Guest: Rawn Shah - IBM
Host: Editor

Editor
You're listening to developerWorks Interviews, where we feature conversations with technical luminaries and thought leaders from a variety of disciplines on topics of import to technology professionals. I'm your host, Scott Laningham. Our guest today is developerWorks own Community Program manager, Rawn Shah. Rawn is also a visiting lecturer at the University of Arizona, where he has been instrumental in establishing a new course in the Management Information Science department on Web 2.0 and online communities. Rawn, thanks for coming on.

Rawn Shah - IBM
Hey, thanks, Scott.

Editor
Why don't you talk a bit first, if you would, about what you do as Community Program manager for developerWorks. I mean, it sounds like your organize shuffleboard tournaments or bingo or something. [LAUGHTER]

Rawn Shah - IBM
Yes, actually, we have a fairly sizable community. We have, actually many, many smaller communities within there -- probably a few hundred of them in developerWorks. We have somewhere between four and 500 forums, about 100 different blogs. And each one of these represents their own community, and I have a number of people who work with me on this. I basically lead that community team on what we need to do with that community, as in activities, like shuffleboard ... [LAUGHTER] ... as well as, what do we need to build there? As well as, you know, who are the important people in the community? Who are the leaders? Who are the key spokespeople there and seeing, making sure that everyone's happy?

Editor
Are you a people person? Is this something that you really enjoy doing?

Rawn Shah - IBM
Oh, I pretend to be. [LAUGHTER]

Editor
Well, I think everybody feels you do a great job at it. Now, there's certainly been some press around this new course you helped to design and establish at the University of Arizona. Tell me how that came about, and what made it seem like this was the right time for such a course?

Rawn Shah - IBM
Well, I'm part of the IBM Academic Initiative, and this is a program in IBM, which works with universities and academics all across the world. And as part of that program, we were having a discussion with the department heads in computer science and MIS, sometime in the early spring. And from that, we were discussing what are the new types of areas that you guys are looking at. And we were trying to find new ways of, you know -- interesting new ways of bringing students into the program itself because there has been a drop-off in students since really the dot-com bust. So once that happened, people are suddenly starting to turn away from this field. We talked a little more about what it is that students are doing, or even high school students at that point. And it came around to the idea of, you know, what I was doing at work -- blogs, forums, all of these things. And we had our own needs in developerWorks. I'm not ashamed to say that. We need help running communities because there are so many of them.

At the same time, from their point of view, these high school students are already familiar with these things, these different technologies as such. So Web 2.0, social networking is already a common part of their lives. You know, we call them, refer to them as the MySpace generation in different ways. And that's exactly what we can work with. You know, it's something basically a future job role for them. So if there is potential for a job for this, this makes it an interesting prospect for a class.

So in discussions with the department head, Dr. Mohan Tanniru, we decided that we would actually get together and see if there's a course in this. And over the summer, I and Andrea Winkle spent time planning this course and, essentially, they started it this fall. And I think it's going pretty well.

Editor
What kind of turnout are you having so far this year?

Rawn Shah - IBM
We have about 37 registered students, and I don't think we've had any drops. So we've kept our 37 students. And it's been quite interesting. It's been a full class, and so far, the response we've gotten on how well the class is going, you know -- they did a mid-semester evaluations and such -- has been very good. In fact, it's been very, very good. So I'm excited about that.

Editor
It's interesting to think about these online communities and the technology surrounding it with Web 2.0 being a way to draw folks back into this area of study, isn't it? I'm sure that must show some promise too and create some excitement there at the university, I would think.

Rawn Shah - IBM
Oh, it certainly does. I mean, it's also not a ... it's not a highly technical course in that you don't have to be a programmer, you don't have to know how to be a system administrator as such. But it is in the IT field. And it spans probably a number of different areas. It involves marketing, it involves relationship-building, involves communications leadership, knowledge-gathering. These are all different areas which are taught by the business college under information technology or just general business. So it is a much wider topic than just an IT focus. And it still is, you know -- it's an interesting prospect in the future of IT departments everywhere.

Editor
Does it feel like it has some potential to draw students into more of a technical interest in things? Or would it more naturally dovetail with other areas in business, maybe?

Rawn Shah - IBM
Oh, management information science is not entirely technical. In fact, they have both sides. You can become entirely technical once you start in there. But you can also become more of the management role of information, become a knowledge engineer. And that's where -- this is a starting course for juniors -- so it is one of the first courses that they take in MIS, itself. And so it gives them that opportunity. You know, once you've taken a look at this course, you can say, "Well, I want to go more into the knowledge engineering part" or "I want to go more into the programming aspect of it."

Editor
Tell me a bit about the emphasis of the course, if you would -- some of the key points that you cover in the class.

Rawn Shah - IBM
So we certainly talk about many of the technologies which are in Web 2.0. This is one of the first things people ask: Is this a programming class? And I tell them no -- this is knowing what the tools are, knowing how to use them, and knowing how to support your organization in deploying these. Most of these technologies are still fairly new when it comes to companies. They've heard of blogs, they've heard of wikis. A lot of them may have used some of these technologies as such. But it's still emerging.

So you do need a support role for understanding what are the best practices for each of these things. How do I grow the audience for each of these things? When I have these events, is it money well spent? What is the expected outcome of this? And this is what we are preparing students for. We teach them many different examples of what other companies are doing with these technologies. There's a background on why companies should use this, there's a description of each of the major technologies -- we cover blogs, wikis, forums, chat, podcasting, and a number of other topics.

And then we go on to more of an understanding of how you build that into a community -- understanding the life cycle of communities, understanding the relationship-building. And there's lots of activities in between that we do in class, as well as assignments for homework.

Editor
What are the main requirements for a successful online community? Are there some real key things you can identify, like number of people that have to participate -- I think you mentioned leadership -- or some of those things?

Rawn Shah - IBM
Right. And actually, leadership is probably the first thing that you need to have -- is the participant could be the actually community manager or they could be, you know, just a knowledge expert who's joined a community. The idea here is to try and establish the core number of people who are the primary discussers, the primary participants of that community itself, because there is a plain fact about most communities that there is sort of a distribution curve of how many people actually participate in a community as in post, write, comment, whichever, and how many are readers. You know, these are people who just read the community.

Jakob Nielsen, he's actually an Internet design guru out there -- he's written quite a bit about that. And the ratio of this is very substantial; you get maybe somewhere between 1 and 10 percent of people actually write in a community, but anywhere from 90 to 99 percent are readers. So understanding those demographics, understanding what makes the community start growing to the point where it can self-sufficiently keep growing itself, getting over that initial hump is how it's usually described.

Editor
What's the value to businesses in all of this? I mean, maybe there are some that are fairly obvious, but how would you describe the value to a business owner?

Rawn Shah - IBM
Well, we look at it in several different ways. You can use this inside your company. You can use this externally, when you look at externally, you can use it with your customers, your business partners, or even just the general public. And the value, it's the same, actually, whichever way you go. It's just the roles that change. It allows the people with information, the people with knowledge, to interact with others, and find and discover themselves without having to actually assign people.

It's sort of a dynamic self-emergent kind of phenomenon where if people are interested in the topic and you can get enough attention to draw the right crowds there, you will start creating new knowledge and, essentially, you start innovating with that crowd of people, whether that's inside your organization or, you know -- which is really interesting to companies -- is that now you can innovate with your customers, get their input on what you should be doing, how you might structure your products and services, what new areas you might want to consider, what other companies are doing. You know, all of that information basically is generated out of the community.

Editor
What about opportunities for developers? I mean, I don't know that you have much opportunity to talk about that in the class, but what about your thinking as a member of developerWorks and the conversations you have with members of the team and even developers, maybe, that have asked you about this. What do you see there for them?

Rawn Shah - IBM
Well, there's lots of things. There is certainly the Q and A. We get a lot of communities, which are essentially Q and A. You have, you define a topic, let's say it's a specific product, and you establish that as a resource where developers can go and say, "Hey -- I'm having this particular problem with my setup for this product. Does anyone have an answer?" So that is one way of finding, getting your questions answered, and that actually has been happening in online communities since the very beginning.

Another way is to demonstrate your knowledge as in, you know -- let's say you have the other side of that equation where you say, "Hey, I know the answer." This is what we're doing. And businesses can do it, and when I talk about business, I'm talking about developers and consulting companies, even individuals. They can do it as a form of, I'm willing to call it presales, but essentially that's what they're doing. They're demonstrating their ability and knowledge in that factor in hopes that others might come to them for help. And that is not an unusual situation, either.

Editor
It seems like there's some obvious downsides to some of social networking on the Web, but I tend to feel like those aren't caused by the technology. They're just kind of accentuated by it maybe or brought out more on that scale. And then there are some obvious upsides, including drawing people together, facilitating more community, where it may be in some cases, it wasn't even achievable before. What do you feel are some of the promises of online communities now and in the years to come?

Rawn Shah - IBM
I think one of the biggest benefits of it is you get an honest view of what others think about what you're working on. Now, that is both an upside and a downside. Not everyone can deal with honesty ... [LAUGHTER] ... on what they're doing. And that's the true fact is that this is really what people think about, let's say it's a product or what people think about that kind of information that you provide. And it's how you react to that information, how you deal with that, which is really what changes. It's changing the organization itself.

The traditional ways of publishing information in scripted forms, prepared messages, and all that which has been taught for longer than 100 years or so, that's being changed into a more collaborative and more interactive means. And so like I said, it's both a good and a bad, but it's really how you take it. So you get more direct input, and you get more real input than you would get through perhaps surveys and such.

Editor
It's a larger and maybe more efficient, more dynamic arena for interaction, but the interaction is still up to the participants, right?

Rawn Shah - IBM
Yes.

Editor
And quality of it.

Rawn Shah - IBM
Oh, yes.

Editor
Other thoughts, Rawn, that you wanted to share before we wrap this up?

Rawn Shah - IBM
Yes, actually one of the interesting things about this course that we're doing is the three-way relationship. There is IBM working with the college, but we're also having the college working with high schools. So one of the things in the final project is we take our students into a high school and they try to sell their ideas for online communities to gather high school students to participate. So what that does is actually involve the high school students in the field of MIS, and it gives them an early preview as to what they could be doing at the college level.

And for our students, they get the benefit of real community of students that they have to try and attract and manage themselves. So this is a model that interests lots of other universities. How do you work with high schools? How do you actually get them involved in something that you're doing? So we're hoping that this is something that we can take an interest to other colleges with.

Editor
Well, that's cool. Rawn. This has been fun, and all the very best with the course. It sounds like an exciting thing.

Rawn Shah - IBM
OK. Thank you.

Editor
Again, our guest has been Rawn Shah, Community Program manager for developerWorks and visiting lecturer at the University of Arizona for the class Web 2.0 and online communities that he helped to create and establish in the Management Information Science department at the university.

Visit our developerWorks communities to see some of the things we're doing with the technologies and ideas that Rawn spoke about in this podcast. Just go to ibm.com/developerworks and click on developerWorks communities in the right column.

Listen to our other podcasts or subscribe to one of our syndicated feeds on our podcast page at ibm.com/developerworks/podcasts. That's it for this time around. For Rawn Shah and everyone at developerWorks, I'm Scott Laningham, talk to you next time.