Introduction
Each week I plan to publish another article on suggestions for making this APM Community much richer. So far, the following blogs have been published:
Help Your Online Neighbor
My Big DC Adventure and the APM Community
How to Build a Vibrant APM Virtual Community: Active Participation!
How to Build a Vibrant Community: Content, More Content, and Then Some!
How to Build a Vibrant Community: Tell Us a Little About Yourself
How to Build a Vibrant Community: Wanted -- Engagers!
How to Build a Vibrant Community: If You Link 'Em They Will Come
How To Build a Vibrant Community: Tell a Friend/Colleague.
Sociological Dinner
Sometime back, I attended a group dinner with sociologist E. Digby Baltzell. You can find more on him at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Digby_Baltzell. There are two things that I remember of that night. One was his constant struggle to get a cigarette out of a well-worn pack while talking. The other was someone was talking what people had today as community. Baltzell dismissed this by saying something like, "You don't have Community today, you have instead Communion." I don't remember the vigorous dissent or much after that.
And thinking on that day brought me back to my mission here Encouraging people daily to make this community grow in ways that are meaningful to them.
Overall Models
Here are some different simplified models on how this community can grow. This is just a guiding idea on what to shoot for. The end-result doesn't have to be just one.
- A social community can just be a community. In this case, people share ideas/questions about a common set of products, infrastructures, and applications to monitor. And that can be sufficient for many.
- Members can strive for communion, That is a joining together of minds. This could be through such events as chats or ongoing meetings. And once achieved, perhaps some joint project projects take off.
- Members causally spending time together in the spirit of friendship. This could be informal discussions on a technical/non-technical topic.
There are also some simplified participation models to strive for.
Participation Models
- Simplified/Delayed two-way discussions. Someone posts a question and a person responds. But sustained two-way communications in a Community question/discussion can be difficult. And conversations are not real-time
- Real-time/Two-Way Discussions. This can happen when Instant Messaging is supported and through discussions from Office Hours and the like.
- Collaboration Discussions -- Multiple people working together on a deliverable or a joint problem. (Such as a document on naming standards for a particular function) And if this became common rather than the exception, how much richer would this Community be!
Note that using the Jive Tools may alert you when a topic is being discussed. (https://communities.ca.com/tools-eapis.jspa)
Your Turn
Thank you for your support and participation in this community. We are very lucky here to have so many talented people making this a better place each day!!!
- I want to hear back from you on what we can do this make this Community more appealing to you personally so that you would log in frequently. Please reply to this post or email me directly at hallett.german@ca.com