This week we hold the Sun Customer Engineering Conference in Las Vegas with over 4’000 participants and over 200 break-out sessions

At the conference we launched our first Community Equity Pilot based on CE2.0 – our Enterprise Social Network Community Framework for Customer Engineering .

Community Equity in action !

In a previous blog post called Community Equity – a way to measure Social Capital for an enterprise I explained the theory…
Now lets see how we implementing Community Equity in practice.
The CEC 2007 conference with over 4’000 participant and over 200 break-out session was the perfect pilot case.
We implemented the Conference as a social networking experience and asked the conference attendees to actively participate.

What we asked the conference attendees

1. visit the communities pages of the session they have attended

• rate and comment the session
• participate in the session forums

2. adding content to their myshare
3. check out the myProfile pages of the other attendees

• review their content
• rate and comment
• and last but not least adding friends to their friends list

How a user can check her/his Community Equity
While attendees actively participated in the CEC 2007 community, they could see how their Personal Equity evolves by just checking the My Community Equity widget
on their My Profile Page

The widget dynamically shows the current Contribution – and Participation Equity related to the average of the community and the current rank in the Community.
And yes this widget is only visible to the user – (Hey – we respect Data Privacy laws :- ) )

How to drive participation ?
For the conference we announced a contest for the most active participant.
After day one – the participation was pretty low. We somehow expected this and thought about an additional incentive..
So we asked Dan Berg (VP GSE EMEA, CTO Services), the host of the CEC conference to announce the name of the last day winner at the General Session in the morning …
and show the name on the big screens to the 4’000 attendees …
Well – it worked very well – the next day the participation more then doubled …

and even better some people got so excited about it that they tried to hack our rating service !.
Wow – have you ever seen a hack on a website site which does not provide any value ????

What’s next !

The conference is over and people are flying back..
To keep the good participation trend up we decided to extend the participation contest until end of October.
That means attendees can go back to the CEClive site check out the content, provide feedback, add related content etc.
Lets see who will win the contest …. I will announce the winner on this blog :-)

How did we implement it ?

Social Network and Community Service
First we developed & deployed the community and social network service as part of our CE 2.0 architecture.
This enabled us to pilot community building and social relationships funcitionality on top of an enterprise wiki.

Community Equity Web Service
We implemented Community Equity as a web service as part of our CE 2.0 architecture

Dynamic Community generation
AT CEC we had over 200 breakout sessions. We developed an XML based data feed between the external conference registration application and our CE2.0 framework and dynamically created over 200 communities around the breakout sessions.

A session community page consists of set of widgets
Speaker widget – list the speakers of a session
Session Description – a short description about the breakout session
Attendees – a list of all people attending a given session
Session content – a dynamic aggregation of session content based on session tags
Related content – shows related content for the session based on related session tags
Forum – a Forum were attendees can discuss the session

Dynamic My Profile creation
Then we dynamically generated around 4’000 user profiles of the conference attendees by implementing a mashup between the registration data from the conference
and our internal LDAP name service.
These My Profile pages are our initial implementation of our “Facebook for the Enterprise” service and are not specific to the conference. Only the MyCEC session is a specific widget for CEC.

A MyProfile page has following widgets:

Who am I – Picture of a person, name, phone number, office location link to the corporate calendar etc.
My Friends – a list of friends
Common Friends – a list of common friends when someone else looks at the Profile
Where am I – a Widget to show the current location of a person using the https://plazes.com service
My Community Equity – shows the current Personal Community Equity
My CEC Sessions: show all sessions a person has registered during the conference
MyShare – a summary of all Community contributions (attachments, links) of the person

Conference Content aggregation
Then we built a content aggregation page based on internal sessions- and external related content (blogs, video, photos) of the Conference – and voila
– we had a Social Network enabled conference pilot –

The CEClive entry page has following aggregation widgets

#8226 Sessions – Just starting, just running sessions, all sessions etc.
. CEC2007 News – A shared wiki page to publish news
#8226 Top of CEC – Top contributors and participants of the conference based on Community Equity calculations
#8226 Blog aggregation – aggregation of all related blogs of the conference using the suncec2007 tag for technorati
#8226 Photo aggregation – aggregation of all related photos of the conference using the suncec2007 tag for flickr
#8226 Video aggregation – aggregation of all related video of the conference using the suncec2007 tag for youtube