Last night I gave an updated version of my talk on successful community management, “How to Herd Cats” (slideshare link), at the sixteenth Oxford Geek Night.
(Update: Al has posted his video of the talk on Vimeo, thanks Al)
It was a particular honour to be asked to give a keynote as it was almost three years to the day (give or take a week) that I did a microslot talk at the very first Geek Night (a little nugget that JP stole for his introduction. Damn your eyes sir!).
As usual the night was great fun. Thanks to JP for all the organisation and set up (it’s true, gaffer tape really does hold the universe together), and thanks to everyone who came. I received lots of nice feedback after I’d finished the talk, which is always gratifying.
For those of you who wanted to delve deeper into the subject, then as I mentioned during the talk, you really can’t do any better than Jono Bacon’s “The Art Of Community”. It’s available for free download under a Creative Commons license, but I would urge you to buy a copy too. It really is a fantastic piece of work.
I’ve also collated links to related sites and articles on delicious.com under the tag “ogn16″.
And finally, for those of you who kept asking me about the Stormtrooper slide, I present you with the most awesome link in the history of awesome links: Stormtrooper 365.
3 Comments
My legs are in slide 5!
Having been an active moderator on a number of game design related forums in the past, the slides make perfect sense. I’ve seen some nasty things happen, threads go up in flames, moderators turn on each other, entire swathes of forums suddenly removed due to petty squabbling and community members leave in their droves to ‘competitor’ sites.
I would’ve liked to attend to hear the speech — when you next visit, I’d like to chat about it anyway, if Cathy lets me… ;)
I told the crowd that was you, but you were all better now.
You know me, always up for a chat about these things over a few bottles of red. There should be a video of the talk appearing at some point in the next few days and I’ll link to that when it appears.
Look forward to that.
It’s always good to have a sounding board and even better to have a speaker to listen and learn from — ideas, concepts, trends — it’s all good.
If I end up falling over in a field again, even better.