A few words from the new guy

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A few words from the new guy

Fri, 2009-11-27 11:24

Hey there! John Markow here. The new guy.

As Tommi mentioned, I've recently joined the team behind Beta Labs to help everyone involved at Beta Labs get value out of participating - from the community of lead consumers, to the R&D teams developing the apps, to our employees participating in alpha testing. I'm really honored and excited to have the chance to work with people that share the same passion to improve Nokia's products and services in this way.

So who am I? Well, I'm an American originally from near Boston, Massachusetts, an electrical engineer by training, a communications professional by experience, and a social media enthusiast. For almost nine years I've been living in Finland with my family and working for Nokia in various communications roles.

Throughout that time I've seen the challenges that small teams at Nokia face in bringing innovations to the market, but I've also seen the potential in the simple act of listening to people that care enough to speak up. It's amazing to see how Beta Labs (and its internal sibling that I helped to establish) have matured in a relatively short time, thanks in large part the contributions from our community.

And what will I do? Following on what Tommi and Ilkka (next to me in the photo) have been courageously doing already, I'll exercise my facilitation muscles to help connect the dots between our beta testing community, employees, and product teams...all the while trying not to spoil those things that are working well. And in practical terms I'll be helping the R&D teams with publishing materials at the site, gardening the content as needed, and looking after our Twitter stream.

But before I get ahead of myself, I'd love to hear what you have in mind in terms of developing how things work around here. Just drop a comment below.

- John

Tags:

Beta Labs improvements

Comments

Submitted by mbrett on 27-11-2009 15:06. Welsom toe the forum

Firstly I just want to say welcome.

Looking in the Graduated Betalabs forum will be a good place for you to start in finding a number of community suggestions which have been discussed in the past and have been added to Ilkka's list of things to do at different points.

Following from that do you want community suggestions to remain in the Graduated Betalabs Forum or is there a new suggestions box planned (website specific), rather than suggestions for new apps, which keep making there way into the Betalabs forums.

Some of the main issues we see is lack of progress reporting in most dev teams. I realise they are very busy guys, but this lack of cumminication in some areas can result in loss of interest from the Forum Community. I myself have seen a number of big contributors fade away over time. We see very long time between beta releases when compared with other companies efforts. This is by no means slating the betalabs team who work very hard, but as an example. OVI Maps 3 released a beta in c.Feb'09 for S60v3 then one more beta c.May'09 and then I think we went to the final release, which contained many of the reported bugs from the betas and a couple of new ones. I relise that Kee and the guys are also very busy, but maybe you will be able to help improve the lines of communication and reporting. The above Maps incedent did leave a sour taste in many mouths.

I can make many more suggestions, but If I continue too much longer you would need to print on multiple pages for this one comment.

Welcome again,
mbrett
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N95 8Gb (Product Code: 0558787 (UK)) FW 31.0.015
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http://www.n97geeks.com

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mbrett
N97 RM-505 (Product Code: 0585262 (Vodafone UK)) FW 21.0.045
N95 8Gb (Product Code: 0558787 (UK)) FW 31.0.015
http:///www.twitter.com/MartynBrett
http://www.n97geeks.com
If you find a post helpful give it a thumbs up.

Submitted by markow76 on 27-11-2009 15:22. Thanks mbrett

Thanks mbrett for the welcome and for the good tips so far. I'll definitely dig into the old posts and see how I can help, especially in the area of improving the communication between contributors and development teams. Setting up some chats with regular contributors is probably a good idea too.

For now let's keep using the Forum for Nokia Beta Labs to discuss anything related to the site, the community, or the activity overall. It's in the Graduated category now, but we'll move it back to Active when we do the next site update.

http://betalabs.nokia.com/forums/nokia-beta-labs

John

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John - Community Facilitator @ Beta Labs

Submitted by suyog on 27-11-2009 17:03. Welcome on Board !

John,

Welcome. It's great to see Nokia giving importance to Beta labs and even improving channel between users, employees, development. I hope to see few more things
- More formal bug tracking
- Faster response/interaction from product teams
- More clear communication regarding when apps get graduated(I still see Messaging IM in Beta)

Suyog

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Best Regards,
Suyog

http://mobileyog.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/mobileyog

Submitted by speedgrapher on 27-11-2009 18:09. welcome!

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5800 Xpressmusic / 0561618 / FW 31.2.008
N95-3 / 0551733 / FW 20.2.011

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N97 mini / 0585508 / FW 12.2.110
5800 Xpressmusic / 0561618 / FW 50.2.005
N95-3 / 0551733 / FW 35.2.001
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MacBook Unibody - OSX 10.6 - iLife '09

Submitted by snowy on 03-12-2009 12:00. welcome aboard

welcome aboard

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