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At Sun we have a community called Onestop. This is a community of around 300 subject matter experts who voluntary maintain a page around a topic like a product, a technology or a best practice. The people in the field are [...]]]> Recently I got a lot of questions on how to build trusted content with communities.

At Sun we have a community called Onestop. This is a community of around 300 subject matter experts who voluntary maintain a page around a topic like a product, a technology or a best practice. The people in the field are really trusting this content.

As example I got some feedback from a user who told me

” If its not on Onestop it does not exist.”

This is pretty cool and probably the dream of any online marketeers. Community created content is TRUSTED by the community !

But how can you build trusted “bottom up” content?

Its all about how you facilitate the communities !

Content and Trust

As more process you add to the content creation/maintenance as more its get trusted by the user.

Example: Wiki content might be pretty untrusted but a product page maintained by the product group is a highly trusted as it is the System of Record for the product description.

Reputation and Trust

As higher the reputation of a person is as more people trust the content

Example: In this example we look at the overall Java community. If John Doe, a newbie in the Java world blogs about a Java topic the trust is pretty limited but if James Gosling blogs about a Java topic the trust is likely pretty high

Community model and Trust

When we look at the community model e.g. a completely open and unmoderated community versus a facilitated community we discover that well facilitated communities have more trust then open and unfacilitated communities.

Example: A wiki were everybody can publish whatever she/he want is less trusted then a highly facilitated wiki like Wikipedia

Lesson learned for SunSpace

ok – what did we learn when we build and deployed SunSpace internally ?

1. We need to build a content trust model

We learned a lot from our existing Onestop community and applying these best practices to other communities
(read the Onestop blog for details)

2. We need to build a reputation model

People want and need to be recognized for the contribution and participation in communities. With our integrated Community Equity model we now can evaluate the reputation of a person based on their Tag equity related to their contributions.

3. Facilitated community facilitation

Community need active community management !!!

As part of the SunSpace Community methodology we facilitate the facilitation of communities trough our Community Driver community

more about this in a future blog …..

Feedback is always highly appreciated !

Feature Summary

Installation

Thanks a lot to all who attending the SunSpace webinar with Atlassian. We had a lot of attendees and [...]]]>

Thanks a lot to all who attending the SunSpace webinar with Atlassian. We had a lot of attendees and Atlassian told me that
the recorded webcast has been viewed quite a bit already.

We received some questions from Atlassian (thanks Morgan – great webcast organization) which I could not answer during the Webcast.
Instead replying to each person individually I thought I post the Questions & Answers here.

I appreciate your feedback/comments (which will help improve my blog equity )

and a BIG thank to the twitter community for the great feedback you provided in real time

Q: Can you share what you have used for showing / editing the personal page?

We are using the portal feature from Bubbles in combination with Themebuilder   and have created a set of widgets for the personal spaces of a user. Bubbles has some variable support like %owner% %users% etc. which makes personalization of the myProfile page pretty easy – means we have ONE portal with a set of common widgets for ALL users. When a user logs in the first time – we create the personal space and home page of the user and just add {portal:user} to the home page.

Example: excerpt from the Who am I widget

# shows picture – Confluence macro
{my-picture:showControls=false|showName=false}
# shows Role Communities with medals – Bubbles macro
{menuitem:flat=true}{my-communities:@creator|showLogo=false|communityType=ROLE|showControls=false|showCommonMembership=false|showDescription=false|showRole=false}{menuitem}
# shows user detail – Sun macro
{cache}{user-details:%owner%}{cache}

Q: What is the relationship between SunSpace and the recently announced Glassfish Web Space?

As I explained in the webcast – SunSpace is build on a federated services architecture. That means we can integrated any Web properties into the architecture
We are actively working on the integration of the Community Equity Services (rating/commenting, tagging, equity calculation engine) into Glassfish Web Space.
Please contact me if you want more details.

Q: Do you employ dedicated community moderators/content managers? What is the process for onboarding new groups into this environment from a people perspective

As part of the community methodology we established a community driver model and community. Each community has one or more community driver(s) who actively facilitate the community.
On a global level we facilitate the community of community driver and help them to
- establish common policies (publishing, tagging, measures etc.)
- facilitate best practices among the community drivers
- use the community driver community as a sounding board for feedback and RfE planning   

Q: What is the process for onboarding new groups into this environment from a people perspective

If someone wants to add a new community to SunSpace, she/he has to fill out a template to request a community. We review the template and create the community within 3 business days.
We decided for this model to validate if a similar community already exists – so we can connect other people and communities and avoid replication of work.

Q: Do you feel the contribution equity will work against the goals once the population get too big. people may feel it is not possible to overtake the rest in terms of C.E?

Absolutely – One of the Community Equity widget shows the ranking of a person across all communities. With the Tag Equity model we provide a much granular model e.g. Top Contributors,Top Information, Top Country of a specific community or subject (e.g Java, HPC computing etc.). That means that each individual community can build their specific value system and can leverage the tailored Community Equity Services. (I will post soon a blog post on all the community equity widgets we have today)

Q: Is it possible to share more details on the search. Is it an open source solution too?

(Intranet) search is only as good as the metadata it gets. (e.g. garbage in/ garbage out). The goal of the Community Equity services is to metadata enrich URL’s
That means we automatically add metadata like tags, equity values, author information, hits, rating information etc. to each URL during the content authoring process.

Then we have a simple three step model how we can turn the search in an extremely powerful mashup service:

1. constant feed (RSS/ATOM) of metadata enriched URL’s into to search engine (more or less realtime update of search index)
2. leverage standard search technology (in our case Ultraseek/Verity) to search for terms
3. take the search result as XML stream and post-process the search result to generate dynamic mashup services
as example:
- build tag cloud of search result
- show related communities
- show experts related to search result
- etc.

In theory you can take any search technology as long as we can programatically read the search result and do our “magic’ with the post processing.
Currently we using “perl” for the post processor

We have not yet decided if we open source this technology…

Q: Will the hardware configurations they are using be discussed?

Infrastructure: The architecture is designed for secure deployment in an Intranet or on the Internet.
We use Zeus as the firewall/load-balancer and Appgate for the secure admin access
The hardware is based on Sun X4450 servers for the Web and Application tier and on SPACR M4000 for
back-end tier, search, Zeus and Appgate.

Tuning: We spent a lot of “brain cycles” on tuning the infrastructure, caching model, Java JVM settings, Confluence
and our web services. We are happy to provide you the infrastructure and consulting for your project .

Q: Do you use internal Confluence user accounts, or have you integrated with an external LDAP directory service?

We use a combination of both. When a user logs in the first time via LDAP , we create the Confluence user on SunSpace and auto-populate
- confluence user
- create a user in our back-end user/group service to provide federated access control across all web services  
- personal space including home page
- add the user to specific groups according her/his profile in LDAP
- and more ..

Q: How do you motivate people who perhaps do not care very much about the ratings on the system? or perhaps the question is how do you identify the critical motivating factors ?

1. easy to use
The entry barrier for rating (or commenting) should be as low as possible. We have a simple rating widget on each page which allows to provide rating feedback with a single click
2. real time feedback
For each page we have an activity feed were the author (or others) can see the latest activities (update,tagging,rating,comment,views,download) around the content
3. Community Equity an Methodology

As discussed in the Webcast – the most important question we need to answer is “What is in it for me?” . Since all social activities (like rating) count for a person’s personal equity, people
are more motivated to provide feedback. But this is not enough. The overall Community Equity model need to be linked to recognition / incentive programs were people get recognized for their community work. And hey – be creative here – getting a distinct T-Shirt for the best community contributor of the month could already make a big difference.

Q: Will sun consider selling this technology for other users?

YES -

1. Consulting – we provide consulting on how to build “vibrant communities” and we can “clone” SunSpace for your business
2. Open Source – we plan to open source the Community Equity Services (rating/commenting, tagging, equity calculation engine) in the next few month.
3. Productization – we plan to productize some of the technology as part of Sun’s web infrastructure offering

Please contact me if you are interested peter.reiser(at)sun.com

Q: Also wondering whether you see a future link to extrernal social networks?

Absolutely – we are looking carefully into the emerging Social networking standards like Open Social , APML , ATOM activity extension and others ..
The Community Equity model is already prepared to add Personal Sociometry Equity (http://blogs.sun.com/peterreiser/entry/community_equity_specification)

Q: What kind of ontologies are involved?

Currently we support folksonomy tagging and so called controlled vocabulary which are focused around product, technology, geographical coverage (Region Country), industry and best practices. Daniela Barbosa from Dow Jones published an great ebook called Folksonomies and Taxonomies Cookbook which includes SunSpace as a use case.

Furthermore as part of our participation in the EU project KIWI, we are actively working on the integration of Semantic Web into our Community Equity model.

Q:I heard Peter from Sun mention that they have configured Confluence to start with the Personal Space of a user (at login). Do you have any idea how that was done?

We added a script to the default home space of SunSpace which redirects the user to her/his personal page

{redirect:~$action.getRemoteUser().getName()}

Q: did you have performance issues – especially with the theme builder and bubbles plugins – and if so, were you able to resolve?

Good question:-) We are constantly fighting with performance bottlenecks versus user expectations/experience. Generally performance is good and theme builder and bubbles are scaling nicely. I would categorize performance challenges as follows:

2.Confluence platform tuning: As describe above we doing a lot of infrastructure tuning. On the application level we carefully monitoring the Confluence cache sizes and adjust if needed. Also we are moving to a clustered infrastructure pretty soon which should balanced the load to different servers. One of the bottlenecks we discovered is the large amount of spaces (> 25’000 users spaces, > 500 global spaces) and Access Control. Since we SunSpace will be accessible from the Internet (Sun employees only – sorry ), we have each single page access controlled and anonymous pages are disabled. We have seen various issues with some macros and actions (e.g. dositesearch, feed, {blog-post} etc.) which seems to do recursive access control across ALL spaces (Global and Personal). Atlassian is aware of these issues and is working on it…

Q: How do you manage people and content they created when some leaves the company in your “people” directory?

Thanks for this questions Unfortunately Confluence has no function to disable a user nor delete a user if she/he made a contribution.Luckily – as part of our Community Equity Services we maintain our own user/group management model to allow Access Control across multiple web services. Every night we running a scheduled job which compares our user table with LDAP and automatically disable users which are not found in LDAP anymore. This disables the users in all web services (attachment etc.) except Confluence. What we can do in Confluence is to display a message on the Profile page that this user does not exist anymore.
Hello Atlassian – please add a disable user function which disables the user in Confluence including email

Date: 12. February 2009 Time: 9am – 10am Pacific Time Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/904570408  

[Shel Israel, editor of Global Neighbourhoods. Photo from his blog.]

Excerpt summary:

When I first saw CE 2.0, I was pretty certain that the work of this 25-year veteran of IT would closely resemble a Rube Goldberg drawing, filled with complexity [...]]]> Shel Israel did a follow up interview on our former CE 2.0 project .. now called SunSpace

[Shel Israel, editor of Global Neighbourhoods. Photo from his blog.]

Excerpt summary:

When I first saw CE 2.0, I was pretty certain that the work of this 25-year veteran of IT would closely resemble a Rube Goldberg drawing, filled with complexity and confusing we of a nontechnical ilk.

I was wrong. More than anything, it looked like Facebook. It looked like it would be fun to play with. It had all sorts of “consumery” features. For example, you got ranked for your contribution and the ranking was public.

Read the full interview here

Thanks Shel !

Thanks guys

Shel Israel’s summary: “As the chief architect of Sun’s Community Equity 2.0 (CE2.0) project, Peter Reiser is considering the place of the individual in a social network from the perspective of a computer scientist, a sociologist, a psychologist, and a carnival ringleader. An attempt to mesh Web 2.0 technologies with corporate communities, [...]]]> link to the video

Shel Israel’s summary:
“As the chief architect of Sun’s Community Equity 2.0 (CE2.0) project, Peter Reiser is considering the place of the individual in a social network from the perspective of a computer scientist, a sociologist, a psychologist, and a carnival ringleader. An attempt to mesh Web 2.0 technologies with corporate communities, he hopes to inject fun and serendipity into information exchange.
In one of the more exciting technologies I’ve seen, CE2.0 is equal parts Facebook, corporate intranet, and community forum. The ability to aggregate and display community participation, and to profile the individual on a community equity model is incredibly innovative”

Many thanks to Shel Israel (interviewer) and Robert Scoble (camera man)
It was a lot of fun

The objective is to build a dynamic Social Value system by calculating the Contribution, Participation, Skills, and Reputation equity a person can gain by actively engaging in online communities.

The Equity values are captured through activities that the Community members are participating [...]]]> Hurray! We finally filed the patent on Community Equity and I can disclose more details….

Overview

The objective is to build a dynamic Social Value system by calculating the Contribution, Participation, Skills, and Reputation equity a person can gain by actively engaging in online communities.

The Equity values are captured through activities that the Community members are participating in, for example:

• Adding or updating contributions (wikis,forums, attachments)
• Rating, commenting
• Tagging
• Downloading and reusing content
• Social connections
• Search queries

Equity Model

The systems will calculate the following equity values:

• Information Equity (IQ)
• Personal Equity (PEQ)

Information Equity (IQ)

The Information Equity captures the social activities around an information and dynamically calculates a numeric value that represents the importance, relevance, and quality of the information. Information can be a wiki page, blog post, forum entry, or document.

The activities that the IQ captures includes:

* How many times users (repeat) have viewed the information
* How many times this information has been downloaded by users (in the case of an attachment)
* How many times this information was reused by an individual
* User feedback (ratings, comments)

How do we know that a document has been reused?
We developed a web service called “Content extraction and metadata store,” which writes a tag in an OpenOffice document. This tag describes the source community of the document (for example, Project xx). If a user is downloading this document and stores it in another community, we write a parent tag into the OpenOffice document, which describes the destination community. By analyzing the tags we know that a document has been reused. In addition, we can build a dynamic cloning reference of related documents.

Personal Equity (PEQ)
The purpose of developing a Community Equity (PEQ) value for each individual is to help recognize their achievements and their participation in the community.

Here is the calculation:

PEQ = CQ + PQ + SQ + RQ + OE

Contribution Equity (CQ)
The Contribution Equity measures the contribution of a person related to his or her role or roles in a company.
The CQ tracks the total contribution of wiki entries, blog posts, attachments such as documents, podcasts, videos, software, and how this information is useful to the community (IQ).
Per contribution we calculate an equity value based on downloads, ratings and reuse by the community.

Participation Equity (PQ)
The Participation Equity calculates a value for the active participation of a person. We use the feedback activities a person has provided to other community contributions like

* Ratings provided
* Comments provided
* Tag or Tags provided
* Reuse of content

Skills Equity (SQ)
The Skills Equity shows the skills of a person based on his or her contribution
Details will be disclosed later.

Reputation Equity (RQ)
The Reputation Equity (RQ) is a combination of contribution, participation and role equity.
Details will be disclosed later …

Personal Sociometry Equity (OE)
Humans suffer from information overload. There’s much more information on any given subject than a person is able to access. As a result, people are forced to depend ,on each other for knowledge. Know-who information rather than know-what, know-how, or know-why information has become most crucial. “Know-who” involves knowing who has the needed information and being able to reach that person (Johnson et al., 2000).
In this context, understanding the formation, evolution, and utilization of online social networks becomes important. A social network is “a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange.” (Garton, et al., 1997). While the Internet contributes to the information overload, it also provides useful tools to effectively manage one’s social networks and through them gain access to the right pieces of information.
(source:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks)

We are looking to add the following Social Equity indicators:

* Centrality (number of friends) – Freeman 1977: http://moreno.ss.uci.edu/27.pdf
* TBD

Tag Equity
Tag Clouds are calculated by frequency of use. This does not necessarily reflect the value of a tag (or the topic a tag represents). By calculating the Equity of a Tag based on social activities of the community (add or edit, comment, view, etc.) we can dynamically calculate a Tag equity of all contributions related to this tag.
Details will be disclosed later.

Equity Aging
Equity values age over time.

Example Information Aging: A technical white paper about Internet Security from 1999 was really valuable at that time but might be obsolete today …

Example Reputation Aging: 15 years ago I was an expert in IBM mainframe integration. I had a great reputation reputation of fixing any problems related to SNA.
Over the last 15 years I refocused my expertise and skills and my reputation (and skills) about IBM mainframe integration has gone.

To calculate time-based equity, we assume that any action, such as view, download, rating, and updates, has a “time-to-live” value . This value goes to zero linearly.

Mathematical model (credit goes to Dmitry [Dima] Riachtchentsev, our math genius on the team)

Excerpt from Dima’s specs:
To reduce the calculations, we use a linear model:
1. Just after the action that affects an Equity, the Equity value is changed to a multiplier value.
2. Then this value goes to zero linearly. It becomes zero after a valid time period.
With such a model, we have a linear trend every time.
The linear trend enables us to not track the whole history to calculate equity values. We can just change two linear trend parameters after every action and after the aging time period.

Equity Visualization
We developed a set of widgets to visualize the Community Equity model.

My Community Equity
This widget shows in real time the Contribution and Participation Equity of a Person.

People Ranking
This widget displays the top 10 people. In addition, it shows the ranking of the person either as bold (Name) or the ranking position if a person is not in the top 10.

Country Ranking
This widget displays the top 10 countries with the highest Community Equity average per person in a country.

Switzerland is leading…. I like it!

Content Ranking
This widget displays the top ten Content with the highest Informaton Equity . In addition it shows the ranking of the contribution of a person in bold.

*What’s Next?*
Stay tuned for some future blog posts on our pilot experience and results….