[OpenID board] Getting the most out of UserVoice.com

Thu Dec 3 19:58:17 UTC 2009

We now have about 350 members of the OpenID Foundation and I'd guess a good number of other individuals who follow various OpenID mailing lists.   If members of this group can volunteer to work with Global Inventures (who runs the backoffice infrastructure for the OIDF), we can start executing on some of these opportunities, but we can't count on just board members to do this.  The board is about strategic direction, corporate governance, providing an intellectual property management framework to let committees and technical working groups do their jobs, and responding to market needs like the recent federal government OpenID initiatives.    Depending how the operating plan and budget for 2010 works out, the OIDF may be in the position to hire a part time marketing/PR/web contractor to take the lead on some of these issues, but until then we really are dependent on the volunteer efforts of the community.  So if you have some extra cycles to help out, please let Chris, Don Thibeau, John Ehrig, or myself know how you'd like to contribute.

Cheers,

Brian
___________

Brian Kissel<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/10/254>
CEO, JanRain - WebID and Social Publishing for User Engagement
Email: bkissel at janrain.com<mailto:bkissel at janrain.com>     Cell: 503.866.4424     Fax: 503.296.5502

From: openid-board-bounces at lists.openid.net [mailto:openid-board-bounces at lists.openid.net] On Behalf Of Chris Messina
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 11:41 AM
To: openid-board at lists.openid.net
Cc: Richard White; Darin Richardson; OpenID Board (public)
Subject: Re: [OpenID board] Getting the most out of UserVoice.com

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Brian Kissel <bkissel at janrain.com<mailto:bkissel at janrain.com>> wrote:
Are there any volunteers in the OpenID Community who are willing to work with Global Inventures & Don Thibeau to help us review UV input and update the OIDF website, respond to inquiries, etc?  If so, please speak up.
This kind of work could be done within or under the marketing@ list... as part of a "rapid response" or "funnel and connect" program. I think part of the goal would be to reshape the organization to be better about responding to incoming feedback as well as content posted to the web generally about OpenID.

I would suggest that our presence beyond the boundaries of the mailing lists are very weak. We must do more to reach out to people where the conversations are happen and not presume that people will always come to us.

This should be a community/board partnership structured not unlike the early SpreadFirefox efforts.

I still believe that UV is a great tool to capture community feedback, but also agree with Chris that if we don't have the resources to address the inquiries and recommendations from folks who visit our website, we should find a better way to capture and process that input so that we don't appear to be unresponsive.  This is nothing against UV which I still think is a great offering, its more about our ability to take actions based on input from our site visitors.
I concur. I'm not so much worried about the tools as with the resources we have to measure and respond to the data they provide us.

I'd like to also see us use a tool like Cotweet to be able to watch and respond to conversations on Twitter about OpenID, or to bring in support questions from Twitter to, say, UserVoice for addressing.

Given all the energy that the OpenID community clearly has laying dormant, I think it's high time we figured out a strategy to capture and activate it in positive ways that help to grow, mature, and amplify the community.

Chris

Cheers,

Brian
___________

Brian Kissel<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/10/254>
CEO, JanRain - WebID and Social Publishing for User Engagement
Email: bkissel at janrain.com<mailto:bkissel at janrain.com>     Cell: 503.866.4424     Fax: 503.296.5502

From: openid-board-bounces at lists.openid.net<mailto:openid-board-bounces at lists.openid.net> [mailto:openid-board-bounces at lists.openid.net<mailto:openid-board-bounces at lists.openid.net>] On Behalf Of Chris Messina
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 10:47 AM
To: OpenID Board (public)
Cc: Richard White
Subject: [OpenID board] Getting the most out of UserVoice.com

I receive notifications from the OpenID UserVoice microsite on a nearly daily basis (http://ideas.openid.net).
Lately, most of the suggestions and bug reports are null, made up of one or two words, or outright spam.

The legitimate requests and suggestions are few and far between and not on the whole all that useful.

In the beginning, Brian Kissel heavily advocated for using UserVoice to collect user opinions and ideas, and now the management of the site has fallen entirely, it seems, to me.

I'd like to propose that we either figure out how to operational the data from this site or get Inventures to manage it for us and then provide bi-weekly reports to the board about what people are looking for.

Considering that we just executed a survey of the board's priorities and it was proposed that we do the same for the membership, it seems that we're not only ignoring solutions that we already have in place to collect this kind of information, but that we're already failing to use the information that we already have.

Unless we can expand the parties within the foundation who are receiving and able to act on this information, I suggest that we shut down UserVoice in the beginning of the new year and find other ways to pool member and public sentiment that we'll actually use.

Chris

--
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate

Personal: http://factoryjoe.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrismessina

Citizen Agency: http://citizenagency.com
Diso Project: http://diso-project.org
OpenID Foundation: http://openid.net

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--
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate

Personal: http://factoryjoe.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrismessina

Citizen Agency: http://citizenagency.com
Diso Project: http://diso-project.org
OpenID Foundation: http://openid.net

This email is:   [ ] shareable    [X] ask first   [ ] private
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