How do you extract maximum value from a conference presentation or workshop, both for you, and your audience?

political polarisation creates groupthink creates more polarisation, which prevents ideas from circulating and developing.... Pumping resources into ensuring one side of US politics is overrepresented on Medium is bad for US politics, and bad for Medium - In response to Influencer Outreach: Progressive Politics (job ad on Medium)

Get with the community; The death and rebirth of comments: The death of the open web?

News isn’t just a product, it’s a community... How do you start a river, from a content point of view? It’s just a list of feeds. You can add to the list, or remove from the list. You’re the curator, though you’re not just curating stories, you’re curating flows. - Dave Winer: Here’s why every news organization should have a river » Nieman …

Every news organization, or company with a community should be running a river.

Apart from the Online Hangout(24 September, 16h30 CET), a new online community just opened for public sector communicators across Europe.

I spoke to seven news organizations - Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today's FTW - about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now... Here's how they're all using social media to encourage reader discussion. - What happened after 7 news site…

“Audience engagement editor” is a job that didn’t exist until a few years ago. But now those with the title wield heavy influence in the industry, shaping both how journalists cover events and how readers consume news... this new breed of editor crafts online tone and relationships with readers... elevate a publication’s online persona by crea…

The nuances of building and maintaining communities can really only be learned through extensive practice, both as a participant of other groups and as an active designer of your own. There is no better way to learn this art than by taking a critical look inside as many communities, both successful and crumbling, as possible. For those getting …

Du short-blogging sans limite de caractères. De la recommandation de liens. Des automatismes pour rédiger facilement vos messages. Des forums sous chaque billet. De la veille d'actualité. Une thématisation avancée. ... Seenthis propose le concept de « short-blogging » : du blogging de référencement au travers de billets dont la taille n'est pas…

"More than anything else, though, I think this event was about powerful stories — sharing stories, relating to stories, showing support after stories, and encouraging things to happen as a result of stories..." Rich picking here - e.g.,  “For every man that thought I was a secretary, there was a woman that called me a b****.” - The Stories o…

A tl;dr version of “From One Spokesperson To Millions” the brilliant 45-minute longread by @jessedee on taking one of the most successful campaigns of all time - Paul Hogan’s 1980s Tourism Australia campaign - and updating it for the age of user-generated content. Some key quotes:

If you don’t want comments on your website, that’s fine, don’t have them. But don’t act like comments are some sort of intractable problem that can’t be realistically addressed by mortals. They’re not... you could fix this, but your priorities are elsewhere.... Having threads that close, having moderators that redirect entrenched disagreements,…

"at some point, you start to crave something with more substance. Today’s readers want more than listicles and clickbait, and this is driving meaningful change across the digital publishing industry... In the maelstrom of Internet content, we are drawn to articles that make clear promises for what we will get out of them, as well as those that …

My EuropCom 2015 workshop on online communities is taking shape. (Update: view all slideshows and key takeways from the session) According to the EuropCom2015 site it'll be held after lunch on Day 1, and will cover:Convening and managing an online community is an extremely effective way of achieving communications goals, but will probably fai…

So the question at hand is how to keep your community alive and thriving. Or, on the flip side, here are the top 15 ways to (inadvertently) to kill an online community: - How To Kill An Online Community In 15 Easy Steps | Vanessa DiMauro | LinkedIn

The Coral Project aims to change how publishers, contributors and readers think about interacting in online communities ... to further opportunities for online engagement, extending beyond comments into conversations and contributor contributions... The goal of the open-source software is to enable publishers to better manage contributions and …

sixth edition of the annual report series provides a snapshot of the progress and changes in community management approaches and highlights emerging standards. This year, TheCR analyzed data from more than 200 communities representing a broad range of community sizes and sectors to measure community maturity and its relationship to member engageme…

"Networks are pretty good for collisions. Bureaucracies are pretty bad for collisions." - Why I Write on Medium — The Message — Medium

Some really advanced techniques in handling trolls here - The Internet’s Most Trolled Cartoonist — The Nib — Medium

“In fact, the very point was to get them, and these comments, off my pages,” - After deciding to charge for comments, Tablet’s conversation moves…to Facebook » Nieman Journalism Lab

I need three speakers for a EuropCom2015 workshop to share their thoughts on convening and managing communities in the context of public communications and policymaking. The following throwaway remark on Linkedin landed me with the task of setting up a workshop at EuropCom 2015:"I'd suggest combining "Setting-up and managing online …

I quite enjoyed the experience of reposting to Medium, and really like how Medium is evolving as a platform, particularly how they are… … re-imagining comments with Highlight, Comment & Respond… these three interactive features echo the ‘nibble, bite, meal’ content model, but in the other direction, from you back to the …

Comment moderation and online community management strategies for news organisations, but relevant to government sites too: "Comments are a way for readers to connect with one another, and with the journalists and editors reporting the news. But ... can quickly turn uncivil, and news organizations often don’t have the resources or manpower to con…

Good case study, concluding with observations on the role of journalists which also apply to government communicators: "An engaged journalist's role in the 21st century is not only to inform but to bring readers directly into the conversation through... real-time coverage, alternative story forms, crowdsourcing, beat blogging, user-generated co…

A whole load of recommnendations for the UK's House of Commons, including some intriguing ones - eg: "We believe the public want the opportunity to have their say in House of Commons debates; we also believe that this will provide a useful resource for MPs and help to enhance those debates. We therefore recommend a unique experiment: the use of…

"Crowdsourcing is not about work. Crowdsourcing is about community. Without a solid community, you get not-solid results from your crowdsourcing endeavor.... The goal of many of these tactics is not to stop assholes from being assholes, just to slow them down and demotivate them from destroying your community." - Crowdsourcing isn’t broken — Bac…

"While we've always loved a good chart and map at Vox, appreciating a chart or map does not data journalism make. Data journalism is not just data visualization... ... the explosion in data sources readily available on the web... can both aid in telling important and necessary stories, but can also be easily misunderstood and potentially manipula…

" online comments can be worth having, if the publisher puts the work in." Excellent case study. Found this stat particularly interesting: "Users who log in, which is required if you want to comment, view seven pages per session on average, while non-registered users make it to only 1.7" I'd suggest that users who both view 4 times as much conte…

"Guardian digital editor Aron Pilhofer say killing off comments is a “monumental mistake.”... ... many traditional newsrooms are failing to take full advantage of the web’s ability to create a two-way relationship with readers, and that this is a crucial element of what journalism has become in a digital age... ... "You see site after site movin…