swanwick's blog

Below is the text that I provided for Hugh McKellar about KMers

Last November at the KMWorld conference in San Jose a new community was born. While most online communities require email reminders to keep members informed of recent activity, KMers works exclusively through Twitter. It helps to answer the question, “why should I use twitter”.

Last week on KMers chat we talked about the possibility of a KMers remote workgroup. Lots of great ideas for a worthy topic were brainstormed and they have been captured in this poll: http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2595909/

If we get enough interest in any particular project, we will use KMers to help get it started.

We are working hard right now to develop a schedule of chats out at least a month in advance. We feel that this will

• make #KMers more predictable/schedulable
• give chatters a chance to attend the topics they find most interesting
• provide more exposure for the moderators
• encourage blogging and comments leading up to each chat

One of the founding sponsors of KMers is the Knowledge Management Institute. As such, their members will receive information about the KMers chats in their periodic member emails. We welcome everyone to these chats and hope that you find them a valuable tool in your search for KM information and connections.

There is a call for presentation proposals at Knowledge Management 2010. We have submitted KMers as a case study in how to build a social media driven community. http://bit.ly/75SEEY

We believe that it will be great exposure for our community and will be an excellent example to show how some of the recent social media tools relate to community building.

Thanks so much to everyone who has supported KMers in our very early days. There have already been some great chats and there is so much more to come.

KMers has some governance to help it run smoothly. The leadership team meets once a month and has drafted the following objectives/metrics for the community. We would love to have some feedback from the community itself on what our objectives should be. Note: ping me on @swanwick, if you don't want your comment to be publicly posted

Objectives

The KMers.org site was ready for beta launch last week in time for the KMWorld09 conference. Yesterday we launched the weekly #KMers twitter chat. I would guesstimate that we had about 15-20 people contributing to the Twitter Chat which means we probably had that number again of lurkers.