2017 Blog Retrospective
With the New Year, comes reflection on 2017, and the desire to further recognize some of the great contributions on the SAP Community. In that spirit, I hope you will enjoy this compilation of some of the outstanding blogs contributed last year, with a twist.
The idea for this retrospective was inspired by Jelena Perfiljeva’s “Blog Digest” series from January 2017. In it, I found blogs I was delighted to read, but that I don’t think would have gotten my attention otherwise. The new “Most Popular” (formerly, “Most Liked” blogs section on the SAP Community landing page gave me further encouragement, since it has also led me to great blogs that are in tags I don’t follow, or by authors I am not familiar with.
The twist is, that in the tradition of the Member of the Month, we decided to limit recognition to contributors who are not SAP Mentors or SAP Employees, since that status already helps generate attention and interest. These harder to notice posts were selected based on a combination of quality indicators by other members and traffic analytics to help sort them out. Our goal is to help bring blogs to your attention that you might have missed, while recognizing the contributors.
Please join me in congratulating these outstanding contributors. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, expertise and perspective by blogging on the SAP Community.
Putting this list together was immensely enjoyable for me. Reading through the contenders, it seemed the subject matter, which ranges from technical knowledge sharing, guidelines on how to handle answered questions, and feedback on things that need to improve here, represented our year on community well.
Despite our challenges, the spirit of knowledge sharing, onboarding and commitment to helping things get better came through. I am optimistic for 2018!
We hope to continue this initiative with similar bi-monthly retrospectives going forward. More details from me and Jerry Janda coming soon.
Many thanks to those who provided input as we put initiative together!
Thank you! I don't know that I deserve to be on the list, but I'm happy that I am.
Michelle
You started quite a conversation! Definitely a notable part of 2017. Thank you for your continued contributions.
Congratulations to all the outstanding authors listed above!
Thanks for a list. These are great ways to discover new members to follow
Hey Caroleigh,
I very much like this idea! Honoring the authors, and giving everyone a chance to discover something they might have missed otherwise!
On
I'm wondering: Could we maybe get the raw data (#openData !) of this analysis? (e.g. as a spreadsheet or something)
Again, I think we could benefit twice:
- amongst the 2nds, 3rds and so on places per month, there are probably also some things worth (re-)discovering
- having (big) data and playing around with it (-> gaining insight) is something some people like to do. Maybe they even do it using SAP technologies, thus showcasing use-cases which relate to SAP Community, too.
Looking forward to the bi-monthly retrospectives!
best
Joachim
Interesting idea. Let's see what Jamie Cantrell thinks.
This reminds me of something I once read about mountain climbing. Everyone pays attention to the "Seven Summits," the highest peaks on each of the continents, and the few mountaineers who have reached all seven are rightly honored. However, it would be a far more difficult achievement to climb the seven "second-highest" summits rather than the highest summits, as that particular group includes mountains known to be significantly more difficult and dangerous (think, K2 instead of Everest).
Ooh then turn the big data play into a friendly competition amongst community members to show off their sap skills to visualise the data and blog about it!
Hi Joachim Rees & Colleen Hebbert
Really interesting ideas regarding getting some activity going on around the data.
To do this particular analysis, there were a lot of considerations put into what should qualify/disqualify posts from being counted. For example, SAP employee and Mentor posts were not included because we wanted to give some visibility to posts by other members who might not otherwise get that same exposure. A lot of weight was given to user-driven metrics, like “likes” and comments, to ensure that we were recognizing blogs that didn’t just rake in the views, but that were considered valuable by our members. There were judgment calls to be made and each blog post was reviewed to ensure we were also sharing a good mix of post types and topics. For example, you’ll notice that we included posts that were more critical of the current community experience, as well as how-to’s and personal event experience recaps. We also wanted to make sure that there was no funny business going on (e.g. accounting for any “bot”-type activity), so Caroleigh, our gamification guru, was the best person to take the reigns and dig into the data to make sure that the posts we were highlighting really did reflect the fair values of the Community. So, while the data played a huge role in creating the initial list, it was not the only factor in selecting the final posts. In that sense, a spreadsheet won’t give you the full story of why each post was selected.
I commend Caroleigh Deneen for the time and effort she put into this post, and for her commitment to recognizing the hard work each of our authors puts into their blogs. It’s this type of acknowledgment and peer recognition that makes our community so special.
Hi Jamie Cantrell
I agree completely with your commendation of Caroleigh Deneen 's efforts. It's great to see blogs brought to the surface and nice to discover some i had not read. Excluding employees and Mentors made sense as well 🙂
It was more thinking how to go further to discover new content but encourage people to get involved with community by applying their skills
Regards
Colleen
Hi Jamie,
thanks for explaining in more detail how those blogs have been chosen, very interesting indeed!
I take your response as a very polite turning down on my idea to have the raw data released, is that correct?
If you don't feel like sharing it, that's ok with me.
But my point "it would be interesting (and not harmful) to have that data" stands nevertheless.
If you do decide on providing it, you might put a disclaimer on it saying something like "sorting this by most likes etc. will not necessarily result in the list we created because [link to your post].".
I said it in other places (don't find them now) already: I would like it to have statistics provided by the creators of SAP Community. (As opposed to having to collect the data oneself (RSS, Webcrawling... ), as others (e.g. Robert Russell ;-)) have done in the past).
Now that you have the data right there, I think it would be nice and easy releasing them. But again, if you don't want to or cannot, that's fine with me, too.
best
Joachim
Hi Joachim,
As you mentioned me 🙂 then I enjoy using SAP tools to collect the data from this site. It would be interesting to see official data though. It does seem lots of potential official data is collected (as long as it doesn't slow the site down then it is a good idea). And the back door to the karma points via answer hub api was switched off just after I had an email from Michael Braun. So the official data is obviously there as mentioned - just not shared...
Cheers
Robert
Did Michael Braun explain why the AH API was turned off? Was it a performance issue, privacy, or something else?
I didn't follow up after it was switched off, so no idea why. I only guess that the karma points being visible via AH API was a problem. As that went against the stated privicy of this feature. But only guessing the reason why it was switched off.
Oh, and maybe you (and others) can also follow Veselina's suggestion and (user-)tag those blogs with blog digest ?!
Would be great for ontent discovery and "keeping things together"!
I very much like this idea, and since we would like to do more to draw attention to member (non-SAP) blogs, this could be a convenient way to group these highlights together.
--Jerry
Hi Caroleigh,
it is fantastic idea to congratulate and giving thanks to the contributors.they have given very timely help and prompt response which helps our forum members more benefit. they are supporting for a very long time..simply great.
This guys made it big. so we need to give them big applause/ Appreciation.
Regards,
G.V.Shivakkumar
.
Thank you, Caroleigh! Very timely post as during the holiday season many blogs can easily fall through the cracks in our attention spans. 🙂 Even though I tried to stay on top of ABAP blogs I found one that I would've missed otherwise.
By the way (what would be a comment without sneaking in a request? 😉 ), can we get Latest ABAP Blogs back to the home page, please? It looks like they had to yield the space to add Top Liked. But there is sooo much white space and unnecessary large images, surely we should be able to squeeze in more content.
Thank you!
Happy you found one, that's what we were hoping for:) Let's ask Catherine LaCroix about getting the ABAP Blogs back on the home page...
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but, unfortunately, we cannot add a 4th column to that page. I realize the white space is unpleasant to most and it looks like we have plenty of space to add content, but in reality, the template won't allow it.
That said, we could, if we had a large consensus, change one of the feeds to display only ABAP content as we had before. That is limiting though and the content, as you likely know, is available on the ABAP page: https://www.sap.com/community/topic/abap.html.
In addition, we could highlight ABAP content in the Featured Content section. That's below the feeds, but it does offer a better spot to include recent blogs that may otherwise be overlooked. Feel free to send along suggestions to me as I'm updating that space at least once a week (probably more).
I know it's not the answer you seek, but I hope it's helpful.
Catherine
Thanks for all contributors which are spend their unpriced time for us.
Thanks for the short list. I’ve got a lot of reading to do after a pause in SAP work. A lot changes in two years and it’s fun getting to pick up all the “wish list” items that are now part of SAP.
Thank you for recognizing my contribution.
Thanks & Regards,
Tushar Sharma
Thanks for your recognition, Caroleigh!
Hope you all have a wonderful new year and bring more inspirational thoughts to our great community!
Congratulation for outstanding contribution. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, expertise and perspective by blogging on the SAP Community. in many situation it helped me to go through the topics and helped me decide and take important client facing challenges..