Overseas Expertise

Since establishing a viable business is of interest to me and to others, such as expats and spouses of people with overseas jobs, I thought the content below might be useful. Some of the information could be regarded as “USA-specific” but other resources can assist with the practical aspects of starting a business.

Top 12 Resources for Start-Ups:

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Top 12 Resources for Start-Ups

Every now and then I get asked to provide a list of resources to help small business owners get started and growing. Here are some of my favorite recommendations.

• SBDC - Counselors trained to help you find the local and national resources you may need - located in most metropolitan areas - Find an SBDC chapter
• SCORE - Service Corps of Retired Executives Find a SCORE chapter - Retired business owners volunteer and share wisdom.
• StartUpNation - Resources to help you start your business and growing community of folks interested in starting.
• SBA - Small Business Planner
• IRS - Starting a business checklist
• Business Know-How - Tips on starting a business
• Microsoft - Small Business Resource Center
• Entrepreneur.com - Guide to starting a business
• Inc.com - Guide to starting a business
• Business Owner’s Toolkit - Guide to starting a business
• AllBusiness.com - Tips for staring a business
• BPlans - Business plan help and advice

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Technorati Tags: Entrepreneur

After completing the previous post and taking some time to think a bit more about what “community” is , it occurred to me that there are some additional observations I want to include.

A community that is “online” presumes a certain level of technical sophistication. While some communities may encourage people to have some common knowledge or a shared interest, it is an online community that de facto requires both a shared interest and the ability to effectively communicate among other members who may be separated by time and distance. The potentially asynchronous nature of an online community encourages a greater attention to what was said rather then when it first appeared.

“Community” also involves different levels of interest and participation. This is a slightly different issue than good vs. bad behavior. Physical communities in the United States (and elsewhere, of course, but since I am from the US I prefer to comment on what I am more familiar with) have members who are then sub-grouped into leaders, supporters, particpating and non-participating invdividuals. The goal for a healthy community is to encourage leadership that builds the community’s value along with a stable or growing base of supporters who reinforce changes and decisions made by the leaders. The participating individuals in a community could be characterized as “commenters” (from the online model) and enjoy seeing change and will be involved in a peripheral manner. The non-participating individuals (or “lurkers”) may not cause harm to the community but they aren’t creating any value for the community either.

One theme that will be covered in the coming weeks of FOC is the chracteristics of Teacher vs. Moderator vs. Faciltator roles. I am interested in learning more about the perspectives people have on the roles of Moderator vs. Facilitator. Another title I have come across is “Community Manager.” It will be interesting to learn more about the appearance of the various titles in commercial vs. non-commerical communities.

Tags: community, FOC08

“Communities can grow anywhere communication occurs.”[source]. This statement (quoted from an O’Reillynet.com piece struck me as a good place to start when attempting to define “community.” People who wish to communicate with each other and, presumably, have a specific topic (or group of topics) form a “community” by agreeing to focus on the topic(s) at hand and avoiding irrelevant, tangential discussions. In an online community-type setting, the community members have chosen to be there and should expect to observe and engage in the discussions.

As with real world” communities there is a reasonable likelihood of miscreants being present. For this reason, leadership is another key ingredient in an online community. Etienne Wenger wrote about different types of leadership. Aside from the leaders, a group of people with a common interest should also respond to problems to ensure they do not threaten the main purpose of the group’s interaction or the process of interaction.

“But in all cases, leadership must have intrinsic legitimacy in the community. To be effective, therefore, managers and others must work with communities of practice from the inside rather than merely attempt to design them or manipulate them from the outside.” (Wenger, Communities of Practice“). This statement imparts an important idea that plays a vital role in online communities. The virtual communities that continue to develop and multiply often have a commercial motive. These are fine and aren’t necessarily “illegitimate” but they, perhaps more so than non-commercial communities, need to have genuine and involved leadership. An ideal situation would be a community leader who has a passion for the topics being discussed and is able to couple that passion with a paid role to encourage and support the community. The opportunity for overt sales or marketing would be greatly diminished since the point of the community would be to grow steadily and see return visitors to participate in the community. Trying to masquerade as a “community” and then attempt to keep people involved merely through sales offers would likely be identified as a marketing “trick” rather than a real community.

“Traditional knowledge management approaches attempt to capture existing knowledge within formal systems, such as databases. Yet systematically addressing the kind of dynamic “knowing” that makes a difference in practice requires the participation of people who are fully engaged in the process of creating, refining, communicating, and using knowledge.” (Wenger, Communities of Practice“). This statement, for me, provides key measurement points to evaluate the health and maturity of a community. A useful nuance from the statement is the absence of any mention of quantity or percentage of community members who should be fully engaged. However, a community can only have so many voices and members before it reaches an unmanageable size. I believe that size limitations apply in both the online and physical worlds when talking about community effectiveness.

Resources reviewed while developing opinions about community:

• The Art of building Virtual Communities - http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog/2007/08/the-art-of-buil.html
• Participation Online - the Four Cs - http://blog.core-ed.net/derek/2006/11/participation_online_the_four.html
• The Five Stage Model (E-moderating) - http://www.atimod.com/e-moderating/5stage.shtml
• Communities of Practice - Learning as a social system (E. Wenger) - http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml

After some hours of focused effort I managed to complete the following tasks:

• Created a “course expectations” entry on my blog for FOC 08
• Established a new blog for FOC08, adjusted it, added links and then decided against using it
• Transferred all the new content over to my existing blog after realizing it would be silly to try and maintain two separate (but related) blogs
• Added a large number of RSS feeds to my Google Reader

The variety of people enrolled in the class is really impressive. I have found several blogs that I want to leave comments on to get more involved with the conversations. I guess this is my goal to reach prior to the next online meeting.

Technorati Tags: FOC08-week1

The idea of learning how to effectively contribute and lead online communities is a skill that I believe to be essential for my professional development. I have been involved with online communities as a member and a community manager (in one case). I recognize that I need to develop a better operational understanding of what it takes to not only contribute to but nurture an online community. Here are some of the questions I have about online communities:

• How to attract people to participate rather than merely watch online discussions?
• What should a community leader (i.e., community manager, moderator, facilitator) expect to do in the early stages of an online community?
• What should community managers expect once a community has been established? What are the maintenance activities involved?
• Should communities always expect to bring on moderators and establish varying levels of membership or can communities remain fairly “simple” and still be successful?

I have been an advocate of social networks to assist with establishing “real world” connections among expat communities. I would like to learn more about how people perceive social communities and which ones are the most valuable (depending on the audience).

Lastly, I hope to gain a better understanding of how to connect with niche audiences in order to encourage their participation in an online community (e.g., forum, social network, blog, podcast, etc.)

Technorati Tags: FOC08

I recently took on a research question that required me to look for online and first-person information that referred to multiple overseas locations. At first glance, it appeared that the core question and the supporting issues could be answered with a few email exchanges complemented by some online research. As the responses started to roll in, it became clear that my initial assumptions were not entirely accurate.

The information I thought I was going to find in the public domain wasn’t as easy to locate as I had hoped. Instead, I found some of the data was available but gaps still remained. By this stage, I recognized that my working research knowledge might not have identified all of the options available to me. So I turned to the social networks that I am involved with and posed a question. In this case I used LinkedIn and was quite pleasantly surprised with the responses.

Within just a day after I posted the question I began receiving responses that were both informative and free of obvious self-promotion. Also, the replies were entirely on topic and didn’t attempt to redirect the conversation to an unrelated issues or websites. Overall, I can recommend the Q&A services at LinkedIn as a good supplemental resource for more information. In this case I was searching for data that might have been available for purchase from information services such as Hoovers, but I was impressed to see that my contacts in LinkedIn (and people outside of my connections) were able to expand the list of potential information sources, both free and fee-based.

It will be interesting to see how future questions will be answered depending on their complexity and niche. I am sure that I will be spending more time on LinkedIn to try and answer questions posed by other users in light of my positive experience so far.

So what if a wiki works? Who can use it?

Among the different systems I have come across for creating and managing content, one of the semi-friendly ones has been wikis. Since it makes sense to stay informed of what other people are doing with wikis, I was quite interested to read a recent posting about how at least < a href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/002764.html#002764" title="Wiki Markup Has No Future">one person saw wiki markup as having no future.

James Robertson (of Step Two Designs) has touched on a very practical and, well, true aspect of wikis. They generally don’t have a simple markup interface and usually make you learn a few oddly-organized and unusually-structured syntax in order to take advantage of the power of a wiki tool. I have had the experience of learning to use different wiki applications and made it a habit to regularly refer to the user documentation in order to appreciate what the tools could do. This exciting process required an investment of time and patience. If we are talking about encouraging companies or non-profit organizations to use wikis, then there has to be a better way to bring the users up to speed on how to put information into the wikis.

Wikis as tools - people can be taught

As a counterpoint to Mr. Robertson’s comments, I have found that there are increasingly varied plugins and enhancements to wiki tools that make them easier to use once they are set up. One example is PmWiki. This particular wiki platform has been a reliable and highly-customizable tool for both my personal projects and for client sites. In one case, I used the PmWiki tool to establish an accessible and easy-to-edit site that served as a style guide reference for virtual team members scattered across at three continents. The initial version of the site was set up in an afternoon and then enhanced with an additional few hours of work in the following weeks.

My point is that wikis, while possibly not the most evolved applications for ease-of-use, can be set up by the people who have the time, interest and skills to wade through the esoteric mark-up and then turned over to the target end-users. The wikis can have plugins added to make editing easier. There can also be an acknowledged learning curve that makes it necessary for new users to take some time to become familiar with a new tool. There are new applications being written every day. In some cases, such as in government, the applications are tested and tweaked to make them as user-friendly as possible. However, it is a simple truth that all new users of an online tool will need to be introduced to even the simplest operations. People can be very adaptable but they often resist change - even if it will make their lives simpler.

Web developers, when functioning as consultants for their clients, may need to consider the necessity of not only building new systems but also delivering, as a standard component, some basic training to ensure that their clients not only enjoy the new website/CMS but appreciate how to make the most of its features.

The recent post at Business Blog Summit - Starting a business blog: what does your next web site need to do? - highlights a topic that small business owners should consider as they look at launching or re-launching a business website. The variety of functionality that most businesses seem to want are, in fact, found in blogging tools. The trick is explaining this functionality in terms that business owners can both appreciate and apply to their marketing and e-commerce needs.

It is tempting to go into great detail about the amazing features of systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal that enable the sharing of website content in various formats. However, I think the more relevant conversation is looking at how these tools can offer a means to put content on the internet and facilitate its update on a regular basis. Small business owners are busy enough without having to view their website as yet another “ball” that they have to keep in the air while running their business.

One the best tools I have come across for managing content development and project management is Basecamp (from 37signals.com).

I started using this application as a means to keep track of some volunteer projects and then realized how useful it could be for all of my projects. The ability to create milestones and to-do items as well as draft and share content through “writeboards” has become a standard tool for my work.

A particularly handy feature is the ability to create mailing lists for each project and in order to share updates with other remotely located team members or clients. This also makes it easy for people to see what is being done without having to login to the project website.

I came across the following statements made during a 1995 O’Reilly interview by Jason Fried, president of 37signals:

Basecamp democratizes project management and makes it a team effort. Basecamp lets everyone get involved in managing a project–the thinkers, the builders, the managers, and the client. Anyone who has access to the project can subscribe to the RSS feed and be updated about anything that is posted to that project.

Basecamp embraces the openness, accessibility, and universality of the Web. You don’t need fancy project management software (and worry about which version or platform you have). You don’t have to ask your clients to install some new software on their computers (and deal with updates, patches, and so on). You don’t need to worry about Mac or PC. All you need to use Basecamp is a web browser and an internet connection. Every firm and client has access to that and knows how to use that. That’s standard issue. Plus, most people have that setup at home, so you’re never far from your projects.

I can definitely agree that the communication tools for project management are often too complex and hard to use. Status reports with graphs and Gantt charts look great and tell a compelling story. . .to other project managers. What is really essential is being able to keep clients updated and do it as simply and clearly as possible.

Basecamp and the related Writeboard and Campfire applications make it possible and easy for a virtual team or a remotely located freelancer to stay in touch and provide a professional communications tool for that is useful to both the team and their clients.

While the topic of website accessibility is not new, the the increasing sophistication of website content and the expanding number of internet users makes it more important than ever. If you are at all unsure of what “accessibility” means for a website, at least from a U.S. perspective, you should check out the U.S. Government’s Section 508 website. While accessibility does not refer to internationalization of website content, it seems to me that by designing website content to meet accessibility standards, this will help an organization adapt its website to international audiences.

The people who can benefit from an accessible website include those with vision and hearing impairments as well as those over the age of 65. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s projections, the older population in the United States is on the threshold of a boom. They estimate that some 20 percent of the U.S. population will be over 65 by 2030. You find additional population data for countries worldwide at the AARP website.

This information can certainly help a company or organization plan for how it needs to structure its website content for varying age groups as well as nationalities (i.e., language requirements). By planning for an aging and more diverse, international population using the internet, organizations can reach more people and potential clients. For international development organizations, reaching more people in host-country languages can make it easier to both do business with foreign governments and reach expatriate citizens who might be inclined to support projects that

Accessibility in general is a sound web design practice since a fundamental principle of the internet is universal access to information. A person’s ability to access online content should not be inhibited by poor design that ignores people who have vision, hearing or other physical impairments. The challenge, of course, is to develop websites that meet accesibility guidelines without requiring excessive costs for development and testing.

In most cases, web accessibility requires you (at a minimum) to design your website with particular attention to web standards and using HTML to structure your site while applying CSS for the “look and feel.” This means better planning and control of the content you are presenting online. Fortunately, there is a growing awareness of the need to build accessible websites. Accessify is an excellent starting point for finding tools and techniques that can improve the accesibility of a website. From there, it is definitely worthwhile looking at the Web Standards Project to learn more about building standards-compliant sites and why this makes sense.