Communities of Interest

1. Communities of Interest Jim Isaak for CS TAB – Nov. 2007

2. The Problem(S) • When a group of professionals want to start something -- what do they do? • Get out their chains and switch blades & head for the hood (takes an hour or two) • Form a Computer Society TC (takes a year or two) • Petition to be a part of some existing TC (time delay is TC relative) • Form a group on Yahoo (takes 5 minutes) • Form a group on IEEE’s new eCollboration site (ok, next year when it exists, also 5 minutes or else!) v0 -- CS208@JimIsaak.com

3. 4 – Correct – form a Yahoo group • Ok, or myspace, facebook, secondlife, linkedin, etc • Yahoo has over 52,000 technology groups, 123,000 computer groups; 99000 software groups More Groups than we have members!!! • So now, when these folks want to hold a workshop, conference, start a newsletter, start a publication, create a standard … where do they go? (hint – IEEE CS is probably not a consideration) • So do more CS leaders know Cobol than know Python? … is it just me? or are we becoming obsolete? v0 -- CS208@JimIsaak.com

4. So where do we put 50,000 new committees? Ops – problem #2 .. • If all 50k+ of these folks approached us how would we respond? (hint – how have we responded with the last 5 that came our way?) • Approval of new areas of work is so -- 20th century • And then giving them a seat in TAB along with the overhead of a TC could be a lose-lose situation v0 -- CS208@JimIsaak.com

5. Solution: Communities of Interest (I first thought, technical communities, but we have too many things called TC’s already) • Immediate creation – form via online tools (eCollaboration) for a web presence, email distribution list, etc.(Use web-account authorization – does not require membership, but does allow us to start relationship) • We need some guidelines – to toss out inappropriate activities (gambling, as opposed to a discussion of the technology and business of online gambling, etc.) Key Point: no-overhead, fast acceptance triggered by any member (probably not general public, privilege can be revoked)and relationship capture for all of the participants. v0 -- CS208@JimIsaak.com

6. CI - Opportunities • Related TC’s can be given a heads up, and invite the communities to get engaged with them (newsletters, workshops, submit papers…) • ‘Gentle Join’ process for non-members:ask a bit more about them to let them know about things they may value: local meetings, relevant articles, conferences, etc. – and ‘give’ them something periodically (every quarter, perhaps an article from eXplore that relates to their interests) • Define paths towards traditional activities:how to get a workshop or conference goinghow to start a standards activityhow to initiate a newsletter or other publicationhow to become a TC (and why … but maybe this is not the main thrust of our future organization – can we handle hundreds of TC’s?) v0 -- CS208@JimIsaak.com

7. Next steps • Suggest this light weight path as a strategic plan objective • Request a more formal proposal –probably including P&P changes (yuck) • Probably including a CI Tsar (or …) – as a contact point into TAB for what we hope is an explosion of activity(and anticipate staff requirements here as well) • Embrace the first likely activity as a test bed Say “yes” first, and learn from doing v0 -- CS208@JimIsaak.com

8. What part of YES don’t we understand? v0 -- CS208@JimIsaak.com