And this is likely to be the last post I make to this blog. By the time you read this I will have likely handed in my card key and celebrated with the great people I’ve worked with over the last 7 years.

One of the key values that Microsoft instills in teams is an entrepreneurial spirit.  I’ve also never experienced full time employment outside of this walled garden. Tomorrow, Tuesday, the 26^th I'll be joining the leadership team at Telligent Systems to run a new team focused on the managed platforms experiences.

I'll be based in the Seattle area and the developer community won’t be rid of me either. I’m looking forward to experiencing life on the other side of the fence and helping to grow the great communities on the Asp.Net, Silverlight.net, IIS.net, and WindowsClient.net family of sites.

Over the last seven years I've learned so much from everyone at Microsoft, and along the way I've had a chance to work on lots of cool projects including delivering tools for CS students and teachers, writing IDE automation libraries, opening new community channels for our developers, and helping to change the way Microsoft works with, supports, and engages customers on a daily basis. As a customer and shareholder I hope that Microsoft continues to push the envelope of corporate transparency and customer engagement as a strategic advantage for the core platforms.

I'll miss the teams I've been a part of the most.  What's hardest to communicate to customers and interview candidates is how every team here has its own culture, sparks of innovation, and unique collection of individuals who care deeply about shipping great software and pushing each other to succeed. 

If you'd like to keep up with my new adventures, the Internet offers you several solutions. If we’ve met you can look me up on the ever so trendy Facebook, subscribe to my blog on http://ledgards.com/blogs/josh (I promise to post more than recipes :-) ) or send some old school e-mail to jledgard@gmail.com. Thanks for all the commentary and great feedback I’ve received from you all on this blog and I hope you give me the same BS detection and rowdiness wherever I engage in the future.

If you read this before 6pm Monday, the 25^th, and you are in the Redmond area I'll be hanging out at the Workshop Tavern in Redmond (7541 Leary Way NE).

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/06/12/lolcat-alignright

• In the back of my head I’m always thinking “Could I work for this person” when I make my recommendations.  This approach makes me tune some questions such that I’m honestly hoping to probe into areas where I feel the candidate could teach me something. If I feel like I learned something during the interview it’s always a good sign.  It also helps when to think about this when looking for diversity of thought… what perspective or talents does this person bring to the team that we’re missing?  
• For Microsoft PMs I generally look for “well roundedness”.  The vending machine series of questions I ask are designed to go after aptitude for interaction design, technical architecture, and testing.  Since PMs are best when they can be a jack of all traits I don’t expect ideal candidates to excel at every competency, but I look for strengths in all three (dev/test/pm) since you’ll eventually be working with every discipline, writing code one day, and helping people test the next. 
• At least 50% of my questions have to be ones that I ask consistently. The rest of the space I reserve for customization based on the resume or role.  It helps set a good bar. 
• I always like to start interviews (after chit-chat) with the standard “canned” questions for which most people expect such as something that’s really obvious from the resume.  I think it puts people at ease for harder questions. 

Anyway, feel free to share your tips. These were just the ones off the top of my head. 

Good communities create cycles of community rituals. One example was a community where the influencers all decided that they would see who could post the most from 4:40 to 4:50 on Thursdays.  :-)  It's up to community managers to both instigate good rituals and reward the ones created by influencers.

The next question is about what's the least software you can create to enable rituals. Can the software be flexible enough to support the rituals and guidelines that have been established over time? 

Move people with agendas to another community... "perhaps AOL is a good place for them." :-)

Registration screens can be a great tool with proper wordsmithing to convey your sites culture. Color and flow also help.  By all means... avoid ugly communities.  Ugly communities lead to argumentative members. 

Don't ever attempt to stifle or limit the conversations. 

• Influencer relationships such as the MVP program
• Connect them to your product teams so they get insider information
• Software coupons and give-aways. New reward every year.
• Need rigorous process to qualify the MVPs
• Visual, Branded, recognition is important.
• Meet in person at the Microsoft Summit.
• Help your customers be successful by helping them develop new business opportunities.
• Cisco site does rewards via the visibility... if you've reached a certain point level you are a Pro.. Then you can do interviews with them where they get to show off their chops.
• Give people more functionality and access to private clubs that are outside of the main community. Make them feel special
• Make it very easy to do what you want them to do.  Model the behavior for them. Seed the behavior.   Give people real time results and feedback on what they've done so they don't waste their time.
• Earning rewards doesn't work.  But you can create a network of people that are willing to help you.  Be a facilitator to content.
• Identify people that are active in the community to empower them. 
• It's really important to help newcomers because lurkers will look to see how new questions are handled before deciding to post themselves.
• Giving people a chance to start smaller groups can help get people engaged.
• Others have tried many times, but they don't have critical mass and the small groups don't take off.
• Does this hijack traffic from the main lists that people use?
• Idea: Ask questions back to the people that show up looking for answers. get them locked into participating beyond just asking questions.  You could make it a requirement to answer some silly questions when they get an answer.
• Idea: People don't land on your welcome pages. How do you use elements of the welcome page to the thread pages that people do land on.
• Idea: Audio prompt or animation that shows newcomers how they can get engaged.  Make it more accessible for people to make that first interaction.
• Make sure your site is optimized for search engines.
• Idea: Put a certain amount of content that people can see in front of private communities. Maybe an area for non-logged in people.

Designing for your goals

• Idea: Give people "their page" to start from rather than a default home page.
• Generate points and reputation that match the creation of content you are trying to incent.
• Idea: Need to overlay social networks to create localized knowledge networks where people become more comfortable.

Internal versus External participation

• Getting people in the company to participate...
• Cisco gives people monitory rewards to get employees to participate in thier communities.
• Others have tried goals for employees, but it's hard to get people to participate.
• Really need to let employees talk to customers about what they are working on.
• Create private groups with influential customers if you are afraid of leaks, but you have to be willing to accept some risk.

Users needing permission

Fear of public speaking online

• Setting the Stage for Participation
• Important to meet and greet newcomers to establish culture and trust. Flickr did this when they started. You have to give people their start.
• You set the scene for people in your community that gives people social que.
• Show people what good behavior, appropriate topics, looks like
• People can be more creative when you give them some boundaries.
• Idea: You need to create hooks that frame the discussions.  "I don't have time for 'boards'", but pull quotes from the community draw people in as they are browsing sites.
• Great book called "Company Command" - On the "Front Porch" you visit with colleges and peers.  Need a dynamic "here's the draw" pull into the communities.
• Meeting people in person early and often welcomes people to online venues, but how do you get more of this online? Make sure to gather community members at conferences.
• Instant engagement means you need "instant feedback" that guides the discussion
• Concept: Communities are less about content and more about connection people to people. Give them people they are comfortable to speak in front of.
• Idea: Send people compliments, let users be transparent with each other to help reputations develop.
• Move from "here's the content" to "here's the content & the people" - Welcome pages need to show more user centric information.
• Meme: Oldtimers get clickish and insular and don't like newcomers.  You have to always designate areas for newcomers.  New helpers need to start by rotating through he newbie area first before they can get to the advanced niche groups.  
• Feature your contributions from your ideal contributors to get more of that type of user that generates that type of content.
• Having a location for anonymous participation can help shy people get engaged.
• Blog comments have a low bar and forums the bar is higher to start discussions.

Censorship

Trust plays a role in registration and participation

• Idea: Get real pictures for people to post photos of themselves. Create discussions around the photos.

• Some people don't care, some people are really opinionated. The consensus was that "if they are done right". 

Question: What are the different methods of putting ads on new Community Sites

• Babycenter.com owned by Johnson and johnson so banners are injected every tenth post.
• Big enough companies will have an ad department that sell ad space. These are the most effective ads, but also require more investment to make work.  In these cases you have a high amount of control over the ads.

Topic: Can the community control the ads instead of Google?

• Ad serving networks aren't sophisticated enough to create a good matches and often create poor or offensive matches. There are hundreds of high profile ad serving networks and not all of them work best.
• No proactive ad filtering can be bad.
• What happens when Slingcommunity.com serves Slingbox alternative ads.
• People have issues with Google. Community for Babycenter.com had a discussion on abortion and the ads for abortion clinics came up. This led to mis-trust of the ad filtering from google.
• Smaller, closed, private communities... could the community control the advertising? Self service advertising that had approval process and ran on a regular basis.  This is non-trivial for smaller/niche communities. 
• What about Digg for your community moderators where they can mod up or down ads that are relevant for their communities?
• Another tab in the community could work for this type of service.

Question: Are there ads in the newsletters?

• Some have no ads in the newsletters
• Some have different departments to serve ads so there is no tie between site ads and newsletter ads.

Topic: Payperpost?

• Opinion: This is a horrible idea to allow in communities because it's bound to get out of control.
• Are larger companies just better off giving their best customers blogs as a reward for their contributions instead?
• People jump all over shills in discussion forums, but not in the blog world.

Topic: How are the community guidelines established?

• Does the community want to slap down the "google guy"?
• Open source community sponsorship ads are worthwhile?
• Everyone would love a site that incorporates a community controlled ad network.
• Create a community ad review area.
• What about digg for community ads?
• What about people that don't participate in any other way.

Suggestions: Dealing with people that inject ads into your community.

• Creating an outlet for the "ad-injectors" such as a "show and tell" forum. 
• Another idea was "Shameless self promotion day"! 
• Banning
• Create a rule about not using ads in signatures
• 3rd party recommendations are a grey area. What's an ad and what's helpful advice and linking?
• What about letting posters choose who sponsors their post? Then their post gets a theme from the advertiser that's tasteful. 

Question: What is working for ads?

• Large concern for relevancy.  There isn't a great targeted solution.
• If the ads match the reason then you can go from .5% click rate to 3-5% click rate.
• Two challenges:
• Profiling users to target ads.  Is there integration between the profiles and the targeted ads.
• relevency isn't that sophisticated.
• Do logged in users click on ads? Do you want them to see ads?
• Pop-up ads or ads that extend over the content cause more user complaints than the reward makes worthwhile.
• People interact via boards via e-mails and then the miss out on the ads.
• Yahoo groups has done a terrible job monatizing the opportunity they have for niche ads.
• What is a new model for ads? Who are the innovative ad companies?
• How can users or companies create the viral content and serve that content through ad networks?
• Is the limitation technology or ideas for clever ads?
• 30 Rock and The Office do product placement right... spoofing product placement while doing it... eating at chili's... scrubs does this too.
• Myspace is starting to do rich content in your ads that pulls eyes in.

Troll whisperers aren't necessarily very good at hacking tools, so there's always an opportunity for geek synergy in helping them to automate their hand-crafted techniques, giving them a software force-multiplier for their good sense. For example, Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling -- removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that it leaves the words intact, but requires that you read them very slowly -- so slowly that it takes the sting out of them. And, as Teresa recently explained to me, disemvowelling part of a post lets the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is and is not socially acceptable.

When Teresa started out disemvowelling, she removed the vowels from the offending messages by hand, a tedious and slow process. But shortly thereafter, Bryant Darrell wrote a Movable Type plugin to automate the process. This is a perfect example of human-geek synergy: hacking tools for civilian use based on the civilian's observed needs.

Everyone has days and events in life they’d love to push the rewind button on, yesterday was one of those days. Regardless of my opinions, thoughts and beliefs on anything Barry Bonds it was absolutely irresponsible and wrong to say what I did. I don’t think it’s within anyone’s right to say the things I said yesterday and affect other peoples lives in that way.

Source: Public Apology « 38 Pitches

And I love the comments with reference to the rise of sports related bloggers tearing down the need for traditional media. This blog thing really is catching on I tell ya...

"You have successfully eliminated the need for the sportswriter with your blog, so I would suggest that you also choose to antiquate radio by taking your public comments directly to the people in the form of a “38 Pitches Podcast” and dominate yet another form of alternative media."

I saw a red car out of the corner of my eye quickly cut in-front of me and attempt to turn right onto the cross street without a signal. They did this, without knowing that I was right next to them. I slammed on both brakes, but careened into their right front passenger door. I was lucky the force of the collision unclipped me from the pedals. I flew onto the hood of their car and I heard their tires skid from the brakes. When the car stopped my momentum flung me off of the hood and onto the pavement.

Source: Yesterday I was hit by a car while biking to work - Josh Ledgard's Personal Blog