Co-create your Community Manager

February 8, 2010

I’m your Community Manager and this means that it is my job to make Shapeways easier and more compelling for you while at the same time increasing the size of the Shapeways Community. Since I work for you, I’m going to ask for you to evaluate me. I am also going to ask for you to determine what the waking hours of the next three months of my life will be like and where we should be headed. I am asking you to co-create my job & output as a Community Manager for the next three months.

• What will my priorities be?
• What will I work on?
• What will I try to accomplish?
• What elements of Shapeways need to improve?

I’m asking you right now to take this survey in order to tell me now.

How it will work:

The survey is based upon all the comments, answers, ideas, feedback, conversations and emails I’ve received from our community over the past months. I could not include everything but instead included the ideas, projects and suggestions that were mentioned the most often. In some cases regular feedback was not included because it is already being handled by another project or person. In some cases the feedback and ideas came from a relatively small group of people or even an individual. In these cases however these people’s considerable efforts for the Shapeways Community and/or their unique expertise in a relevant area warranted their inclusion.

The free form responses or feedback you will write in addition to the survey will be tabulated, mind mapped and will be added to the goals and projects I will undertake. If significant clustering does occur between free form responses I will add these to my list of projects, priorities or goals.

I will divide up my time according to the priorities that come out of the survey. I will try to accomplish the goals set in the survey. A high score on the survey is no guarantee that something will happen, just that I will try my hardest to make it happen. There is also a personal 360 feedback element in the survey and I will try to either improve or stay the course with any and all information that emerges.

I want you to see me as your employee and I would like to be evaluated critically and fairly.

At the end of the time period I will do an evaluation to determine how successful I was in meeting your goals and if we should repeat this. I’m not sure yet how and if we can make those results public but will try to do so.

The survey will require that you fill in the email address you use with your Shapeways account in order to verify that you are a Shapeways Community Member. I will not see these email addresses. This survey will take you approximately 6 minutes. It would mean a lot to me if you took the time right now to take the survey here.

Photographs by Dano and mbiddulph under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

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Comments

1. David Drummond
   February 9, 2010 at 4:32 am
   Joris — At the risk of making public that which should be private, I’m going to err on the side that views your role as intrinsically public. I think you’re doing a great job. You come across as straightforward and genuinely concerned with doing the right thing, in private communications as well as in public. I’d like to see more of you on the Forums, modulo the risks in being seen as trying to guide, rather than assist, the community. Please do give us the results of the poll; I’d be interested in your thoughts about letting today’s community dictate your priorities, given that one of those priorities must be (whether we demand it or not) growing that community.

2. Lewis
   February 11, 2010 at 4:11 pm
   I want to know what CAD or 3D programs are available in the marketplace, to design all this cool stuff!

3. Richard
   February 11, 2010 at 7:29 pm
   Absolutely echo Lewis’ comment: I have a background in engineering and CAD/CAM – in fact worked on with the very first stereolithography processes in the early 90s – it’s amazing to see what ShapeWays can now deliver and I’d love to be able to design my own pieces: what tools do you recommend that are easily affordable for doing so?

4. Luis Maier
   February 11, 2010 at 9:19 pm
   The first time I was confronted with shapeways I was amazed what was possible to print and I started to browse the gallery. After some time I thought of searching something special, someting that interested me, but I could not find a thing, because the categories feature is so underdeveloped.

5. Joris
   February 12, 2010 at 10:57 pm
   Ok, that would be very cool but very difficult to do. One of the biggest issues we have is the sheer variation in metadata. But the implementation as you’ve described is awesome.

6. Erica Schwartz
   February 25, 2010 at 1:52 pm
   I didn’t remember to write this in my survey, but can you make it so we don’t have to pay ourselves when we order from our own shops? i don’t like to have to change the markup, order, and put the markup back on.

7. Shana Robinson
   March 1, 2010 at 8:09 pm
   Some type of Silicone rubber or other rubber material would be GREAT !!! How about Wood type of material also ?
   LUV ME SOME SHAPEWAYS !!!!!

8. hintzhamlet
   April 18, 2010 at 3:17 am
   Thank you for answering #3. I agree with 1 and 2 as well.

9. Joshua Salik
   January 4, 2013 at 1:59 pm
   I need to create several connected icosahedra. Can you help me with that? Thanks.

10. Duann
    January 4, 2013 at 3:53 pm
    Hey Joshua, you should try in our forums http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=92& Someone will be able to help you for sure.

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