2007 Q3 AboutUs Stakeholder Meeting Agenda
Executive Summary
The past three months have allowed AboutUs to refine overall operations, make needed improvements to the site and nurture its growing community. We are pleased to share the summary below. As always, there is a much higher level of detail on the site itself.
Traffic Overview
Growth in traffic continues to be strong. Our ability to drive new people to the site continues to be a highlight. The initiatives to grow our numbers in terms of page views per visit and returning visitors are well underway.
| Month | Unique Visitors |
|---|---|
| January 2007 | 1,118,059 |
| February 2007 | 1,304,283 |
| March 2007 | 1,619,040 |
| April 2007 | 2,192,951 |
| May 2007 | 2,657,512 |
| June 2007 | 3,185,579 |
| July 2007 | 4,142,939 |
Development Goals Achieved Last Quarter
Notable Enhancements:
- The Development Team completed a much-needed upgrade of MediaWiki, our backend software.
- The Adult Content Policy, which was created using a Consensus Poll, has entered the implementation phase. At this point, visitors to the site are able to flag pages that may refer to adult content. Flagging pages will put them behind a warning page. Being behind the warning page will prevent search engines from “spidering” those pages. This may result in a decrease in traffic given that there are a significant number of these pages. This phase of implementation is an important step in fulfilling the Adult Content Policy.
- Development has instituted case-space insensitivity to page titles, which has solved a problem of multiple page creations for the same topic.
Announcements:
- AboutUs has a new logo that has been enthusiastically received by the staff. Input from our Active Members through a Consensus Poll provided impetus for further outreach to our burgeoning community.
- The Portland office has moved to a new location. Management signed a lease with OMCC and the company moved into the building in the Central East Side of Portland on August 15th. The new offices will be able to house the growing number of employees while giving the company a flexible space needed for agile development of both code and content.
- After a trip to the Lahore office in August, management has hired 5 new developers and 5 content and community organizers.
Stakeholder Meeting
We have many more details to share and would cherish input from all of our stakeholders. Please join us for our quarterly stakeholder meeting which will be held on
- Thursday September 13th at 4:30 PM (PDT/GMT-8) at our US offices:
- 107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520
- Portland, OR 97214
Some notes on our new location:
- The building is still under construction.
- The best way to reach us is to enter on the Washington Street side.
- Basically, you just need to weave your way through to the other side of the building where there is an elevator to the 5th floor.
- Here's a map to help guide you:
- Once you reach the 5th floor, take a left out of the lobby and follow the hall until you see us.
- We are the only tenants on the 5th floor.
Participate in the meeting
Update -- We've also added a live video feed of the Stakeholder Meeting at 4:30 p.m. (PDT). The password is "wiki".
- Join the Conference Call: The call is for audio only. To ask questions or make comments, please do so via IRC.
- dial in: +1 712.580.7700
- wait for message, then hit "2" to enter an access code
- access code: "22688 87#" (AboutUs)
- provided by: FreeConference.com
AND
- log into the AboutUs IRC chat room to contribute questions or comments there.
There are two ways to access the IRC channel:
- via the webpage http://www.miccas.net/aboutus_irc/ or
- downloading an IRC client and joining irc.freenode.net, room #AboutUs
Your participation is very much appreciated.
Notes from the Meeting
A note on the format: We are webcasting the presentation. We hope that those who are watching, will log onto IRC to ask questions.
WardCunningham welcomes the group & introduces RayKing.
Ray: we have accomplished a lot of "operational" things this quarter. Our growth in traffic has been good. Many of you know that we raised $1 million in the past & had planned to raise institutional money but decided to return to our original investors to raise more cash. With Series A delayed, we were able to focus on operations.
- We built our staff in two continents
- We moved into a new Portland Office
- We have experimented with Ad Revenue.
- We have a new logo
We wanted the logo to express the organic nature of collaboration & emergence, community & interaction.
- Working across distance & time:
- Goals: Top 10 Website, Great Brand, Great Place to Work
We would like to approach our business with a triple bottom line vision
We are working with few goals, more projects, and even more tasks all that support our vision. Tasks fit within a 2 week period of time & have clear parameters about what it means to be "done". This ensures that the work we are doing day to day support our projects & goals. This is helping us get everyone on the same wikipage.
We want to model how to work on the wiki.
Teams at work at AboutUs: Development (Dev), Content, Community, Operations
Increasingly, community is stepping up to participate in the work that is done on the site.
You can look at this online at OurWork. This page breaks down our tasks, projects, goals, Mission. Every task is clarified if you click on it.
Wiki Values support all our work. The wikiway has a feeling of inclusiveness, collaborative, positive... our goal is to actually make the world a better place so we want to work towards these values.
Community Team: MarkDilley: We have both staff & community members on the team. He outlines the work done by community... I missed some of it, sorry! Mark & Ward decided to have phone calls with active users. In the past 2 days over 300 folks have been welcomed. This have been very exciting... the community has really contributed. Consensus Polling has been an important part of outreaching to our active users. WardCunningham gave an update about the active user interviews. They were very revealing & helpful.
Content Team: They make great examples out of the basic data. They organize content, answer common queries. There is a fair amount of elbow grease to accomplish this.
Adoption Map: Folks discover us through algorithmic search driven queries or the whois links, from there we hope they will make an edit, make an account, Make more edits on numerous pages, create portals, work on pages about AboutUs... that is, work with others.
Dev Team: User interface features, infrastructure, our platform (for now, we use mediawiki. Mediawiki has some limitations. Therefore, we will need to create our own platform. We can build a better platform, we call it Topsoil.), Also, dev continues to gather & inject algorithmic data to continue to fuel the base platform of data upon which the human work sits. The new skin. There are subtle changes that will aid in our growth: the edit button is better places, the user box, better ad placement (contributes to better cpm). There is "internal advertising" available for those who are not logged in. We can create different messages to encourage different behaviors.
Vinh deserves a bunch of credit.. big thanks to him. Vinh thanks the dev team & the community in turn. Smiles all around.
Community: ESRG developed out of a contact of WardCunningham's they are architects & planners with PhD's... these are the folks we want to serve. By nurturing the initial interest, a community is building on our site. The subject matter is large enough that this could be a keystone for our community building. That's why this project is important to Ward. They are coordinating their work on the wiki.
Ray brings up the Portland Tech page. Geoff is in the room... This is a fairly comprehensive listing on Portland Tech presence. This is exciting for us because this is a model that is very unique & won't show up in any other listing. Geoff has started the process for the Silicon Valley. The advantage of AboutUs is that we have the building blocks to create these pages. The AboutUs pages are the bricks that begin the process of creating a great resource.
User engagement in when folks go deep. Viral engagement is when those folks reach out & invite others. This way folks are "plugged in" already. This way the arrival feels good. We will be creating affordances to help invite folks & make the arrivals friendly.
Lahore Office: There is room for 22 folks 17 are there now. 7 originally & 10 more from our August visit. This is important because if we want to be a global site, we need to have a presence outside the US. We feel that Lahore is special. We have found excellent talent from the top universities. We are working with them in an unusual way, allowing them to opt into the work. We couldn't be more excited aobut our new colleagues in Lahore. The tech community in Lahore has welcomed us with open arms. Glad that we are ambassadors for doing business in Pakistan.
Operations Team: Finance, admin, HR, facilities. Welcome to our new office. We wanted an open space & it's working very well for us.
Traffic: Our traffic has been growing really well. August was a bit flat... hard to determine exactly why. Perhaps because August is a big vacation month? Uniques continue to grow, pageviews are flat. That's why we are focusing on engagement.
Search Engine Placement: Can we take common search terms, create great pages & get good search results? We did an analysis on LASIK search term placement. We found that very high value terms suffer if we don't work on the pages. On the other hand, if we work on pages, the results are very good. We are working on learning this science.
Revenue: Our adult content filter (our policy is not to present ads on pages with references to adult content) filters out 52% of the pages... boils down to $16,500 this month. With the filter turned off we could double our revenue. We can also work on the false positives. We believe there is 20-20% false positive. This is AdSense for content. AdSense for search could be a better opportunity. It's nice to be bringing in some money, although, at this point it's not enough to pay the bills.
Competition: we like to think of them as allies... Ray describes our competitor graph. There was a comment about Wiki & Ray points out that while both sites have good penetration, Wikia is doing much better in user engagement. Focus for next quarter:
- User engagement & viral vectors
- Algorithmic Data
- Mediation Skills
- Series A
- Streamlining content creation
- Ad Revenue
- Partnerships with other informational sites
Questions? IRC folks? Others? Where do you see the site two years from now?
Our BHAG is to be a Top 10 Website. I don't think we'll be there in two years... If we could get halfway there, that would be great. Now, many users are surprised when the find us, in two years, if we could be "known" as a place to collaborate in a constructive manner, that would be a success. If 2 years after that, we were a top 10 website that would be a success. If, community were doing 80% of the work, that would be great.
Suggestion: Create a widget that others could use on their site. Entice others to put AboutUs logo on their sites.
Ray: Restates, there are 3 areas that are on my mind. Easiest is link exchange (like with BuiltWith). Ray explains our licensing... free licensing. therefore the better our data gets, the more folks will want to use it. We believe the more folks who use our data, the more important having your info on AboutUS up to date. 3rd: widget. I am really excited about this potential: We can (will be able) put the AboutUs technology onto any webiste. I want my AboutUs page to be the "about us" page on their site. At this point we do have a "badge". We can add functionality & it will be fantastic.
Ray thanks everyone who is here for helping us get where we are.
Ward thanks the online audience & Ray. Ward signs off. Thank you!
