Community Building: Good, Bad, and Ugly

Dawn Foster provides consulting services for companies wanting to engage with online communities by focusing on the business value of engaging with online communities and social media and helping companies find a way to engage that supports the overall strategies and business goals of the company. Dawn has more than 14 years of experience in business and technology with expertise in strategic planning, management, community building, community management, open source software, market research, social media, and RSS.

Dawn has experience and a passion for bringing people together through a combination of online communities and real-world events. Dawn has experience building new communities, managing existing communities, and providing consulting and advice to companies with a particular emphasis on developer and open source communities. While at Jive Software, she was responsible for building a new developer community for Jive’s new Clearspace product line and managing the existing Ignite Realtime open source community. She is a co-founder and board member of Legion of Tech, a non-profit chartered with organizing free events for the Portland, Oregon technology community. As part of her work with Legion of Tech, Dawn is an organizer for Portland BarCamp, Ignite Portland and other events.

Dawn holds an MBA from Ashland University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kent State University. Previously, she worked at Intel, Jive Software, Compiere, and a Midwestern manufacturing company in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to community manager to open source strategist. She uses a combination of technical and business expertise and education to help companies get real business value from participating in online communities. Dawn regularly blogs about online communities as the author of the Fast Wonder Blog, and she blogs for GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily. She is the author of the book, Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy.

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Jeremiah Owyang is a well known web strategy and media expert and is sought out by both Fortune 1000 and startup companies. He is currently Senior Analyst at Forrester Research focused on Social Computing. In this role he covers social networks, and broke news about Facebook’s recent Social Ads product. He also writes a daily blog Web Strategy by Jeremiah and speaks at Technology, PR, and Marketing conferences about web and media strategy.

Before Forrester, Jeremiah’s was responsible for the corporate evangelism at PodTech.net, and previously was leading the strategy and development of corporate web programs at Hitachi Data Systems, Exodus Communications, Cable and Wireless, and World Savings (now Wachovia). Jeremiah Owyang holds a Bachelors in in Marketing from San Francisco State University.

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Bob Duffy is a former VP of Technical Services for Onsite Broadband and Phatpipe having established their online ecommerce strategies in the dot com era. Bob joined Intel in 2005 managing the online small business strategies. In 2006 Bob established a community marketing strategy for Intel and launched Open Port, Intel’s first end user community in August of 2007. Bob is now the Social Media Operations Managers at Intel working to evangalize new strategies and guidelines for further adoption of social media at Intel

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As the Online Community Manager for PCWorld.com and Macworld.com, Kellie Parker is responsible for setting the community-building strategies, managing the relationships with community software vendors, and interacting with the community members on both sites. She also manages all member created content on both sites, including blogs and blog comments, product reviews, and wiki knowledge base. She is responsible for all interactive features of both sites, including polls and user contests. She manages the PC World “Letters to the Editor” inbox and edits the “PCW Forum” section of PC World magazine each month. In addition, she writes a community-focused column on PC World, writes an IDG-internal blog focused on community and social networking, and contributes to the Today @ PC World blog on social networking and user generated content news.

Prior to joining PC World & Macworld, Kellie was a Senior Producer & Online Community Manager with LiveWorld, Inc for 7 years. At LiveWorld, she built and managed some of the web’s largest branded communities, including HBO, A&E, History Channel, QVC and Discovery Channel.

Kellie holds an MBA in Marketing (with Graduate Honors) from Regis University.

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