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How to use MindMeister as a powerful tool for collaborative mindmapping and brainstorming.
Building an online community is just the first step. Here are my tips on bringing your online community to life.
Today marks the release of Sex and the City: The Movie. With the news that SATCTM tix are selling out, your friends at Social Signal (part of the original Change Everything team) want to save you from the nightmare of a Sex-less weekend. We’ve got twenty tickets to the 8 pm show on Saturday, May 31st, at the Fifth Avenue Cinema on Burrard Street.
The first twenty girlfriends to e-mail me (alex [at] socialsignal [dot] com) will be our guests on Saturday night. We’re also working on a plan for pre- or post-film cosmos (let us know what works better for you when you RSVP).
If you’d like to pass on the love, Social Signal will match any ticket-sized donations you make to WISH, the Women’s Information Safe Haven.WISH provides female survival sex workers with shelter, essential needs supports, and alternatives to their high-risk lifestyles. You can donate online or in person on Saturday night.
We hope to see you on Saturday!
Today marks the release of Sex and the City: The Movie. With the news that SATCTM tix are selling out, your friends at Social Signal want to save you from the nightmare of a Sex-less weekend. We've got twenty tickets to the 8 pm show on Saturday, May 31st, at the Fifth Avenue Cinema on Burrard Street.
The first twenty Social Signal girlfriends to e-mail me (alex [at] socialsignal [dot] com) will be our guests on Saturday night. We're also working on a plan for pre- or post-film cosmos (let us know what works better for you when you RSVP).
If you'd like to pass on the love, Social Signal will match any ticket-sized donations you make to WISH, the Women's Information Safe Haven. WISH provides female survival sex workers with shelter, essential needs supports, and alternatives to their high-risk lifestyles. You can donate online or in person on Saturday night.
We hope to see you on Saturday!
How we experience the Internet in our daily lives — whether we experience it as a dehumanizing void in which e-mail replaces face-to-face interaction, or as a meaningful community in which we discover new commonalities and connections — is a choice we make every day, with every message we send or browser page we load. Those choices can add up to personal and social alienation, or personal and social transformation.
How to use status updates — like the ones you post to Facebook and Twitter — to help drive social change.
How can online collaboration tools like Basecamp support effective project management? That's one of the questions that came up at the values-based project management session I attended at Web of Change, led by Rob Purdie of Important Projects. I wanted to continue the conversation with Rob himself, and promised to blog our own project management workflow at Social Signal so that he could offer his comments and feedback on how to improve our approach.
Let me begin by saying this is very much a work in progress: we're still searching for the Holy Grail of optimized workflow, and feel like the tools we use now — particularly Basecamp — don't fully meet our needs. I'll address some of those limitations towards the end of this blog post, but let me begin with an overflow of what we use and how we use it.
Our main tools are:
This blog post will focus on how we use Basecamp, which is our main tool for managing the ongoing work of individual projects. The fact that we use so many other tools speaks to the issues we have with Basecamp — which is one of the issues I'm particularly keen to hear Rob address. We're also fans of — though not religious adherents to — David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology, which has influenced our approach to task management.
Set up
We set up a Basecamp site at the beginning of each client engagement. Some of the best practices on Basecamp set up that we are trying to adopt as our standard include:
I add all our subcontractors to Basecamp as members of Social Signal, so that we can cover any technical issues without dragging the client into the Drupal abyss. We recognize that our clients don't always benefit from seeing how the sausages are made, and when it gets into some of the intricacies of module development or permissions configuration, we like to keep the excruciating details private so that clients aren't drawn too deeply into technical issues. Unfortunately, Basecamp only allows private communications among members of the same company, so we choose to treat all our subcontractors as members of Social Signal.
Structure and usage
We use messages for communications that require an action or response. This includes:
We use writeboards for communications that are FYI only (though we may use messages to notify each other of a new writeboard).
We use task lists for items that require a "next action" (in GTD terms).
Messages
We have recently refined our use of messages to keep better track of all open loops. We respond to urgent messages as they come in, and at least once a week (and ideally every 2-3 days) we review all the messages in a given project space, and update status. We find that updating message status on a real-time basis is excessively time consuming and leads to duplication of effort.
Our message categories vary a bit by project but mostly reflect major categories of project activities (see screenshot — some items deleted to protect client privacy).
When we review a message we briefly note our response, action required, or action taken, even if it's already completed, for future reference.
We then edit the title of the original message to note the status of that message:
Editing our message titles to reflect the status of each message gives us an at-a-glance view of which client issues have been addressed, and which need to be reviewed for action items.
To-dos
We have recently shifted from using fewer, generic to-do lists (which we were trying to standardize across projects) to using a lot more to-do lists, each one corresponding to a set of related tasks. This reflects the GTD notion of grouping tasks by "contexts" or as "projects" consisting of multiple tasks.
By grouping related tasks we ensure that:
When we had fewer categories we found that the very long lists of tasks under each made it hard to identify relationships or priorities; the shorter list of tasks makes this much easier.
We keep our to-do lists organized alphabetically; when we decide to prioritize a specific set of tasks as the next focus for our work, we move that to-do list to the top of the page and mark it "P1: to-do list name" (as in "priority 1").
Writeboards
Writeboards are our long-term storage area and collaboration space. We use writeboards for:
Assessment
Our experience with Basecamp has been shaped equally by the technology itself, and our diligence in using it. Of course, these aren't unrelated issues; if Basecamp really met all our needs, so that we could keep all our tasks organized in one place, I suspect we'd be much more consistent in using it.
We find that Basecamp works well for:
We find that Basecamp works poorly for:
What we like about Basecamp:
What we need that we're not getting from Basecamp:
Nice-to-haves would include:
Basecamp alternatives
One of my favorite compulsive activities these days is looking into Basecamp alternatives. So far my conclusion has been — to paraphrase Winston Churchill — that Basecamp is the worst possible project management tool, except for all the others. Here are some of the "others" I have looked into, or mean to look into; I'll try to come back to this post and annotate the list with the reasons we haven't moved to any of these:
Unfuddle — intriguing because it includes subversion and bug tracking
Clocking IT — a free basecamp alternative, but as far as I can see no built-in messaging. Time tracking, though.
Michael Silberman of EchoDitto put me onto Central Desktop as a somewhat pricier Basecamp alternative that includes many of our concerns about Basecamp. We're trying it out, and it looks promising, although I'm a bit disappointed in the look and feel (it's not nearly as pretty as Basecamp) and daunted by the prospect of moving our projects over. However the prospect of being able to assign deadlines to tasks (imagine that!!) probably outweighs every other issue.
Brian Benzinger's roundup of project management tools for developers provides quick takes on some of the above, plus many more.
Other Resources
In the course of my obsessing over Basecamp and project management workflow I've found a number of useful blog posts on other people's use of Basecamp and Basecamp alternatives. For some reason many of the blog posts I've come across are by friends in the non-profit tech sector; I'm not sure if that's because of Google's freaky habit of customizing search results, or because non-profit techies are somehow more obsessed with workflow (comments, anyone?) Here are some of the posts I've found helpful.
Sonny Cloward mapped his workflow, which hinges on Basecamp, Backpack and Mozilla Calendar.
Ruby Sinreich blogged her thoughts on Basecamp plus GTD, which includes creating virtual "people" who represent different contexts, so she can assign her tasks to contexts.
LifeDev reports on using Basecamp with GTD, in this case using to-do LISTS as contexts.
Jon Stahl provided an overview of collaboration practices at ONE/Northwest, which includes using Basecamp.
Next steps
I'm going to take Central Desktop for a serious spin. I'm going to continue praying to the 37Signals gods for true Basecamp-Backpack integration, or to the Remember the Milk guys for Basecamp-RTM integration as an answer to their "how can we start charging for RTM?" quest. I'm going to try out Omni's forthcoming OmniFocus task manager.
And I'm going to resist the temptation to engineer an in-house Drupal solution to our project management wishlist. After all, our needs aren't THAT exotic, and there are an awful lot of people chasing the same vision. I'm trusting that one of them will get us much closer to a solution before long.
Meanwhile, I'm eager to hear from Rob Purdie and others about how we can improve our current Basecamp usage. In particular I'm curious to hear:
And if you've blogged your own project management approach or workflow, please let me know by sending an e-mail to alex [at] socialsignal [dot] com, or posting a comment here.
We're often approached by business and nonprofit organizations who are interested in tapping the power of the social web but don't know where to start, or how to get a feel for the possibilities. I'm delighted to be co-teaching a Hollyhock-in-Vancouver workshop next month that will be a great opportunity for Vancouver-based organizations to get smart about Web 2.0:
Web 2.0 and your organizationÂ
Are you interested in how online communities like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube can empower your members and customers to carry your message out into the world? Could your organization benefit from deeper collaboration among your team members, clients, partners or the public? Could better knowledge-sharing, stronger relationships and closer communications inside your organization and with your core supporters foster more efficiency, insight and effectiveness?
The latest generation of "Web 2.0" or social web strategies and tools offer powerful opportunities for organizations to improve the way they work, communicate their messages, empower others, and serve the public. In this workshop you will learn how the latest tools for online collaboration and community building can make your organization smarter and more effective.
This workshop is designed for communications strategists, marketing managers, and webmasters who are interested in how this evolution of the web can help evolve your organization's online strategy. We will give you the tools, knowledge, and most crucially, the vision for how your organization can use the web as a stronger agent of change. We’ll also cover the nuts-and-bolts, introducing the latest tools so that you know which options are most promising for your needs.
About the presenters: Jason Mogus is the CEO of Communicopia, which has helped progressive companies and non-profits communicate and collaborate via the web for 13 years. Jason is also the founder of Web of Change at Hollyhock. Alexandra Samuel, PhD (Harvard), is CEO of Social Signal, and is helping some of the web's most ambitious community ecosystems use the social web to support dialogue and collaboration.
This workshop is co-sponsored by the Hollyhock Leadership Institute, Web of Change, Social Signal, Communicopia, Social Tech Brewing, and Impacs.
To register:
Visit the Hollyhock site, call 800-933-6339 x232, or e-mail registration[at]hollyhock.ca
A few months ago, Rob and I decided that Social Signal was ready to expand its development team with another web services consultant; Aaron Pettigrew has had such a transformative impact on our business that we realized another Aaron (as though there could be such a thing) would allow us to serve that many more clients that much more effectively.
And we decided that while we were adding another web geek to the team, we might look for someone who knows a little about Second Life — a virtual world that is the Internet's hottest new home to online community. (Find out more about Second Life here.) So I sent an e-mail to a leading Second Life blogger who blew my mind when we met at last year's SXSW. Here's what I asked him:
since I keep hoping that our business may eventually involve doing some Second Life projects for folks, I have the idea that our ideal next hire would be someone who's an experienced Second LIfer – probably not someone who's doing Second LIfe stuff professionally yet (though possibly) but the kind of person who'd be thrilled to make that part of their work. Basically we're just looking for a bright, energetic, progressive and tech-impassioned person who would enjoy bringing their social commitments and tech passions together. Do you happen to know any SL types in Vancouver who'd fit that description?
Lucky for us, he had an inspiration: a Vancouverite whose SL name is Catherine Omega. He pointed us to Catherine's bio on the Second Life wiki, and that was enough to convince us to get together with her.
A couple of weeks later, we met up with Catherine (known in real life as Catherine Winters) in a local Vancouver restaurant. Over the course of a lively lunch we covered everything from how she first got into Second Life (on a computer she built herself from scavenged parts) to the larger significance of Second Life and other virtual worlds (as a way of bridging social differences and disparities).
That was the first of a series of meetings in which Catherine coached us out of our SL newbieness and started talking with us about how Second Life could support a socially sustainable business approach. We were dazzled by Catherine's brilliant and thought-provoking take on Second Life's social significance, by her strategic insights into how organizations could make innovative and effective use of an SL presence, and by her exceptional clarity and good humor in making Second Life accessible to new users. And we suspected that as one of the co-authors of the new Official Guide to Second Life, she was in a position to take a leadership role in bringing more people to the platform.
Today, we're delighted to announce that Catherine Winters is joining Social Signal as our Manager of Virtual Worlds. Catherine will be leading a new Second Life practice to help businesses, non-profits and government agencies establish innovative, effective presences "in world". This practice will focus on working with organizations that want to create a profoundly interactive presence that stands out in Second Life's every-expanding world, that want an SL presence that integrates with a web-based online community, or that want their SL presence to advance a sustainability or social change agenda.
We'll have more news to share in the coming months about our plans for Second Life, including the forthcoming launch of our own island. Catherine's creative ideas and scripting powers will be put to good use as we introduce new opportunities for organizations to make compelling use of Second Life as a new medium for strategic communication.
Meanwhile our web site can tell you more about Catherine and our new Second Life practice. We also hope you'll join us for an open house to introduce Catherine to our clients, colleagues and friends, and to introduce Social Signal to the Second Life community. The open house will be held from 2-4 pm Second Life time (aka Pacific time) on Wednesday, January 3 at TechSoup's space on Info Island. (Many thanks to CompuMentor for lending their space to us for this event) If you've yet to visit Second Life, this is a great excuse to download their software and try it out (it's free to download and free to register) for yourself.
If you'd like to learn more about Second Life, or about how Social Signal's new practice can help your organization establish an effective Second Life presence, please call (778.371.5445) or e-mail Catherine (catherine [at] socialsignal [dot] com), me (alex [at] socialsignal [dot] com) or Rob (rob [at] socialsignal [dot] com).
We owe that blogger a huge thank-you for making this inspired connection. And yes, this does mean we're still looking for that web services consultant.
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