Hi!

I’m happy to be writing my first post as Community Caretaker here at Akoha. Although the title might sound fluffy, I am seriously committed to keeping you in the loop at what we’re doing here at Akoha, and what our plans are going forward. I’m always available if you’d like to reach out with questions or feedback. Feel free to contact me anytime

For today’s post, I wanted to pop in and let you know that we’ve been working hard these past weeks on improving the Akoha experience. We’ve got some exciting ideas for redesign, and I can assure you that you’ll enjoy playing Akoha even more in the future! In the meantime, here’s a glimpse of our idea-generating sessions.

“We can has Post-It Notes?”

As you can see, we are very fond of our local stationery store (and yes, we do recycle these afterward).

NEW HOME

In other news, we have moved into ou new office on the sixth floor of the Cooper building. Instead of M1, all fan mail can now be directed to #615 - 3981 St-Laurent, Montreal, H2W 1Y5.

Here’s Alex posing during the move. I’ll post up new pictures once we’ve settled in!

After a long search, we’re happy to introduce Alain Wong as our new Community Caretaker. I’ve known Alain since he joined our friends at Standout Jobs two years ago, and he really made an impression on me, both through his warm and open personality, as well as his interest in social entrepreneurship and community-building. Alain embodies the Akohan spirit, having recently biked 3000km from Vancouver, Canada to Tijuana, Mexico to promote and raise funds for micro-credit.

When he’s not biking around the world or helping us spread the Akoha love, Alain teaches and competes as a professional swing dancer. Stealing a line from my friend Ben Yoskovitz, that’s just the type of person we like to have on our team, passionate and multi-talented.

• Alain Wong

  Community Caretaker

  Fresh off his previous adventures — working at his first startup and then riding his bike down the Pacific coast — Alain will do anything to put a smile on your face. Having studied business, law and the art of gifting, he works hard everyday to keep the the Akoha team focused on you, the player. More than anything, Alain is a good listener — so don’t be shy!

  In his spare time, you can find Alain cutting a rug to traditional jazz, teaching Lindy Hop, DJing, and blogging about the swing dance scene.

  

We’re still on the lookout for more great people who share our vision at Akoha. View our job openings here.

For the first time since we launched our closed beta at TechCrunch last fall we’re experiencing what’s referred to in tech circles as “unplanned downtime”. In regular-speak this means that our production servers just decided to stop working all of a sudden.

We’re really sorry if this causes you inconvenience and we wanted to let everyone know that we’re working hard to figure out what’s wrong and get Akoha.com back up and running again.

We have just got the machine that hosts the blog back up and running but we’re still working on the problems that have been plaguing our production servers (these issues may be due to hardware problems on the hosting machine). We expect that all servers will be fully operational within the next few hours.

In the meantime, you can check out our twitter feed for updates on the situation.

Thanks for your patience!

In my first post to this blog, I’m excited to announce that Akoha has just released django-lean, our open-source experimentation framework. Read on to find out more about why we created this tool and how it might affect you.

In order to best serve our Akoha community, we have made it our mission to learn more about who our community members are and what they are seeking from Akoha. One of our recent initiatives is the use of in-site experiments (also known as a/b or split tests) to gauge the effectiveness of our changes to Akoha.

Using experimentation, we are now able to implement a new idea but expose it to only a portion of our community members. Over a few days, we watch the aggregate activity of those users who saw the new feature (the test group) and compare it to those who did not (the control group). If the test group demonstrates more engagement with Akoha (more missions played, more comments, …) we consider the experiment a success and roll it out to all of our users. If the test group engagement is unchanged or worse as compared to that of the control group, we roll back the change and reconsider our assumptions.

For the most part, you will probably not notice that any of this is going on. But if you find yourself spending more time on Akoha over the next few weeks and months, it might just mean that our experiments are bearing fruit!

When we set out to begin our experimentation journey we found a lack of tools to help us along the way. We created django-lean to fill that gap, and decided to open-source it so that other developers might benefit from experimentation. For the technically minded amongst you, you can check it out at bitbucket.org today or come hear our flash presentation at Montreal-Python 9 on September 30th!

We’ve been hard at work for the past few weeks making improvements to Akoha’s innards; now it’s time for us to poke our heads up and gather some more feedback from our community!

For this study, we’re looking for 10 participants in Toronto or Montreal who have never used Akoha and who would like to spend 60 minutes 1-on-1 with our team to chat about how you’d like to use the web to make a difference in the world.

If you are between the ages of 18 and 35 and would like to be part of the study, please send us an email to support@akoha.com. Be sure to include your full name and a phone number so we can contact you.

Participants who are chosen for the full interview will receive a $50.00 Amazon or iTunes gift certificate.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

(Akoha values your privacy: all personal information including interview responses will be held strictly confidential. We won’t spam you and you will not be contacted by a salesperson.)