MashedPotato Tech

'Festival Magic' I've heard this phrase for the past 8 years while serving with an amazing group of 4000 volunteers who put on the Gilroy Garlic Festival  - lauded by most as the premier food and entertainment festival on the West Coast.  While the saying started out as a bit of a joke to explain how things get done, the reality is those two words are the bedrock of an annual event that has been taking place for almost 35 years. The history of the festival is long and storied - this video gives a great overview.  However, the elements behind the concept of 'Festival Magic' are applicable to communities of all types, whether it's open source software development, social media communities, or affinity groups.  This 'magic' isn't really all that magical - it breaks down to the following main ideas: Empower Everyone to Lead Gilroy Garlic Festival volunteers are expected to lead (and follow) at all levels of the organization.  Even the most jun...

What's in a title? While a lot of us community types don't get caught up in what you call us (we prefer to be catalysts in getting the job done), the fact remains that those outside of our sphere sometimes fixate a bit too much on the word 'manager' in our typical title.  In point of fact, some of the most successful community people I've run across are closer to a community 'sherpa' than they are to a community 'manager.'  What is the difference, you might ask, and does this mean that they don't perform typical 'management' tasks? The answer to the second part of that question is no - in fact, they can and do step in to get their hands dirty on tactical tasks (moderating forums, building content, refereeing competing interests) all the time.  However, building an effective community requires someone who is also fairly strategic (the 'sherpa').  This strategy comes to the forefront in areas such as charting the community directi...

As an avid baseball fan, I love to go root on my beloved SF Giants (and a World Series victory last year was just an awesome gift to go along with my new baby daughter!) One of the things you hear at a major league ballpark is vendors hawking programs or in-stadium magazines with line up cards: 'Get your program, program here, can't tell the players without a program!' All of this got me thinking about the different roles in successful tech development communities. These kinds of communities, not unlike your baseball line up of 'lead off hitter,' 'cleanup hitter,' etc., have important players as well. So, with that in mind, I'd like to build out a 'Technology Development Community Lineup,' complete with players, their respective roles and a brief 'scouting report' on each of them. So, let's play ball! Leading off - Product Visionary: This person's role, like a leadoff hitter, is to get on base with an idea or a vision of how to...

'Community Management' is a hot topic, & a hot job field , but I think it's important to articulate that it's not a role which should be approached as a 'job'. What do I mean by that? Community Management should NOT be: A role you 'settle' for because you can't do other things Something you do as an ancillary part of your 'real job' Something you get into 'because it's hot right now' A position that you can perform in isolation, without constant upgrading of your skills/knowledge I've talked in the past about what kinds of skill sets I believe are necessary to be an effective community manager, and as I thought about my own career path, I realized that early on in my community management career, I considered myself an engineer doing community management, whereas I now think of myself as a community manager with an engineering background. It is a subtle, yet hugely important difference - one that allows me to draw on a...

I stumbled across the blog of David Jakes ( Strength of Weak Ties ) today, and found the following entry to be a great read. Warning: it is a little long, but I think the themes that he mentions are very valuable, not just in his workspace of education, but also in the professional world as well. I like David's approach to learning (RSS feeds, 'meatspace' publications, collaboration), and I love this quote from him: "Successful technology coordinators are leaders, and leaders understand that leadership is about relationships. Having relationships with people that understand you, and support you, are required to be truly successful, but this only comes with honoring and understanding them first." I think that there is so much truth in that, especially in a world where we like to substitute technology for personal relationships. Technology should be about augmenting those relationships, and helping others - tools such as del.icio.us are a great example of this ...