Twitter Groups: Bringing communities together

Posted on by in Social Media
Following agile talk on Twitter using Tweetdeck (click image for larger view)
Following agile talk on Twitter using Tweetdeck (click image for larger view)

I like Twitter. A lot. Twitter has helped me connect with a diverse group of people, particularly in the Agile community. I consider myself fortunate to chat and learn from people like Lisa Crispin (@lisacrispin), Brian Marick (@marick), Esther Derby (@estherderby), as well as lesser knowns like myself. For instance, I learned about Lisa’s upcoming book on Agile Testing (pre-ordered), Esther’s love of gardening and good food and have a ring-side seat between the always colourful Ron Jeffries (@RonJeffries) and Bob Martin (@unclebobmartin). I also discovered some great articles, including Cory Ladas’ Scrumban.

There is a lot of Agile-related chatter on Twitter, and it isn’t always easy to find. To help myself and others join in, I created the Agile Twitter group as an experiment, using  TwitGroups.com.

How to join the conversation

  1. Sign up to the Agile Twitter group.
  2. The Agile Twitter group official tag is the highly original #agile. Just type #agile somewhere in your post, likeLooking for an #agile pm tool, anyone have suggestions?and your tweet will end up in the Agile group’s Twitter stream (or is that tweet stream?).

How to follow the conversation

Unfortunately, Twitter has no built-in mechanism for following keywords so that those tweets appear in your Twitter stream. Here, then are the options I know of:

  1. Use a desktop tool like TweetDeck which has built-in support for Twitter searches. I have a search for everything with the word agile, which captures both Agile group tweets and anything else Agile on Twitter, including agile kids hiding behind couches to avoid their parents.
  2. Monitter is a real-time web-based keyword tracking tool, with support for RSS feeds if you prefer to receive updates that way.
  3. Add [email protected] to your list of IM contacts, then send twitterspy the message “track agile” (without quotes). You’ll get IM replies with linked Twitter ids.

    Track #agile conversation using IM via twitterspy@jabber.org
    Track #agile conversation using IM via [email protected] (click image for larger view)
  4. Visit the Agile Twitter group page occasionally and see what activity is happening by clicking on the Agile group’s Twitter stream.

Quick reference of Agilistas on Twitter

At the bottom of the group page is a list of all the members, with links to their Twitter page and personal web site. This is another easy way to follow people who have an interest in Agile like you. In less than a day, almost 100 people have registered. Now we just have to get people joining and following #agile, or this whole experiment is a bust.

What else do Groups offer?

These groups allow members to share links to related blogs, articles, forums, events, photos and wikis. You have to go to the group page to post and see them. I doubt this will get much use, but hey now you can’t say I didn’t tell you.

If you are a member of the group, let me know what you think, either as a comment here or on Twitter. Just don’t forget your #agile. 🙂

Surving in Tough Economic Times: 20+ Resources to Get Started with Scrum

Posted on by in Agile

Recently I had the opportunity to share about my work passion, Agile and Scrum at a local IT group luncheon. I was pleasantly surprised at the level of interest and depth of questions. Organizer John Hatherly told me they had about double the normal pre-registrations for a talk.

Perhaps the tough economic times is behind some of the interest. Agile / Scrum is ideal for these conditions, since Agile delivers the highest value early and often to clients:

  • The product backlog is a list of potential work items prioritized by business value. The highest value items are worked on first.
  • Working software is released early and often, making it possible to go to market faster.
  • Continuous feedback helps ensure the team is delivering what the client needs, and helps the client to better understand their own needs. Requirements are always better understood once there is working software to try out.
  • Regular team retrospectives with actionable items give teams the opportunity to continuously improve.
  • Proven software engineering practices: test-driven development, collaborative programming, continuous integration and refactoring increase quality and lower the costs of maintaining software. Think of software as a liability to maintain.

Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of Scrum stated in a presentation at Agile 2008 that even teams doing partial Scrum, or ScrumButt as he calls it, can increase revenues by 40%. High performing teams can improve 400% over traditional Waterfall teams. That’s a huge competitive advantage at any time, especially during tough economic times.

My search for a video / slide presentation tool succeeded, so now you can watch it again (nothing else to do?) or catch it for the first time. Total length is about 1 hour 15 minutes due to many excellent questions asked (original presentation is 45 minutes).

Here are useful links for people new to Agile and Scrum:

Fun learning

Reference

Tools

Agile Community

Books

Book recommendations, in order of preference:

Thinking of transitioning to Agile? Contact me to see if I may be able to help your organization or team.

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Today is World Plone Day – Join the Celebration

Posted on by in Pursuits

The first World Plone Day event is now finished. New Zealand WPD organizer Tim Knapp was pleased with the results:

Just so you all know, we just had our first WPD Plone Day event (in the world) in Wellington, New Zealand and about 31 people turned out, we had 6 presenters and a grand old time.

What you can do to join in the efforts to showcase Plone:

  1. Digg this article TODAY: http://tinyurl.com/worldploneday and post it to Facebook.
  2. Vote up this Slashdot article TODAY: http://tinyurl.com/wpdsd
  3. Write a blog post sharing what you love about Plone and the Plone community. Tag it with worldploneday2008.

Don’t forget to catch the LIVE coverage – video, IRC, live blogging, Twitter posts and Flickr pics – http://tinyurl.com/worldplonedaylive

World Plone Day 2008 – Live!

Posted on by in Social Media

Catch all the action as World Plone Day travels across the globe!

Twitter



    Older Twitter posts

    Photos on Flickr

    What the blogs are saying about WPD

    10 Reasons To Choose Plone CMS for your Web Solution

    Posted on by in Pursuits

    Digg this post Plone is an open source CMS (Content Management System), recently awarded the Best Other (non-php) Open Source CMS award.

    Plone, together with an array of add-on components is used for a variety of needs:

    World Plone Day 2008

    As part of World Plone Day, Friday, November 7, here are 10 compelling reasons for choosing Plone as a web site solution:

    1. Stable future. Plone is owned, supported and protected by the Plone Foundation, similar to the Apache Foundation. Growth of Plone in code and community has risen at a steady pace since inception in 2000.
    2. Avoids vendor lock-in. Plone uses the same open source license as Linux. This avoids vendor lock-in, expensive licenses, and gives you a predictable future — and the freedom to innovate.
    3. Easy to use. Plone’s focus on usability makes it easy for users to manage content. Watch a video to see for yourself.
    4. Secure. Security is considered one of Plone’s key strengths. Fine-grained role-based security model secures your content. Plone’s sandbox architecture ensures that intruders will not have access to your server or your network.
    5. Standards compliant. Optimized for search engines, works in all major browsers, supports Open ID, support for web services and relational data storage.
    6. International. Translated into over 35 languages, including Chinese and right-to-left languages like Russian and Arabic.
    7. Solid documentation. Hundreds of how-tos and tutorials. Screencasts on plone.tv. Seven books published on Plone, including an end user manual. A new book on how to get the most out of Plone without touching code on its way. No other Open Source CMS has an end user manual.  You can buy the hard copy or download the PDF for free.
    8. MS Desktop integration. No other Open Source CMS has a Microsoft Windows Desktop integration for free. Enfold Desktop enables everyone to have a first class Windows desktop experience.
    9. Nestle Plone inside an MS shop. Enfold Proxy enables people to deploy Plone in a possibly hostile to linux IT department. How many Microsoft organizations want to run Apache? Enfold Proxy is *not* free.  It costs money.  But you get support.
    10. Separate content management and delivery. Use *any* software to deliver the content from the Plone CMS. Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby. Whatever presentation-tier technologies the customer is most comfortable with can be used.
      Static publishing      . Look at http://www.cia.gov/ and http://www.fbi.gov/
      Dynamic delivery.  Look at http://www.povertylaw.org/ and http://www.aci-na.org/ for examples of Entransit.  Using very very simple and fast technologies to serve Plone content dynamically.

    Want to know more? See if there is a World Plone Day event happening near you, or visit online:

    • Plone.org – is the main site to read more information, download copies, access documentation and products (add-on functionality)
    • Plone.net – find a provider that supports Plone, read case studies and press releases, browse the directory of Plone based sites.
    • Plone.tv –  a diverse collection of training and interview videos about Plone
    • Plonegov.org – a collaborative software ecosystem where government organizations, NGOs and private enterprises work together to share the cost of enhanced capabilities.

    World Plone Day: Show Your Pride

    Posted on by in Social Media
    Lets make some noise

    Let's make some noise

    World Plone Day is almost here. This is one day of the year we celebrate and promote Plone worldwide as a community. Are you ready to make some noise for your favourite CMS? Come on everyone, gimme a P, L, O, N, E!

    Before Friday, Easy Ways to Promote Plone

    1. If you are on Twitter, follow twitter.com/worldploneday and encourage others to do so.
    2. Post a link to worldploneday.org on Facebook, Twitter so people can see if there are events happening in their area.
    3. There is a Facebook event. Join and invite people you think might be interested. Show your pride by becoming an official fan on Facebook.

    On World Plone Day, Ways to Promote Plone

    1. Vote for and comment on Plone articles on sites like Slashdot.org. Follow or check twitter.com/worldploneday on Friday, November 7 for links to posted articles. There will also be information on Planet Plone.
    2. Write a blog post on anything Plone: tips, sites, useful docs, how you use Plone, experience of the community, etc. Be sure to tag your post with ‘worldploneday2008’. Add a link to your post to Delicious, Reddit, Digg, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Who knows, we might get noticed on Techmeme.
    3. Take pictures of WPD activities, post to Flickr, use tag ‘worldploneday2008’.
    4. Invite others to watch live streams of Plone events. Check worldploneday.org later for more details.

    After WPD, Share What Happened

    So what was the response in your area? Online? What questions / comments did people make about Plone? Share what you saw, felt, experienced through blog posts, photos.

    Thanks again to Roberto Allende for coming up with the WPD idea and working so hard to make it happen. Let’s help Roberto make the first ever World Plone Day an amazing success!

    Have a question or idea? See the contacts for World Plone Day, or leave a comment here.

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    Posted on by in Links

    • Know Your Web Site: An Hour A Day with Google Analytics | NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network

      Google Analytics is undoubtedly one of the most powerful web analytics packages out there. In fact, it’s so powerful, it’s difficult to know how to begin understanding all of the information it makes available. NTEN wants to help you unlock the power of Google Analytics. In this hands-on webinar, Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, will teach you how to use web analytics reports to understand the performance of your web site in terms of measuring progress toward your organizational goals, but also to help you understand who your web site visitors are, where they come from, and what they’re doing on your site. You’ll leave the webinar with actionable tips and tricks you can use right away, regardless of your skill level.

      Presented by Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google and author of “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day”

      tags: analytics

    • Google Analytics screencast

      screencast for helping people (especially non-profits) get started with Google Analytics

      tags: analytics

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