Marla Parker's Weblog

Online Community Summit 2007
October 4-5, I was fortunate to be able to attend the Online Community Summit 2007 in Sonoma, CA. I love this meeting because it is small, exciting, and full of interesting learning. This year, I especially enjoyed talking with or listening to presentations by:

• Holly Pendleton of Catholic Health Initiatives, a $7B nonprofit corporation I'd never heard of, about her work with the internal online community of staff working at CHI hospitals and other healthcare facilities around the country.
• Peter Cohen of Amazon, who is passionate about the possibilities unleashed by their Mechanical Turk.
• James Nauta of the American Academy of Pediatrics, about the difficulty of creating online communities where practitioners or patients can share best practices with one another without running the risk of illegally "practicing" medicine over the wire, e.g. by implying a diagnosis or suggesting medication that turns out to be ill-advised in some specific case. What a difficult problem!
• Paul Resnick of the University of Michigan School of Information, whose research into community participation reminded me of a workshop I attended once where we played variations on the Prisoner's Dilemma.
• Neal Sundaresan of eBay, who explained to Roger and me why snipers are actually healthy for a micro-community on eBay, e.g. the group of collectors who buy and sell antique golf clubs made of wood.

...and many more. Thanks to Josh Ledgar for his copious notes on the days of the event, and Bill Johnston's report back and this picture he posted to flickr:

The biggest piece of serendipity to grace the event for me was via the Ride Board, through which I met Deborah Grove. She alone was brave enough to accept my offer of a ride at oh-dark-thirty when I drove from Los Gatos to Sonoma in time for the pre-conference Online Communities for Social Good meeting Thursday morning at 8:30. (We stopped in Millbrae to pick up coffee and my former java.net colleague, Helen Chen, now with MATLAB Central.)

I say it was serendipity for me because Deborah started blogging about Green IT and consulting in that exciting field this year. She had so much interesting stuff to share, I of course cannot remember it all now, over a week later, but I have my homework cut out for me, starting with reading her blog.