Online Community

Our clients are planning, designing, and launching online professional networks of all shapes and sizes to reach, engage, and inform external stakeholders.

These range from private blogs to share privileged information and invite input; to online communities around face-to-face events; to project and partner collaboration; to communities of practice focused on specific topics. Since the technology landscape changes so fast, here's our current short-list of go-to platforms that we use to support our clients for these activities.

So, you've decided to invest in a tool for collaboration and content management. Great! And you are ready to begin. Even better.

There’s been an exciting development in online collaboration this month with GSA’s launch of Challenge.gov – a platform for Federal agencies to conduct challenges and contests.

Part 1: Discover

Synopsis: The conversations on social media can really tell a rich story about your brand, topic, cause, target audiences, or other area of interest. It is important to develop effective listening techniques in order to make decisions and justify activities based on these stories. As the first in my series on best practices for listening and engagement, this posts discusses tactics for discovery, the processes of defining content and sources for your listening activities.

Forum One hosted a webinar on June 23 on online collaboration for philanthropic organizations. You can follow the one-hour archived session (or the slides on Slideshare) to get a nice slice of perspective from Amy Gipson of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Melissa Schoen of the California Healthcare Foundation.

In 2009, "social media" became the conventional buzzword to replace "Web 2.0" as the most eye-roll-inducing term of the year. To be fair, social media captured a lot of what was finally maturing: photo sharing sites like Flickr, video sharing like YouTube, professional networks like LinkedIn, and of course getting friend requests from Grandma as Facebook went from avant garde to ubiquity.

We've written previously about the Obama Administration's Open Government Directive. Among other things, the Directive has led to a proliferation of innovative "ideas sites" across the federal agencies.

This month, Forum One and Autodesk hosted a panel titled, "Social Media for Social Impact" during Social Media Week in San Francisco. We had the privilege of having four panelists who each told a story demonstrating how the social web had empowered communities around social causes.

Crisis Camp DC participants work hard to develop applications and tools for relief workers in Haiti.

Earlier this week, I introduced a series of blog posts discussing the Good News Story in Haiti.