site. To encourage more people to get involved it helps to shine the spotlight on commenters sometimes. Forums, comment plugins, and social networks extend your community and allow more people to get involved.

With forums and lots of other social aspects of your site Patrick says, “If you don’t set it up to be successful then it won’t be.” It’s not enough to just have a forum linked on your homepage. You need to feature it, highlight content from it, and more. You cannot launch something and leave it alone, any community needs a significant time investment.

Key to anything you do though is ownership. Patrick emphasized that you need to own your content and your community in a tool that is truly yours. He also talked about things like edge rank which is Facebook’s algorithm for surfacing content in your news feed.

Ultimately, “people want to engage with you in spaces they already are.” The less friction between discovery and participation the better for your community’s growth.

WordCamp Portland New User Workshop

This weekend is fast approaching and it’ll be filled with WordCamp Portland.

In addition to the WordCamp we’re running a new user workshop on Friday, September 16th from 9am to 4pm. We did this at WordCamp San Francisco and it was a blast. Over 60 people went from total newbies to knowing everything about publishing with WordPress. Now, you can join them.

If you’ve always wanted to start blogging but never knew how, now’s your chance. We’ll walk you through each step of the process and by the end of the day you’ll have a great looking site you can take with you.

Or, if you’re one of those people who is always the default “guy/gal who knows about computers” in your social circle you can use the workshop as a way to get all your friends set up with sites. We’ll do the work so you don’t have to. 🙂

By the end of the workshop you’ll not only know how to publish and customize your site but you’ll be prepared to get the most out of the two days of unconference sessions as well. You might even think of a session topic to pitch yourself.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex. Great TED talk about the power of trial and error. The bit about schools and politicians toward the end is right on.

Digital Journalism Camp Session Summaries

After a morning unconference session that involved a 5 mile hike with Daniel I caught the afternoon sessions at this weekend’s Digital Journalism Camp.

Journalism startups

First up Melissa Chavez moderated a panel about lessons learned from three journalism startup founders. Michael Andersen of Portland Afoot, Barry Johnson, and Robert Wagner talked about their startups and what they’ve done well (and wrong).

Andersen emphasized how there is plenty of journalism happening, but that it’s mostly for rich people. He’s motivated to create meaningful information for those making under $50,000 a year. In other words, “there’s journalism for those with iPhones but not Samsungs.”

While discussing approaches to building audiences and readership Wagner mentioned that in journalism it really helps if your business is the hub. Being the place where people come to find more information will not only make your property valuable but will tell you a significant amount about your readers. Johnson argued that a journalist should not be afraid to sell. The worlds of journalism and sales are not mutually exclusive in his eyes.

Technology was a key point for all three as well. Wagner mentioned that Cascadia.fm relies heavily on WordPress. He thinks it doesn’t get enough love for all it does. He also pointed out that they don’t have any mobile apps. Cascadia.fm wants to provide the best experience for people to connect with them on the web regardless of device. Andersen said that, “I’ve got to focus on relationships with readers and hope the technology becomes commoditized so I can grab on to that.” Barry Johnson put it succinctly when he said that, “Technology is a practice that is a part of journalism. Journalism will thus be adapted to whatever new technologies come along.”

Unheard voices

The second session of the afternoon was about whether digital tools give marginalized communities a voice. Cornelius Stewart led a panel of 5 that was absolutely fascinating.

Israel Bayer, director of Streetroots, talked about their efforts to bring the homeless into all aspects of journalism. He also noted that, while some think a web presence would undercut street sales, their sister paper in Seattle launched a website and saw their sales increase 40%. He pointed out that it’s the technical parts of a project that are the easy. It’s the relationships and building of a community that are difficult.

Craig Fondren of Sabin Community Development Corporation talked a lot about how they educate their community in the tools of journalism. They focus heavily on bringing many generations into their workshops. As he put it, “If you can get online we have a class for you. If I have your kid in one of our classes then I’m going to get you in a class and I’m going to get grandma too.” They put a lot of work into senior instruction.

One of their driving goals is to get people interested in the tools. Fondren believes that his community will get left behind if we don’t latch on to this tool set. Sabin CDC never charges for a class and they expect those they teach to come back and volunteer. They try to make sure their kids have the skills needed to take part in real world projects. They’ve done work with Trimet, the Oregon Film Council, and many other companies.

The panel also featured Brian Conley and Steve Wyshy of Small World News. They collect video coming out of war and underserved areas and bring it on to the web. Brian had perhaps the quote of the day by describing the proto-journalist:

10,000 years ago a citizen journalist was the guy who went over the next hill and was like, “Hey there’s cool stuff over here!” He was viewed as crazy or was made the village’s chief.

Small World News works for those in Libya, Afghanistan, India, and Egypt. Brian will fly into these countries and train residents in the use of camera equipment and professional-level software like Final Cut Pro. The people then shoot hours of video, make the edits, and send the finished versions to Brian and Steve to post online. In other words, Small World News is working for these people, not the other way around. Once the content is online volunteers subtitle the videos into various languages.