Benjamin is back!

Hey there, I am back :)

I've been away from my role as a host for the Online Community for a few months due to an trip full of amazing experiences with my KaosPilot team in Bogotá, Colombia and some travels afterwards. 

Meanwhile The World Café has gotten a new website and soon the Online Community too will get an update in look & feel.

My role will still be to care for the online community - to approve and welcome new members and make sure they find their way around, as well as offer some potential conversations, groups or people on the site that might be interesting to connect to based on my awareness of the social landscape. I'd like to experiment more and more with social algorithms that I program to make sense of data and find meaningful connections in an abundance of possibilities. On my blog you can see some experiments of mine in that direction.

Here's a little graph that I created from the World Café community member data, using the dates people joined. The red line shows the growth of the community members from 0 to 3440 from it's first day of existence (May 8th, 2009) to day 834 (August 20th, 2011). The blue lines show the number of people that joined per day - the peak was on day 75 when 150 people joined :)

 

So, as you can see, I am inquiring into ways of telling the story of an online community, mirroring back its potential and connecting the members to each other... both by using my social intuition/care and by utilizing my humble but ambitious programming skills to harness meaningful insights from the data we are all providing through our online presence and interactions.

Soon I'd like to offer a tool where you can (if you want) find people who use similar words on their profile or a location search that allows you to find community members within a given radius from your location. I hope that will help you meet interesting people near you as well as be of benefit in your travels! 

Sunny greetings from Aarhus in Denmark,

Benjamin