The State of Python

Python Atlanta (PyAtl) got off to a great start in 2009 with their January meeting. Steve Holden, chairman of the Python Software Foundationand the author of the book "Python Web Programming", gave an informative and entertaining talk on the state of the Python community along with some good insight into the workings and objectives of the PSF. As an amusing sidenote Steve mentioned the reason he's in Atlanta this week teaching a workshop on Microsoft Sharepoint.  Another great presentation was given by Chris Johnson,  owner of Atlanta business ifPeople, on the Plone content-managment system. Plone is a python based CMS built on top of the Zope application server. As usual the pyatl meeting started at 7:30pm and was over by around 9:30pm. The meeting is held in a convenient venue the GTRI Food Processing Technology building on the edge of the Georgia Tech campus. 

Discovering eDiscovery

Yesterday I attended a 1/2 day seminar on a new subject for me called eDiscovery. The event was located in the Westen Peachtree Plaza in downtown Atlanta. The speaker was Randy Kahn, an author and consultant specializing in legal and compliance issues of information technology. It wasn't a fun event but I did learn a couple of things in this area. Probably the most important was that unless you are a brokerage company then you have no legal requirement to retain email records of employees....which was news to me. Legal problems around email can arise if a lawsuit is filed against your company and past emails exist either in backups or retention systems. Lawyers can request access to those emails and if the old emails are subsequently deleted in the normal course of backup cycling for example the company can be charged with destruction of evidence.  So the key points here are that the emails EXIST and a lawsuit has started. If the emails don't exist then there's not a problem. Of course the company may loose a case where the emails would have provided evidence in it's favor. But my point is the IT manager isn't legally responsible for emails that have been deleted in the normal course of doing business. Good to know. Another thing I learned is it's important for a company to have a record retention policy in place the defines what kind of documents (contracts for example) will be retained for how long and making sure employees have read the policy. And finally one thing Mr Kahn stressed over and over so I think we all got it was that record retention is NOT backups...which is how most companies handle record retention. Hopefully I won't ever have to be involved in eDiscovery, which is going back through electronic records to recover information that pertains to a lawsuit. If I do then I hope my company employs a real record retention system versus relying on backup tapes. Next subject!  

Jive Software seminar on social media strategy

Today I attend the Jive seminar on social media strategy and thought I would try blogging live during the event...taking notes directly into my blog just to see how well the approach works. 

First the seminar  is packed with around 60 attendees. Just about every seat is taken so they managed a pretty good turnout for the event. The venue is Twelve Hotel on West Peachtree beside the Civic Center Marta station...a nice botique hotel that provides free wifi in the meeting rooms for a change. I'm so tired of those big downtown Atlanta hotels that do not provide free wifi. One observation...people are dressed very "upscale" compared to the typical IT event I'm used to attending. Not sure what this means just an observation. Also there are as many women attending as men...another difference from the typical IT event. Social media is not like traditional IT maybe? 

The presentation is being led by Barry Tallis. Starting off with a hilarious video of a couple spliting up because they don't communiate one on one but instead the guy uses traditional marketing communication channels like a web site and brochure.  Barry says social media is about taking your normal everyday social interactions and putting them online. He isn't talking specifically about Jive Software but instead is keeping the disucssion focused on how to build a social media strategy for your organization...off to a great start. 

I like the idea that people find your site via searches on content that is generated in conversations. It's all about the content and specifically content generated by site members NOT by the corporate marketing department. 

Here's one excellent reason to encourage your site visitor to become site members...survey shows members purchase twice as often and 5X more than the average visitor. So you want to turn those visitors into members ASAP.  

I like the case studies portion of the seminar especially when Premier Global Services discussed issues around creation of their new social media community, PGiConnect. Their biggest challenge is one I am faced with often, asking internal staff to began posting community content to the site. They gave a number of useful tips on how to get internal staff engaged such as using rewards based profiling with expertise searching. Results so far are the staff is posting and are even somewhat competitive about posting...who has highest number of posts for example. One of the major concerns they had to overcome was "we're gonna let people drive up and have conversations with us without controls" which is a major concern I hear from people considering implementing a social media site. The answer to the question, Why launch PGiConnect? is that it's going to make it easier for customers to do business with us. Something every business or government agency would aspire to I'm guessing. The biggest risk is "what if they don't show up?" (customers that is). 

One thing they did to help insure success is creation of an editorial calendar and tying mbo's to the internal core team with expectations for contributing content. They also identified other sites where core team members are expected to contribute content with expectations that these external sites will link back to pgiconnect. 

Some tips for success are (1) If operations becomes the primary creator of content then subtantial training is needed.  (2) If someone starts a discussion it is really important to engage that person to reward them.  (3) Mandated usage by internal staff and also rewarded them for using the site. 

One benefit discovered by internal staff is it allows them to speak directly with tech staff of customers thus bypassing marketing. How do you get non tech people to engage? By understanding your core business and putting the community right in the middle of the process stream. Have a very specific set of goals when you build your community. And you may have multiple communities. 

Have a content plan...decide how to keep content coming in. When asking what and why are we building the first question is "what's in it for them (the customer)?" Why would they come and why would they come back? 2nd question and focus is on the type of visitor...are they technology or business types for example. What activities are they doing or expected to do? Which demographic is most willing to create content and share? 

There are five approaches to engaging the community. One approach is to sit back and lisetn. Another approach is where you are involved in the discussion. Third is energizing where you proactively push info to the community. 4th is where you provide learning and support. Last approach is embracing where you ask the question "what do you want us to do for you?"

 Last thing to think about is the technology. What characteristics are most valuable in helping you achieve your goals and plans.  

Different types of communities are Loyalty, Enthusiast, Innovation, and Partner. 

Plan user workflows. People need to understand what to do and where to go. Make sure it's clear and simple.  If a person comes in and they don't know what to do then they are gone. You need a content programming schedule. Create Polls maybe every day or week.  Other good ideas include tech talk,  seeding the conversations, and establishment of a 3rd party blog. 

Plan the lifecycle of a successful community by opening a step at a time to establish a certain tone and foundation up front.  You want people to understand the personality. Know that you will have peaks and valleys. Target the right people at the right time and constantly promote. Know that your community is going to evolve. 

Evangelist, manager, moderator are the three key roles necessary to create a successful community. Evangelist represents to internal members...creates a governance model for communities within the organization. Communication manager is inward facing into the community...keeps track of pulse of the community...knows what's going on. Moderator polices, removes inappropriate content, and contacts internal staff to respond to posts. The moderator should monitor content daily. 

Finally you want employees to be visible and real to the community with real names and faces. 

Web Master Jam Session 2008

Had a great time at Web Master Jam Session - a two day conference held this year in Atlanta on Oct 3-4. This was my first time attending this conference and I would definitely repeat. 

Speakers all seemed to be professional web developers and designers who were good at providing insights into issues and techniques for building world class professional web sites. 

Some of the sessions I attended were

The Bigness of Smallness - John Moore

Universal by Design - James Craig

Going Social - Chris Perry

The Web Planning Process - Jason Ford

Design Lessons in Chess - Rob Weychert

Web Application Interface Design - Garrett Dimon

Striking a Balance - Nathan Smith

There was a general session "Web site smackdown" where a panel of experts criquited submitted websites. Another general session was really interesting as Mike Culver, web services evangelist at Amazon Web Services, spoke about Amazon Mechanical Turk. 

The venue for the conference was pretty cool...a place I haven't been in Atlanta called the Loudermilk Center located on Courtland near the Georgia State campus. 

One of the best outcomes of the conference for me was starting to follow many of the speakers now on twitter so every day I'm picking up new tips and tricks from this group...kind of like the gift that keeps on giving. 

Since the main sponsor, Coffee Cup Software, has moved their headquarters from Dallas to Atlanta the conference will probably be held in Atlanta next year I'm guessing. Hope I get to attend.  

Atlanta Python Rocks

I attended Sept Atlanta Python meetup last night. As usual this meetup is packed with info on the latest and coolest in computing...Adobe Flex (as a front end to python of course), an intro to Amazon Web Services, and a Google App Engine app for an iphone. The AWS talk focused on EC2 and the new elastic block storage (think virtual hard drive). And the flex talk highlighted PyAMF which provides the integration between Adobe Flex/Flash and most popular python frameworks.

This meeting everyone introduced themselves...good to see many people were new to python. And I'm always encouraged when I see a bunch of old guys (like me) still hanging in there staying in the game. As a bonus I learned about a cool video training site for python and ruby called ShowMedo and a new blog to follow on cloud computing by a local (to Atlanta) guy, John Willis, who heads up the local Atlanta cloud computing meetup, AWSome.

.NET University comes to Atlanta

Today I had the opportunity to attend .NET University at the Microsoft offices in Alpharetta. .NET U is a free one day class on new and emerging Microsoft technologies like Biztalk, .NET 3.0, and Sharepoint. The class I attended today was on ASP.NET. I continue to be amazed at the quality of training available free of charge from Microsoft. The two instructors for today's class were both top of their field who you will see presenting in events that cost hundreds of dollars. Microsoft also provided a nice lunch free of charge. The concept of .NET University is to provide all the course materials, handouts, labs, and powerpoint and to encourage it's reuse by anybody willing to take th e time to present. So it's a great resource for internal training or user groups. I look forward to future offerings of .NET U in Atlanta.

Python Is Coming

Yesterday evening (7:30 til 10:00) I attended the Atlanta Python user's group meeting held at Georgia Tech's Food Processing Center. The main presentation was about Google's new App engine...a complete application development and hosting environment utilizing Google's infrastructure. Right now the only development language supported is Python and App engine is in beta limited to around 10,000 developers. Last week I received my app engine developers account from Google and so was excited to see a presentation on it at the python meeting. The most important insight I gained from the presentation is that the apps database engine supports flat tables only...no joins between tables (arrrrrgh). Although tables can be linked and there is good referential integrity between tables. So the take away is think lists not tables…denormalize your data structure…and put everything you need to deliver a record to the web into a single record. Well this is just the beta...wonder what Google's plans are moving forward? Hopefully we'll get a better db at some point. Wish I was attending Google's I/O conference in two weeks in San Fran...where all questions regarding the app engine will probably be answered. For more information on the Google App Engine here's a presentation on youtube on how to create and deploy an application using the app engine. And it's very interesting that Python is now number seven on the Tiobe programming index, one position ahead of C# and two positions up from Ruby. Python seems to be on the rise as the language of choice in the web 2.0 hacker community.