The SNA JumpStart series began yesterday very positively. We had almost 150 people on the call, and despite a phone glitch that kept my guest speaker from getting on the phone, all went well. I await the survey results. We’ve also had a rash of sign-ups for our Yahoo! group community, ona-prac.

It’s a bit daunting to start a Yahoo! group. It doesn’t have the features we’d really like, but the barriers to entry and to user participation are so low, it seems like a good way to get started.

I heard a great talk today about the Knowledge Network at Caterpillar Tractor (on the SIKM Leaders forum). They have homegrown tools that support the ability for two communities to share a threaded discussion. I could really use that this week. There are terrific dialogues about SNA and communities in the COM-PRAC list (discussion on ROI brought in the topic of SNA and benchmarks) and also in the new Google group Value Networks (Valdis Krebs’ posting about the validity of data in an article about SNA and a link to his article on The Social Life of Routers).

Second jump start session on SNA is tomorrow: Nat Welch will be hosting case studies by Don Ronchi (Raytheon) and Kate Ehrlich (IBM). It’s not to late to register.