There are a lot of good people working day in an day out within the DataPortability Project and it seems that we are picking up steam again (more on that to follow). I am a big fan of having defined roles and responsibilities so i recently suggested to the Steering Committee that we try to recruit an official Community Manager as well as some additional roles that i will be posting soon.

I personally believe that a Community Manager role is an essential part of any web facing company or organization. It is not that active members are not doing some of the items that the role has been defined with- and that they will continue to do some of them- but that it will be great to have an individual to run with things. I also feel that the role is a great way for someone to pick up experience in a global public web organization with a lot of public exposure.

In the spirit of the DataPortability Project, this position was posted and then will be finalized when the appropriate candidate accepts the role. There are a lot of valuable things that a Community Manager can bring to an organization- and i just tried to outline them all based on other role descriptions i reference in the post. Since this is a volunteer position at this point- we want to make sure we get the right person and then finalize how they are going to contribute with their input in order to make THEM and DataPortability successful.

If you are interested you can read the Community Manager role description here and if you want to read additional thoughts from group members check out our discussion list.

This evening i attended the Social Media Club San Francisco meeting on the subject of "Who Owns Social Media?". Andrew Mager over at ZDNet was live blogging from the room and also has posted some photos (darn somehow i missed the skittles!).

It was a lively conversation in the room but unfortunately the panel discussion was a bit too short- but i already hear rumblings on the internets that this conversation is continuing.

The main question that the panel tried to address was 'who is responsible for social media in the enterprise?'. As Chris Heuer posted on his introduction post to the event "Most social media ‘insiders’ would naturally say, everyone is responsible, but this is just not the reality for most businesses. Someone needs to allocate budget, someone needs decision making authority over infrastructure and major programs, someone needs to rewrite job descriptions upon which employees are measured and many more people need to understand why, where and how to engage."

I have been involved in the Social Media conversation for a while and it feels good to have these conversations- the practice of using social medial across the enterprise (internally and externally) is maturing and these issues are coming to a head with many companies and the good folks that belong to the Social Media Club around the world are the right people to be guiding these conversations.

One of the questions that i wanted to ask but did not get a chance to address with the panel but did chat with @MeHeatherD and @jacobm afterwards- is who owns the 'brand' of the Social Media leaders in your company. When they leave- how much of the Social Media they have created do they get to take and own (defining 'own' as Intellectual Property (IP)) and even if they don't take the 'content' what is the brand value that they can essentially never truly transfer and that there is no way you can write into their job description or company rules? Or can you?

Image|Seattle City Light Brochures, Seattle Municipal Archives. |via Flickr

I have had this post opened all day (thank goodness for auto-save on blogger!) and it is getting close to the end of the day so i am forcing this out but it is an important one.
Over the last two weeks we have all been so busy and so obsessed about talking about the pain we personally feel, our employers feel, or our clients and even our neighbors in the economic spiral we are experiencing that we might forget about the folks that are already suffering because they have to think every day about how they are getting food on the table. For many this is not something new that happened over the last few weeks, they have been struggling in and out of poverty for years.

Using Twitter hashtag @bad08 i just spent some time looking at some of the other Bloggers who have been participating in the Blog Action Day: Poverty 2008 and they certainly are inspiring.

Last night a bunch of us showed up at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay for a Meetup with a focus to have conversations about how we can share best practices around the need for an 'economic turn around". I thought it was ironic that we were going to meet at the Ritz to drink wine and cheese and discuss the doom of the economic marks so i twittered "Going to: Economic Turnaround Meetup @ the Ritz where we will drink wine and cheese- rule #1 for turnaround- attitude, act like you're rich "

The meetup was organized by Robert Scoble based on his post The customers are gone, now what? Tent sale!. The night was lovely with a full moon and with great conversations as Bill Sanders's blogged about this morning- from real issues that are affecting ourselves and our families (like Robert's brother's bar for example) to the spectacular stories of Paul Allen's Octopus yatch and Space X odysseys.

And as i drove home from the event last night, i thought about the long day at work i had ahead of me today with back to back calls and thought about all the people out there in the world that unfortunately are not tossing and turning like me at night because of the big presentation they are doing, the pitch they need to nail, or they contract they need to get their client to sign- but tossing and turning about how they are going to get food on their table for their family the next day. I hope events and communities like the Blog Action Day continue to make people aware of these issues and help us understand how we can help.

Image| Bill Sanders

Watching this video this evening was the most enjoyable thing i did all week. (even if it had been just a regular week when i didn't need something to distract me i think this would have won out!)

I just finished watching Robert Scoble's Getting USA's Treasured Images Onto Flickr video on Scobleizer.tv with Helena Zinkham, who runs the prints and photography division of the Library of Congress. In the video, she talks about how they get images from the library onto Flickr and what that’s done for the library itself.

Since the Library of Congress went live with this project i have been a great fan- and i have been waiting for an update on the status of the project so this video was extremely interesting to me.

Helena is a great story teller- watching the video i felt like i have known her all my life.

She starts off by pointing out that the Library of Congress's (LOC) objective is to preserve knowledge so people can use it and take it beyond the LOC walls- lucky for us.

Part of the conversation is about the actual work to do the digital images (although i thought at one point she mentioned that she was going to show Robert the room but that never comes up in the video. see technical FAQs here if you want to learn more about the how). The LOC's aim is to take the original image and provide a neutral representation- the digital image should look like the actual original photo. They get comments from people who want the LOC to do the colors nicer/brighter/darker- but the LOC is not in the optimization business because that is "very judgmental" Helena says- so they keep the artifact as close to the orginal as possible letting others ("outside the wall") optimize for what they need the photo for such as prints, posters etc.

At one point in the video Helena shows the earliest known photographic portrait of a person which is absolutely beautiful it is of Robert Cornelius ~stunning. (however it is not on Flickr through LOC).

So how did the LOC get to Flickr?

They knew that allowing people to tag content might be useful to get through the over 40,000 pictures that had not been fully cataloged. So they thought about building a web 2.0 application internally for use with the public- but what Flickr brought to the table, was an existing photo friendly, photo loving community. Working with George Oates at Flickr, starting in May 2007 they worked together that summer to put together a process to get the pictures into Flickr.

Flickr had to create a special type of account for the LOC that is now being used by eight public photography archives through their 'The Commons' program - something i did not know existed but looks to have some gems.

The LOC are the stewards of these collections and Flickr had to provide a special Copyright status that means that the Library is unaware of any restrictions on the use of the image.

So what does it mean that they are Bringing Pictures Alive?

Helena talks about the fact that what this has done is bring the collection 'alive' by allowing people to not only add tags- but comments on the pictures that tell personal stories or point out facts about the photo that due to resources catalogers would probably never get a chance to research.

Here is a perfect example from today's new uploads- this picture of Evelyn Nesbit was posted and within hours a colorful story of her life and times developed in the comments.

During the video, Helena tells a story about this picture of Weavers at Work at the The New York Blind Association and this House in Houston where people went beyond identifying the place that shows how indeed this process is bringing value for the LOC as well as the public.

The one thing that Robert doesn't dig into is how they are going to take the tags and comments specifically to enhance the existing catalog. I would have liked to hear a bit more about some of the results of this additional metadata on the collections outside of Flickr- how are they specifically being incorporated back into the original 'artifacts', what work effort is required? How valuable are the current tags? does it really save catalogers time? or does the metadata noise actually cause more work in the long run?

Helena briefly mentions that the LOC have very gifted catalogers (they do!) - but the volume is just too large to be able to catalog down to the level that the flickr users are doing. It does seem that the LOC is 'manually' enhancing their catalogs, for example this comment where the LOC is corrected and states that they would "update the source data and reload the description".

I have no doubt that the LOC will be sharing more of what they have learned about user tagging collections- but to date there seems to be some real value for both the LOC as well as the public!

And one last note, there was some sound issues late in the video with the volume turning up really loud that gave me a startle so beware!

I am guilty of sending internal group emails with questions like- "has anyone worked on something like this", "can you point me to a proposal that addresses this need that we have delivered on", "what are your thoughts on this article, "who would like to blog a post responding to this", "why do you all always ignore me" (ok they don't ignore me all the time but enough of the time that makes me paranoid...). I have tried to setup up groups on our internal Instant Messanger but the group features are weak, the team is globally dispersed so not on line at the same time, and some people just never log on and messages are not delivered when people are offline and come back on. I am sure my experiences are not unique.

I have however created a 'backchannel' with key folks that i work with on Twitter- the noise there is different i guess and using Direct Messaging bypasses the hundreds of other emails that person may get (especially if they use a Twitter client to alert them of DMs). As i get more followers and i follow more people however i have a hard time listening on on that backchannel (i keep hearing that Groups are coming to Twitter- when??)

Twitter like services- which allows users to broadcast short messages (usually 140 characters) have been coming up during client conversations- from using it internally or externally to communicate; to obviously monitoring what is being said about them- and how they should respond. I don't think Enterprises can hide much longer behind the ignorance curtain- it is becoming a new way to deliver information- one that is inherently powerful in the Enterprise space because it's main purpose is response and discussion- not only push.

Today this article on ReadWriteWeb about Best Buy buying an Enteprise Twitter application from Headmix caught my attention (although i don't read a "license to try pilots" as an full sale in the Enterprise but certainly understand that is a great foot in the door for them). Lucky for the Best Buy team- their project does not seem to be tied to regular metrics and goals since he comments "People have stopped asking us about metrics, measurement and goals. They see that it’s a cost of doing business. Nobody questions whether you need to have phones anymore, its assumed."

Just last month Jeremiah Owyang, who is always ahead of the game, posted an overview of Enterprise Microblogging Tools or what he called "Twitter for the Intranet"- (i get the 'intranet' label but i would argue that the power of a microblogging tool is that it is device independent- it should not matter if i am using a browser, a phone (regardless of what type/platform), or another web enabled device). If you are looking for potential tools to use 'behind your firewall' you should take a look.


Of the Videos that have on the HeadMix site- this ones addresses specifically why Best Buy is interested in this distributed messaging microblogging platform:


Making The Sale from Arik Jones on Vimeo.