A while ago, I posted about a brief meeting I had with Sean O'Driscoll, the person in Microsoft responsible for the MVP Program; at that time Sean agreed to do an interview with me where we would dig into some thoughts on what made for successful communities. Sean is a very passionate and articulate guy, and I would highly recommend listening in.
We covered a lot of ground, and I hope some of Sean's experiences will prove useful to those of you that are also trying to kick off a community of your own. Some of the topics we drilled into included:
- what is Sean's definition of 'community'
- supporting community volunteers to foster better community results
- do communities make an organization cool?
- aligning organizational goals with community outputs
- who should 'own' community in an organization
- techology trends that assist in the success of online communities
- measuring the success of a community
- tag-drafting as a way to follow the thinking of the great information mavens
You can keep track of Sean's latest thinking at www.communitygrouptherapy.com.