BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Community BIRT

I'm pleased to announce the members of the BIRT Exchange Community Leaderboard for April 2013. The purpose of this Leaderboard is to honor the top contributors to BIRT Exchange each month and to have a little fun. Scores are also posted on the BIRT Exchange Connect page. You can recognize past and current Leaderboard members by special badges on their forum and DevShare posts:


To determine the leaders, each contribution made by a BIRT Exchange member is assigned a weighted point score that roughly corresponds to its effort/value. For example, starting a forum topic by asking a question will score you 1 point and answering someone's question scores 3 points. Members with the top summed scores each month are declared the leaders for that month and posted to the Leaderboard. Over time we evolve the scoring system as needed for fairness and value to the community. We even give a point for voting on the BIRT Exchange Community home page polls (but make sure you're logged in so it will be assigned to you).

So please contribute to BIRT Exchange. It's not difficult to get a decent score and we'd love to see you on the Leaderboard next month!

You can find details on the Community Leaderboard Wiki. If you have any suggestions or comments, please add them to this blog post (they're worth 2 points).

Last month I had the honor along with Nobby Akiha (our Marketing SVP at Actuate) of doing a presentation on Developer Advocacy at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference (DRC). Advocacy is a growing marketing trend that organizes and provides incentives to people who talk positively about a company and its technologies, products or services. In particular, advocates are a company's greatest fans.

My talk centered on the group of select BIRT developers we're identifying at Actuate and our objectives to give them credit when they talk about BIRT and provide them with interesting and effective ways of doing so. We're using a cool gamified infrastructure hosted by Influitive to provide the recruitment, recognition and organization of these developers. Advocates are given opt-in challenges that are simple or complex tasks to promote BIRT within their social and/or professional spheres of influence. Plus I try to make it fun and rewarding! Completed challenges give a weighted number of "points" for the advocate based on the level of effort required, badges are awarded for special achievements, and people are placed on a Leaderboard for some fun competition.

Some of the challenges I've designed ask advocates to comment on blogs or articles, start on-line conversations about data reporting and visualization, answer questions about BIRT, provide us with feedback on training materials and even just fill out their BIRT Exchange profiles so others get to know them better. In thanks for their advocacy we will reward them in ways meaningful to them like increasing their professional or personal on-line capital or giving them access to events or other areas of interest.


In fact, the good people at Influitive were kind enough to build a custom site for the DRC that I used to create gamified challenges for the attendees so they could experience what an advocacy program was like for themselves. The challenges ranged from simple tweeting during the conference to joining the DRC LinkedIn group, liking Evans Data on Facebook, taking quizzes, reading and commenting on blogs and providing feedback about the conference.

The DRC itself was very rewarding and as usual I was very impressed by the speakers, insights and the wealth of information I received. I highly encourage anyone who is a developer relations professional to attend this unique annual event. Evans Data always provides the latest look into what developers like and dislike, what motivates them and the best ways to get their attention. Did you know hat 42% of the developers Evans surveyed are developing mobile apps (half of the developers moonlight). Another interesting tidbit is that most developers rely on vendors as the most credible sources for emerging technologies (i.e., not their peers) -- this is a big change in past years.

Take a look at the conference site for a list of the speakers and topics discussed. Also please feel free to post a comment if you want to find out more about what we're doing for BIRT advocacy at Actuate.

I'm pleased to announce the members of the BIRT Exchange Community Leaderboard for March 2013. The purpose of this Leaderboard is to honor the top contributors to BIRT Exchange each month and to have a little fun. Scores are also posted on the BIRT Exchange Connect page. You can recognize past and current Leaderboard members by special badges on their forum and DevShare posts:


To determine the leaders, each contribution made by a BIRT Exchange member is assigned a weighted point score that roughly corresponds to its effort/value. For example, starting a forum topic by asking a question will score you 1 point and answering someone's question scores 3 points. Members with the top summed scores each month are declared the leaders for that month and posted to the Leaderboard. Over time we evolve the scoring system as needed for fairness and value to the community. We even give a point for voting on the BIRT Exchange Community home page polls (but make sure you're logged in so it will be assigned to you).

So please contribute to BIRT Exchange. It's not difficult to get a decent score and we'd love to see you on the Leaderboard next month!

You can find details on the Community Leaderboard Wiki. If you have any suggestions or comments, please add them to this blog post (they're worth 2 points).

I'm pleased to announce the members of the BIRT Exchange Community Leaderboard for February 2013. The purpose of this Leaderboard is to honor the top contributors to BIRT Exchange each month and to have a little fun. Scores are also posted on the BIRT Exchange Connect page. You can recognize past and current Leaderboard members by special badges on their forum and DevShare posts:


To determine the leaders, each contribution made by a BIRT Exchange member is assigned a weighted point score that roughly corresponds to its effort/value. For example, starting a forum topic by asking a question will score you 1 point and answering someone's question scores 3 points. Members with the top summed scores each month are declared the leaders for that month and posted to the Leaderboard. Over time we evolve the scoring system as needed for fairness and value to the community. We even give a point for voting on the BIRT Exchange Community home page polls (but make sure you're logged in so it will be assigned to you).

So please contribute to BIRT Exchange. It's not difficult to get a decent score and we'd love to see you on the Leaderboard next month!

You can find details on the Community Leaderboard Wiki. If you have any suggestions or comments, please add them to this blog post (they're worth 2 points).

I attended Community Leaders Summit West (CLS West) in San Jose a couple weeks ago which is an annual unconference for community leaders. As usual it was a very stimulating event where lots of cutting edge ideas and tools were discussed. About 100 people from mostly the SF Bay Area showed up. They represented wide community concerns from developer programs, education, support groups, women's shelters and non-profits to name a few. Three topics I found really exciting:

Ideation
Ideation is a process of generating ideas that's been around for a while. What was new (for me at least) was learning how companies are using portals to solicit new ideas from their customers and get votes on the best ones. I've seen this before, but didn't realize that making use of third party sites to implement it is rather easy and not too expensive. I went to a session given by Linda Sharp of Religence who said this has been very effective for some companies. She warned that weeding out great ideas from the most popular ones, however, can be challenging because popularity is not always indicative of real innovation.

UserVoice, is an example of one of these portals. It costs $70 a month and seems very straightforward to set up. CLS West used this service before the conference to get feedback from the registrants to solicit and gauge the popularity of various topic ideas. Here are the services that were mentioned.

• Spigit is a good tool to collect ideas and votes
  
• UserVoice provides ideation using help desk/support forums
  
• ConfirmIt does ideation by gathering customer feedback and insights

Community Advocacy
I ran a session on Community Advocacy (i.e., finding ways for people who love your product/service to talk about it in the places they hang out and in ways that are really effective) and had a good meeting, although it didn't get a big turnout. I talked to lots of people at the conference about advocacy and there seemed to be a lot of interest, but no one I spoke to seemed to be doing it in a controlled manner. Gamified portals like Influitive seem very promising and I'm looking into that quite seriously for BIRT. Still, this kind of advocacy hasn't really caught on yet. I expect it to be big someday, really big.

Using Google+
I haven't used Google+ much but was pleased to learn there are lots of capabilities with Google+ that are free and useful for managing communities. Events and hangouts can be set up quickly and made public (on-air) or kept private. Photos and video recordings are simple to capture and save for posterity. Comments and discussions can also be easily added to any topics. I think this might be a great way to set up virtual user groups meetings or live discussions with our community. It works with mobile too.

Summary
Overall CLS West was an well-spent day to be sure. I'd recommend it or its sister meeting at OSCON to anyone who deals with a community. Oh... and if you've used any of these tools or concepts I mentioned, please comment below and let us all know what's worked and what hasn't.

I'm pleased to announce the members of the BIRT Exchange Community Leaderboard for January 2013. The purpose of this Leaderboard is to honor the top contributors to BIRT Exchange each month and to have a little fun. Scores are also posted on the BIRT Exchange Connect page. You can recognize past and current Leaderboard members by special badges on their forum and DevShare posts:


To determine the leaders, each contribution made by a BIRT Exchange member is assigned a weighted point score that roughly corresponds to its effort/value. For example, starting a forum topic by asking a question will score you 1 point and answering someone's question scores 3 points. Members with the top summed scores each month are declared the leaders for that month and posted to the Leaderboard. Over time we evolve the scoring system as needed for fairness and value to the community. We even give a point for voting on the BIRT Exchange Community home page polls (but make sure you're logged in so it will be assigned to you).

So please contribute to BIRT Exchange. It's not difficult to get a decent score and we'd love to see you on the Leaderboard next month!

You can find details on the Community Leaderboard Wiki. If you have any suggestions or comments, please add them to this blog post (they're worth 2 points).

I'm pleased to announce the members of the BIRT Exchange Community Leaderboard for December 2012. The purpose of this Leaderboard is to honor the top contributors to BIRT Exchange each month and to have a little fun. Scores are also posted on the BIRT Exchange Connect page. You can recognize past and current Leaderboard members by special badges on their forum and DevShare posts:


To determine the leaders, each contribution made by a BIRT Exchange member is assigned a weighted point score that roughly corresponds to its effort/value. For example, starting a forum topic by asking a question will score you 1 point and answering someone's question scores 3 points. Members with the top summed scores each month are declared the leaders for that month and posted to the Leaderboard. Over time we will evolve the scoring system as needed for fairness and value to the community. We also added a point for voting on the BIRT Exchange Community home page polls.

So please contribute to BIRT Exchange. It's not difficult to get a decent score and we'd love to see you on the Leaderboard next month!

You can find details on the Community Leaderboard Wiki. If you have any suggestions or comments, please add them to this blog post (they're worth 2 points).

As 2013 draws near, we at BIRT Exchange would like express our thanks and gratitude to all our members and the entire BIRT community for a wonderful year.

2013 is promising to be a good year for BIRT and BIRT Exchange as we explore new ways to visualize big data, develop more awesome plug-ins to BIRT and make some long overdue improvements to the site. Let us know what you'd like to see so we can ensure BIRT Exchange more fully meets the needs of the BIRT community.

All our best to you this holiday season!

*      O       O       O       O  .|.  O       O       O       O       *
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I'm pleased to announce the members of the BIRT Exchange Community Leaderboard for November 2012. The purpose of this Leaderboard is to honor the top contributors to BIRT Exchange each month and to have a little fun. Scores are also posted on the BIRT Exchange Connect page. You can recognize past and current Leaderboard members by special badges on their forum and DevShare posts:


To determine the leaders, each contribution made by a BIRT Exchange member is assigned a weighted point score that roughly corresponds to its effort/value. For example, starting a forum topic by asking a question will score you 1 point and answering someone's question scores 3 points. Members with the top summed scores each month are declared the leaders for that month and posted to the Leaderboard. Over time we will evolve the scoring system as needed for fairness and value to the community. We also added a point for voting on the BIRT Exchange Community home page polls.

So please contribute to BIRT Exchange. It's not difficult to get a decent score and we'd love to see you on the Leaderboard next month!

You can find details on the Community Leaderboard Wiki. If you have any suggestions or comments, please add them to this blog post (they're worth 2 points).

I'm pleased to announce the members of the BIRT Exchange Community Leaderboard for September 2012. The purpose of this Leaderboard is to honor the top contributors to BIRT Exchange each month and to have a little fun. Scores are also posted on the BIRT Exchange Connect page. You can recognize past and current Leaderboard members by special badges on their forum and DevShare posts:


To determine the leaders, each contribution made by a BIRT Exchange member is assigned a weighted point score that roughly corresponds to its effort/value. For example, starting a forum topic by asking a question will score you 1 point and answering someone's question scores 3 points. Members with the top summed scores each month are declared the leaders for that month and posted to the Leaderboard. Over time we will evolve the scoring system as needed for fairness and value to the community. We also added a point for voting on the BIRT Exchange Community home page polls.

So please contribute to BIRT Exchange. It's not difficult to get a decent score and we'd love to see you on the Leaderboard next month!

You can find details on the Community Leaderboard Wiki. If you have any suggestions or comments, please add them to this blog post (they're worth 2 points).