Tools to manage and keep track of community and ideas around delegation [#cls notes]

What are people using for monitoring life of their community?

• Homegrown perl script.

• PlanetPlanet + Feeds. Using Thunderbird to read the feeds and it’s failing.
• Governance issues with the regards to what should be posted to planet.
• Google Shared items to publish moderated items

• Frequent bloggers extra feature inside PlanetPlanet
• Don’t planet this tag

• SVN-search – a way to view SVN history of certain open-source projects. Lifetime history of the project, which commiters contributed mail.
• MarkMail.org
• Apache-attic – ability to mark dead communities within Apache

• Public message boards between anybody else on the site. [WikiAnswers.com]
• The question is whether they should be public or not.

Delegation – as a community management tool. When the community becomes so big that you can’t manage it, you have to delegate and give more power to specific users.

• [Invent] A special delegation tool
• Different projects have their own internal dashboards that helps them asses their community and decide who are important contributors to the project. They usually aggregate a number of scripts that aggregate different stats and parts of community (forums, bugs, commits, etc.)
• Ubuntu is trying to track community contributions. If you do non-technical things, they would like to be able to track it and give you karma points for this and to be able to help you.
• In order to keep people to motivated, you have to validate their contributions and find a way to track them and their community contributions.
• MeatBot – figure out who is actually doing stuff in contrast to who is just talking
• What happens when people try to gain the system. Community managers are afraid of users gaming the system? How do you reward or contribute that?
• Are there any visualization tools for past data/archives and can help with identifying important community contributions?

Community tools:

• GetSatisfaction – emoticons to express feelings and make a better tool
• StackOverflow – karma system that gives you points based on the amount of your contributions, that gives you extra features as you gain more points

Brand tracking tools:

• Biz360
• Radiant6
• OpenBrands

• We need a dashboard of dashboards

Social Tracking Tools:

• Tweetie, TweetDeck, etc.
• CoTweet
• Sugar CRM to keep track of community people.

• Need a reason for monitoring? It shows people that you are listening.
• Job title: Professional listener

Tools that should exist:

• Mozilla is doing a Community CRM – a tool that has information on everyone on community, short bio and their involvement in community + API that allows you to write a JetPacks etc. that show you more information about that person.
• It’s being built on City CRM tool. Open source customer relationship tool.
• The community must look small, to make it grow bigger.
• Similar project is django-people
• Visual relationship tool for email mailing lists
• Mailman archives that don’t suck
• Mailman archives GreaseMonkey script