Anyone who’s spent any time at Portland tech events has likely met Dawn Foster. She’s one of the founding members of Legion of Tech, one of the driving forces behind BarCamp Portland, an adviser to the Shizzow and the SAO, a leader of the online community manager and Portland data plumbing user groups, and a regular attendee at Beer and Blog—among thousands of other things.
One thing you may not realize is that, in addition to juggling all of those side projects, she manages to do a day job, too. And today she announced that that “day job” part of her life was changing. Dawn has joined the Olliance Group to lead a new online community practice.
“I am excited to be joining Olliance Group,” Dawn told me. “My community expertise combined with their established consulting practice and focus on open source will be a great combination. It’s also a great way for me to expand my scope to work on some bigger projects while working with a great team.”
Dawn will become the Senior Executive and Practice Manager for a new Online Community Practice designed to help organizations get the most out of their participation online.
The practice comprises distinct services for building communities, participating in existing ones, and leveraging social media. It focuses on developing community strategy to fit within overall organizational strategy, community planning, assisting with implementation, and mentoring and training throughout the process. The practice emphasizes segmenting audiences, seeding compelling content and technology in beta deployment, incorporating real-world events, identifying and implementing effective metrics and social media monitoring to track and enhance community profiles.
And to overstate the obvious, she’s a welcome addition to the team.
“Building sustainable, vibrant and commercially rewarding communities while by providing real value to participants, balances art and science. Dawn brings a proven track record of helping companies find that balance,” commented Andrew Aitken, Founder and Managing Partner of Olliance Group in a press release. “Dawn’s domain expertise and experience in building successful communities will enable Olliance clients capture and retain developer mindshare and realize the greatest benefit from their community activities.”
And the best part of this new gig (as far as Portland is concerned)? Even though the Olliance office is in Palo Alto, Dawn will be staying right here in Portland as part of the tech community.
For more information on the gig and her immediate future, read Dawn’s post on the Olliance role. For more from Olliance, read the press release on Dawn.
(Image courtesy Aaron Hockley. Used under Creative Commons.)
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Congrats Dawn, good luck with the new opportunity!
Cool! Congrats, Dawn!