Democrats Abroad announced that Americans Abroad for Obama is looking for a Regional Field Director to work with the Obama Campaign in the Vancouver/Western Canada region.

The position is full-time and comes with a $1500/month salary and a $350/month budget. The position also includes a $2500 (total) travel budget.

The selected candidate will travel around the region, coordinate closely with the Democrats Abroad organization in the region, and create new volunteer groups/activitie sin cities/towns where Americans live but no DA chapter exists (as well as assist each DA chapter in the region with their own voter registration events and efforts). Interested parties should send a resume and cover letter in care of Kim Reed, Executive Director of Americans Abroad for Obama, to americansabroad at barackobama dot com.

And if you’re not doing anything tonight, join Americans Abroad Vancouver at the Wolf & Hound Pub (W. Broadway and Dunbar) tonight at 5:00pm to watch Sen. Obama accept the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States.

I don’t claim to be a social networking expert, but as someone who has spent quite a bit of time thinking about end-to-end user experience and how companies can best use social services like Twitter to their best advantage, I decided to see how two of the biggest names in blogging use Twitter to support their brand identity.

WordPress/Automattic

I’ve been a WordPress user ever since Six Apart (who I’ll talk about a bit later) introduced paid licensing plans for Movable Type a few years ago. Since then I’ve gone back and forth between the systems usually at a rate of about once per year just to compare the feature sets, ease of use, and overall reliability of the two services. I suppose you could say I prefer WordPress for blogging because I keep coming back to it; however, there have been some very real improvements with Movable Type 4.2, so much so that I’m seriously considering either switching this blog to MT 4.2, or using MovableType exclusively for any new blogs that I start from here on out.

I like WordPress because their documentation runs rings around Six Apart’s, and because the community of folks who use WordPress are very committed, very helpful, and willing to lend a hand whenever you find yourself in a jam. When I published a post detailing my unfavorable experience moving this blog from the self-hosted WordPress product, to WordPress.com (and back again), Lloyd Budd sent me a public reply on Twitter offering help if I ever ran into any problems again. I was impressed at that kind of service, and it’s the little over-and-above customer service interactions that breed customer loyalty.

Movable Type/Six Apart

When it comes to brand recognition and visibility, I don’t think any other blogging system comes close to touching Six Apart and Movable Type (in my completely unfounded, unresearched, and inexpert opinion). Bolstered by having prolific and high-profile bloggers on their management team, Six Apart’s greatest success is the potential audience they can attract by virtue of the popularity of these bloggers.

When it comes to ease of use, however, Movable Type has a long way to go toward renewing any feelings of ill will I harbored toward them because of the licensing program and because of some well-documented problems I had when moving from WordPress to the open beta of Movable Type 4. They weren’t terribly responsive at the time I had the problem (although a close friend and MT evangelist I know was), but since then, SixApart popped up in my Twitter response list more than a few times in the last two weeks whenever I had questions about MovableType 4.

The Battle of the Twits

I’ve been following SixApart for about a month or so now, and since then I’ve been really impressed with how they use Twitter to talk about Movable Type. They pack much more in 140 characters than many other companies can pack into a one-page press release. Taking a look at some of their recent tweets, you can see that they run the gamut from talking about newly introduced features, to offering links to longer pieces that detail how bloggers big and small use Movable Type to publish their content. Here’s an example of the most recent tweets Six Apart published:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

When I look at these tweets I see a company that is committed to engaging with users (or prospective users) in a personal and approachable fashion, and a company that is passionate not just about their platform, but about blogging in general. It’s very attractive, and it speaks very well of the amount of thought Six Apart put into using Twitter to their best advantage.

So how is WordPress doing in comparison? I admit that it might not be the most fair comparison since I only just started following them today, but I took the opportunity to page back through some fo their tweets to see if those on the front page were a representative sample of how they used the service overall. Let’s have a look at some of their most recent posts:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

From what you see here, it’s easy to see that WordPress has a thing or two to learn about marketing. While announcements of product updates might be useful to those in the developer community (and to some degree, for more advanced users), there’s nothing in these tweets that tell me why I should use WordPress, or that directs me to press releases or case studies about bloggers and organizations that use WordPress for publishing. They’re champs when it comes to brevity, but brevity isn’t always best when you’re using a resource like Twitter to support your company’s business goals.

Conclusions

In this age of whuffie and building social capital, no organization can overlook the importance of presenting a friendly and approachable face to it’s installed and potential customer base. While I prefer WordPress as a blogging platform, Six Apart is the champion when it comes to making the most out of its Twitter stream. WordPress and Automattic could learn a thing or two about crafting a unified face across all their online identities, and could stand to spend a little more time on that message instead of on creating joke videos that poke fun at the competition (and even in this instance, Six Apart comes out on top because they come across as having a sense of humor about the ribbing they took from Automattic!).

On Saturday, I particiapted in the Creating Community Through Technology panel as part of the Out On Screen film festival. Aelyn Weissman, a filmmaker and artist, made the observation that of all of us on the panel, the only ones who worked as volunteers for their respective online communites were women (an aside: I was a paid technical consultant for QueerHistoryProject.com) Joe Rachert, promotions manager of InteractiveMale.com, was the only one on the panel who made a living from the community he serves.

After the panel, I chatted with Aerlyn and Elaine Miller of LeatherDyke.com and asked whether they could identify any online communities that were created by and for women that provided a source of income for the site owners or content creators. I offered up BlogHer, but to be honest, I don’t know if anyone associated with BlogHer makes any money at all, and since their association with iVillage, I can’t say what impact, if any, the corporate presence on BlogHer has had on their sense of community. I wracked my brain, but couldn’t come up with any examples of online communities for queer or queer-identified women that were profitable for their owners.

When I spoke to Tara Robertson, the panel organizer, she asked me what my definition of community was. A community is a group of persons organized around a particular center that has a vested interest in being stewards of that community. Community means presence, whether that presence is physical or virtual, and community means participation, however that participation is defined by the individual.

Communities support each other. Communities are a means for individuals to band together with like-minded individuals to solve a particular problem. Communities can be surrogate families, they can be authoritative bodies, but by and large, a community is a living, breathing organism that cannot survive without the care, consideration, and contributions of its members.

If we are to use that definition as a guide, then it’s easy to point to dozens upon dozens of online communities for queer and queer identified women that fit within it. Communities are collectives, and the collective spirit is nothing new to queer women. We’re used to banding together, pooling resources, and making do (or making a way out of no way), but it doesn’t seem that we’re as adept as queer-identified men at mining that collective for dollars.

Joe Rachert spoke proudly and at length about the way the communties at Interactive Male were created with forethought and with the idea of being more community focused, rather than sex focused. Men have to buy memberships to join the service, and a percentage of those funds are given back to the community in the format of charitable donations to LGBT organizations both here in Canada and in the United States. But what of queer women? Are any of us having the same kind of success with our online ventures to this extent? Are we somehow less comfortable with the idea of enterprise and making money off the people we serve that we’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity, not only to generate personal wealth, but to steer some of that wealth into organizations and projects tha benefit our communities in the long run?

I’ve been revisitng some second-wave feminist writings in the last couple of weeks, and came across the Combahee River Collective Statement. In the statement, the women discuss black feminism, racism, sexism, oppression, and revolution, but one particular passage came to mind after yesterday’s discussion:

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are sociaists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses.

How much of this ideology still informs queer women’s consciousness today? How much of this is the typical reaction to undervalue “women’s work”? I don’t have the answers to these questions, so I’m turning to those of you in the audience for answers, theories, or ideas.

I ran across a piece at Library Journal that talks about “lightening up” our libraries in the face of budgetary shortfalls, staff cuts, and increased demand for services while operating on a diminishing budget. in it, Michael Stephens and Michael Casey argue that rather than becoming more serious in these serious times, libraries should become more fun. What makes a fun library? The authors write:

A “fun” library, our peers (on Twitter) have told us, depends on the tone established by administrators and also lets patrons who don’t necessarily come for reading still enjoy being in the building.

“When they’re laughing, they’re listening,” write Adrian Gostick, a lecturer and educator in strategic communication and leadership from Seton Hall University, NJ, and Scott Christopher, a humorist and columnist, in their recent book, The Levity Effect (Wiley). “Fun at work can provide a competitive advantage, help attract and retain employees, and provide the spark to jumpstart creativity.”

I can say with certainty (and relief!) that I work in an environment that encourages staff to be creative and to enjoy their time in service. Our yearly staff conference gives us the opportunity to share in a few more light-hearted pursuits (such as a Wii gaming tournament, or a ‘Secrets of the Library’ tour), and even though my time here has been short, I know that the support I receive from managers and peers makes me a more productive employee, and inspires a sense of stewardship that I’ve never felt anywhere else.

Being playful and creative puts us in touch with the side of ourselves that so many of us set aside when we’re told to “grow up” or to “act our age”. When our parents tell us it’s time to “get serious about our studies” or when they ask us repeatedly “what do you want to be when you grow up”, or “what kind of job are you going to get with a B.A. in English?” they unwittingly are setting us on a path that takes us away from the very skills we need to retain a sense of individuality and purpose when working in large organizations or in corporate environments.

Yet I’ve seen a shift in recent years, and I think people of my age group are at the forefront of this shift in organizational culture. We work hard for our companies (and for ourselves) but we also want to feel like we’re a part of something greater, that we’re all in this together, so we might as well try to work together to make our environments as enjoyable as possible. We work hard - but we play with a purpose.

What does your work environment do to encourage creativity and fun in its employees? Do you set aside time each day to do something fun at work?

That’s what one of the people who took part in my “Choosing a Digital Camera” seminar said was her first thought when she first saw the announcement. She wasn’t the only person to say that to me after the course ended.

The people who registered for the course shared the same goal: they were all interested in buying digital cameras. They wanted to be able to document and share their view of their world with friends and family members, but were afraid that the technical jargon used to market digital cameras to the masses was too hard for “simple folk” like themselves to understand.

Maybe it was the sight of a librarian speaking confidently about a technical subject in terms that they could easily relate to that made them feel more comfortable about asking questions that they’d never ask a salesperson at a big box store or camera shop. After all, librarians don’t want to sell them anything, we just want to provide them with enough information so that they feel certain that they can make an informed choice on their own.

When I opened the session, I used the analogy of sharks smelling blood in the water to describe a potential sales transaction at an electronics superstore. “I just want to keep you from feeling like shark food,” I told them, and I saw the lingering traces of apprehension leave their faces and bodies. I got the sense that they trusted me, that they understood that I only had their best interests at heart, and I wanted to make them feel better about what they did know, rather than to make them feel ashamed about what they didn’t.

I’d like to think that the participants walked away with more than the information to help them make a purchase they could feel good about. I’d like to think that they walked away with a different idea about libraries and library staff. I’d like to think that in my own small way, I left the with the impression that libraries can be pretty cool places.

By the way, the photo that accompanies this entry is of a paper orchid one of the participants gave me after the course to thank me for teaching the course. As a matter of fact, I did get a little teary eyed after it happened - why do you ask?

I realize that may sound shocking coming from someone who has spent the last thirteen-odd years of her life working on the web, with the web, and for the web, so maybe an explanation is in order.

I’m not tired of the technologies that make the web a more social place. I’ve made and nurtured many friendships and relationships that wouldn’t be possible without being connected. I even met my husband online. I can’t quite imagine what my life might’ve ended up like had I not spent an entire summer seeking refuge from Atlanta’s oppressive heat in Georgia State University’s air-conditioned computer center.

It’s the listmaking, the angling for position, the seemingly endless quest to be recognized as the definitive voice that worries me. It’s the recent discussions of social capital on the web — or “whuffie” that make me feel tired. In case you don’t know what whuffie is, Tara Hunt of HorsePigCow defines it this way:

The sum of the reputation, influence, bridging capital and bonding capital, access to ideas and talent, access to resources, potential access to further resources, saved up favors, accomplishments (resumes, awards, articles, etc.) and the Whuffie of those who you have relationships with.

In short, whuffie is mostly based on who you know, a bit on what you know, and how these connections elevate your standing and increase your personal, social (and in some cases, fiancial) capital.

The web is turning into one large gated community where, if you don’t have the right credentials (cred), you’ll always find yourself on the outside. This way of thinking is inherently exclusionary, and in my mind, flies in the face of the open spirit that used to exist in the early days of the web.

I don’t fault people for wanting to make a good living by parlaying their social connections into lucrative and/or influential appointments. Where this starts to break down for me is when I encounter the second, third, or tenth list of the “most influential” people/men/women/blacks/asians/one-legged jockeys on the web, and how people react when they see that their names have been left off such lists.

The reactions remind me of the jockeying for position that insecure high school students exhibit when they try desperately to craft a more socially acceptable image for thesmselves. It reminds me of fraternity/sorority life on college campuses where those who allowed to pledge are derided by those who wanted to pledge but were turned away at the door. And what’s worse is that it starts to resemble those tiresome and seemingly never-ending blog posts about “monetizing” the web and how you can blog your way to financial independence just by manipulating search engine rankings.

I don’t know if this is a factor of my rapidly advancing age and my increasing inability to suffer what I consider to be foolish behavior gladly, but this isn’t the social community I want to be a part of. I want to be part of a community where people are willing to share their expertise so that we all get better. I want to be part of a community that mimics that hoary old cliche about rising tides that lift all boats. I think this is why, now that I’m working in a library, I feel I’m finally surrounded by people who understand the benefit of the collective we, and how our societies — physical and virtual — are made stronger by nurturing a commonwealth of ideas where those who have access feel a sense of responsibility to those who don’t.

I want a more level playing field, not because I want more attention for myself (anyone who knows me can tell you that absolutely is not the case), but because I believe that as long as we’re so busy focusing on how to come out on top of our limited circles, we’re going to lose sight of our responsibility to and interconnectedness with each other.