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BTW: The slides are downloadable (PDF). Feedback is very welcome.

Read more about the survey on the list.

Since November 19th, when the mailing list went live, 24 community professionals gathered there. I again received a number of very positive feedback about IOCMA and a lot of people showed interest. It’s great to really have struck a nerve here

These days, we are busy working on the mind map. (If you want to edit it, please let me know. I need to add your mail address to the access list at mindmeister.com.) Especially Connie Benson put a lot of effort into improving and expanding it. Great work!

Angela Beesley was so kind to set up a wiki for us at her company Wikia.com to further work on the mind map. The plan is to collect tools and material linked to the mind map nodes and to further explain them. If you want to add your thoughts, visit the wiki and edit away.

Connie and Jeremiah Owyang also did a great job in getting the attention of many others by posting links to IOCMA and the mind map. Looks like the mind map was a good way to kick star

Parallel to the activities online, I also had some great chats and calls with people from UK and Germany. XING’s Silke Schippmann and Klaus Wiesmüller are setting up a Community Roundtable in Hamburg and Tom Nölding is doing the same in Frankfurt. On December 4th I will present IOCMA at the Roundtable in Frankfurt.

You can read about all that and more on the list. If you aren’t subscribed already, why wait any longer

PS: I know, registering and subscribing are dull things to do. I know. Nevertheless, I’d like to remind you of our website. Please take five minutes (that’s half a coffee, tea, or whatever) and set up an account there. The site will become our main website in the near future and the users map is essential to me to coordinate communications with you. Why, you ask? Because it shows me whether you’re awake or asleep

First, the list. To help us concentrate on content and not tech stuff, I chose Google Groups to host the list — at least for now. Go to our list’s homepage to subscribe.

Then, the site. It’s right here, just a directory away: http://iocma.org/site/.

The site runs Drupal, and with a little help from the Drupal community, the mailing list can be accessed there, too. All you need to do is register and you are ready to roll. List and site are synchronized once every hour, which might be changed to a faster interval in the near future. See below the fold to learn more.

The site features a user map, to which you might want to add yourself. To do so, check out your account settings. While being there, you might also want to add some information about you and what you are up to. Feel free to explore

I will take the freedom to invite a few of you to the list right away — if you don’t like to join, just ignore the message.
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Right now I received a number of very positive responses from the United States and Germany. This of course is because I sent the CfP to people in those countries. If any of you speaks a foreign language whatsoever, please contact me.

In my answer to your mails, I pointed out the next steps we should take. I guess the top priority right now is to get the news out to as many of our peers as possible. Here each and every one of you can help with little effort. Spread the word by linking to the IOCMA - Call For Participants or sending it to your peers. Get them involved.

We then will start IOCMA by setting a means of communication for all of us. I’d prefer a mailing list, but of course I am open to what ever suggestions you come up with. If you have an idea, let us know.

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The field of community management opened to me in 2001, when I observed a community of developers at my first employer, Software AG. Later in the same year I took over phpBB.de, the German support site for the renown form software phpBB. I lead the phpBB.de-Team over for years in which we grew from little to big. In the time from 2001 to 2006 I was involved with a number of community projects, offline and online. Some of then were NGO like the Red Cross, some corporations like T-Online, some small companies looking for community advice. Today I work with a well-known publisher in Germany as Community Manager.

I do love what I, what we, do.

We are working in a field that has many different aspects. Community professionals have varying backgrounds, work in different industries and aim to fulfill different business goals. We work with all kinds of communities, all sizes of them and different topics and missions.

Since the take-off of Web 2.0 and with it user generated content the term community was enlarged to nearly all ventures on the web. Publishers, producers, service providers, more or less everyone who sells something, strive into creating communities.

Online Community Management is a challenging profession. It involves facilitation and moderation, selling the community idea within the company as well as to its customers. We depend on our superiors to grant us resources. We need to convince other departments to work with us. We need to evangelize where the community idea is new and to join efforts where it already is.

In fact, we are a product managers. But of a special kind. There is not a boxed product called community which you put on the shelves. We have a potential audience of millions. We have to know how to reach these people, what services to offer to them, how to get them involved in our companies’ business goals. It is about business and brand. Brands carry emotions, and what is a community other than people having emotions.

Until now, we were scattered. We sought help in the little literature that exists about online communities. We searched the web and found single pieces of information. We ventured into psychology and communication sciences, play theory, marketing and advertising.

But we missed something essentially. A place to go to when all else has failed. A place where we can find people who are in the same position as we are, who we can ask for guidance, best practices and ideas, who understand us.

There are more reasons yet to be addressed: education guidelines, lobbying and many more.

These are the reasons why we need something like IOCMA - International Online Community Management Association.

IOCMA seeks to become that one place. It’s time to engage.

If you are working as an online community manager, this call is aimed at you. Spread the word, comment below or drop us an e-mail or send a Skype message if you are interested in helping set up IOCMA, or just want to know when we take off.