Just because an idea is new to me...

...doesn't mean it's a new idea.

This is the first lesson I learned from our annual Worldwide Education and Research Conference (a.k.a. the WWERC) in February. We picked the theme "The Power of Communities" for the conference because open source and the communities that support it are a key part of Sun's strategy. I believe that communities are also critical to the success of academic, administrative, and research computing.

For each of these segments, there are community development projects at various stages of maturity. In the academic computing arena, Sakai, a free, community source collaboration and learning environment, is already fairly well established. It's in production at over 150 institutions and being piloted by over 100 more. Kuali, a suite of open source software for administrative computing, is a more recent effort. In the research community, sharing open source code has been a key part of doing research for years, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

So given that there are all these academic communities, and given that we were just about to hold an education conference focused on the power of communities, I thought we should eat our own dog food and actually launch an online community of our own. So we created one on Ning.com, and invited all of the confirmed WWERC attendees to join.

Of that original list of about 500 people, 180 have joined. Of those, a small number connected online before the conference. Since the conference, however, activity in the community has dwindled. Maybe it will pick up again before the 2009 WWERC. I don't know. But we're looking into ways to re-energize it.

Successful Communities Require Commitment

What I'm learning is that communities — be they in the physical or virtual worlds — don't just happen overnight. It takes work to be successful. It requires a commitment of time and money and an offer of value to (and from) the community members themselves. The difference, of course, between physical and virtual communities is that in the latter, it's easier to significantly increase the number of people in a community as well as geographic scope (among the digital "haves" of the world, at least). But as I wrote in a previous blog posting, just having a bunch of people in a community isn't useful by itself. It can simply result in a modern-day Tower of Babel.

So I'm going to document in my blog our journey of creating a purposeful online community. Now that the original catalyst for creating our online community (i.e., the WWERC) is over, the first step is to define what this community is for, in the long term. Is it a place for us to distribute information about Sun in education? Listen to our customers? Get them excited about Sun, our products and technologies? Give them a place to ask their colleagues questions? Let them give us suggestions for better products? Or all of the above?

First, I've got a bunch of questions for you all out there:

1. What's the most effective way to tap into the collective wisdom of the community? Such tools as social bookmarking like del.icio.us, Digg, reddit and StumbleUpon are interesting, but I don't want to know what the whole world is bookmarking, I want to know what members of my ERC community are bookmarking. I want to know what books and articles they're reading, as well.
2. How can we get members of the community to contribute time and insights to Sun as well as to each other? What is reasonable given our target demographic? (I'll write a future blog about what I'm learning about this from a book called Groundswell from a couple of Forrester analysts, Charline Li and Josh Bernoff.)
3. What technologies or platforms should we embrace? For example, we chose Ning to host our first generation of the ERC community. We needed something that was fast to launch and global in reach. Facebook is primarily focused on the U.S., and doesn't necessarily have a good reputation among our target audience. Still, it has a huge membership. So should we sit on top of Facebook or be standalone? Should we link to Facebook or other communities, and if so, how?

If anyone has insights into these questions I'd love to hear from you. Write me at education_news@sun.com.

After all, just because these are new thoughts or questions to me, it doesn't mean the community hasn't already come up with the answers. That really is the power of community.