Shai Agassi held a private Q&A after his keynote. Of interest to me was his comments on their largest online community, the Software Developer Network:
500,000 visitors per month. Aggregation of knowledge that is second to none. slashdot for SAP. SIs in India are hiring them 500 people at a time and saying for their first three months they are supposed to participate in SDN. Aggregation and knowledge and self-categorization has created an environment where you know the guy who is giving advice may have a point ranking that shows they don’t have a life, but a lot of knowledge. We are contributing perhaps 20% of the content. Average time from Q&A is less than 30 minutes, I wish our support channels were that effective.
I hear that Q&A through formal channels it’s a day and a half, and probably at a cost for $85 to $245 per incident). Step back and think about it for a moment. It’s the value proposition of a public community interface to an enterprise. In this case, it is for software developers. But what would happen if community was broadened to the whole ecosystem?
Shh…it’s under construction here.
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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.
He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.
