content management | web strategy

As an Ottawa native I sometimes complain about Ottawa’s conservative, government-town feel. While Ottawa actually has a lot going for it (beautiful spaces, proximity to skiing and Gatineau park, lots of great festivals), there’s an energetic community of people collaborating, hosting gatherings, supporting projects, stimulating growth, tweeting, blogging and generally getting together and doing stuff in the startup, techie and social media spaces.

This makes me happy. I’ve just starting to dive into what this scene has to offer - here is an informal, unordered and definitely incomplete list of some organizations and events creating energy in Ottawa. Feel free to email me any others.

• First of all…the Code Factory, which hosts some of the events listed below. The Code Factory is a coworking space that provides a relaxed environment in which to work, network and collaborate.

• The Ottawa Network - a grassroots non-profit aimed at connecting members of Ottawa’s high-tech community. They are very active and offer fantastic networking and educational events.

• CapCHI - Computer Human Interaction in the Ottawa area. This group hosts regular evening sessions targeted at user interface designers, researchers, educators, software developers, web designers, graphic designers and human factors engineers.

• Social Media Breakfast Ottawa - Every few months, social media enthusiasts and professionals get together to hear a featured speaker over coffee in the morning before work.

• Third Tuesday Ottawa - Also aimed at the social media crowd, this Meetup happens every third Tuesday of the month. The goal is to explore new developments in social media and online communities.

• DemoCamp - Members of Ottawa’s high tech community present their hardware/software prototypes or finished products and receive feedback from the audience.

• Talent First Network - an Ontario-wide initiative enabling the transfer of open-source research and knowledge from the academic sector to Ontario businesses. The TFN runs and supports events, projects, startups, internships, relevant masters theses and business competitions.

• OCRI’s Technology Executive Breakfast - targeted towards Ottawa technology execs, provides a forum to discuss business issues, hear guest speakers and stimulate the growth of Ottawa’s tech sector.

• Young Business Network - provides opportunities for Ottawa’s young professionals to connect and develop their network circles and business skills. They offer regular networking events and a breakfast speaker series.

Twitterholic is fascinating. It lists the top hundred Twitter users based on # followers, # friends and #updates, and gets updated a few times a day.

Who has the most followers? Surprise - Barack Obama, followed largely by prolific members of the tech/startup/social media world with a few news outlets and wildcards such as Darth Vader. It would be interesting to find out if this popularity is due to actual value of tweets (entertainment or professional), or fame, or some other metric.

Who has the most friends? Again, Obama takes the lead. The #friends on the list ranges from 85,000 to about 5300, which begs the question - how can you possibly follow that many tweets? To an individual user, it seems the point of diminishing returns might come well before those numbers. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a different kind of value in this volume, such as for analytics or research purposes.

Who tweets the most? Less surprisingly, this list is dominated by news and radio outlets. However, the location range is MUCH broader than in the first two lists, where the majority listed were from the US. In this list, users come from all over the world - Japan, Spain, Venezuela, Lebanon.

There’s all sorts of interesting analysis that can be done here. A number of sites already exist that slice and dice the usage in various ways - summed up nicely in this blog post from Flowing Data. The most personally useful is probably Tweetstats, which graphs activity in realtime on any Twitter user.

Of course, Google Trends provides great overall usage stats as well.

I’ve been asked by a few people to describe my school program (Technology Innovation Management, aka TIM) in a bit more detail. With props to Prof. M. Weiss’ slidedeck, I think this image sums it up nicely.

This diagram shows that the TIM program focuses on the early, rapid-growth phases of product development and new ventures, whereas the MBA focuses on the management of established companies and processes.

In a nutshell, the program aims to teach students how to manage the processes that give rise to technological innovations. This includes product development in emerging markets, value creation and monetization models in the “early days” phase. It’s an exciting place to be, especially in the world of web and social media, where there is no such thing as a mature market yet. Heh!

Aside from its place in the graph, the program distinguishes itself in these ways:

• A strong bias towards open source platforms. This ties in with technology’s direction towards a flatter playing field and the movement towards free products and services. How will companies grow and compete in this space?
• Teaching philosophy: learning happens via constructive argument
• Strong ties with startup and open source communities, as well as giants like IBM
• Senior professionals in the industry attend presentations
• A four-step process guides you through your thesis preparation and defense

What’s great is that within the program’s research areas, I will have lots of options to consider for my thesis! I’m leaning towards a topic within social media (of course), but I still have 8 months or so to narrow it down.

I’m in the second week of classes at Carleton. It’s mostly been a flurry of introductions, explanations and setting up accounts but here are my first impressions:

• Class size is about 20 with ~4 women per class
• Almost everyone is from an engineering background
• I’m one of the youngest, keeping company with people who have already built and sold companies
• Professors gauge that an A+ requires 6-10 hours/week of work outside of class.
• There are some strong personalities. I’ll have to speak up!
• I have the overwhelming impression that I made a really good choice with this program.

One of my first group projects will be on web 2.0 and social media - my current favourite topics. I think a lot of my classmates will focus on more hardware or systems-oriented topics. We certainly have a diverse group - I’m hoping to seek out the web-oriented people for the projects. All in all a positive start

I had the privilege of briefly tweeting this week with some attendees of the ALI Social Media for Government conference in Ottawa. While I’m sure they’ll be blogging like mad about the event, I wanted to share some of the impressions I got on Twitter and what a force of connectivity this tool really is! Also worthy of note: how much social media has already been exploited by Canadian and American governmental agencies. I had no idea.

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I’ve just switched from blogger to wordpress, where I’ve applied this lovely Thesis theme. Still pending are my intended design changes, especially in the header. Coming soon.

My official title at work is team lead, ECM practice area, but when people ask what I do, I usually tell them I am a CMS analyst. This is the best phrase I’ve come across that actually describes what I do.

(NB: unfortunately, hardly anyone outside of the web industry understands what I do)

I’m in a funny but enjoyable spot between developer and something else. That is, I’ve pretty much stopped writing code completely, but I haven’t jumped to another pure role either. I play multiple roles including CMS solution architect, business analyst, developer, technical lead and sales engineer.

Therefore, I’ve taken the oft-used “business system analyst” and narrowed it down to CMS analyst. It’s simple…and doesn’t pigeonhole into any of the individual roles listed above. Other ideas might be:

• CMS strategist?
• content management consultant?

I had an interesting discussion today with a Sr. Manager in the industry, and his perspective is that pure business analysts and pure developers are over-represented. The best path is that of a business systems analyst, specializing in one or several hot platforms. I’m largely in agreement, and as content management morphs and the corporate website dies, I believe it will become even more important to be able to provide platform- and industry trend-related insight to solutions.

So for now…I am a CMS analyst. I wonder what this role will look like in 5 years.

As someone who loooves going to work to connect socially with colleagues, I’ve been recently fascinated by the coworking movement.

Coworking is “a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents”, as per the Coworking Community Blog. These community office spaces are tailor-made for independent consultants and entrepreneurs in the high-tech and creative/media industries - complete with the ambiance of exposed brick, percolating coffee, overstuffed couches and Wiis.

It’s also a big step up from the laptop-at-Starbucks freelancers’ schtick. The best spaces offer decked-out boardrooms and all the amenities of a modern office.

But the best part is the networking and collaboration potential. Imagine the benefits of a creative hotbed focused on sharing, encouragement and connection. Regular events, lecture series, even open mic can bring the community even closer.

Some Canadian examples include the Center for Social Innovation in Toronto, which focuses on social entrepreneurship and the Code Factory in Ottawa, which is a more generalized space for startup incubation. [For a great list of international spaces, see this wiki].

There is a lot of buzz and enthusiasm surrounding this movement. My masters program at Carleton has an association to Ottawa’s Code Factory and I’m hoping to make some closer connections… I love the energy and commitment of entrepreneurs I’ve already met.

That being said, I am pondering the realities of working in such a space… Would the presence of other community members be an issue wrt privacy, resource availability, competition? How would conflicts or disruptions be resolved? (Some spaces have elected a council to address these issues).

Nonetheless, in the spirit of the greater social media movement, I’m excited to see these coworking initiatives take off. I’d love to try it out someday.

* Update 2008-09-13: Another great example in LA - Blankspaces, who also put up a great promotional video series here.