1.3. Enhancing and Expanding the Community

We constantly seek feedback from the community. We use that feedback, which comes in a number of forms, both solicited and unsolicited, to shape our future actions. We also use the feedback and metrics collected from the online community as a measure of success. You have to know your community to keep it vibrant and engaged. We believe that both the Matrix and VTS have increased knowledge sharing, collaboration, and networking capabilities among VeriSign technicians. We've also witnessed the launch of additional subcommunities in the areas of quality engineering and software architecture.

We've enhanced the social networking and community-building capabilities and improved the usability of our platform. We wanted to provide more Facebook-like features to allow employees to make connections and form interest groups. Jive Software's Social Business Software, which we've selected as the platform, supports multiple communities, groups, blogging, user customization, forums, and "friending."

We have recently implemented these capabilities companywide in the belief that all employees can benefit from improved knowledge sharing. When we upgraded the technical community platform, we allowed people to test it before we rolled it out to the entire company. We hope the platform will promote greater cross-functional transparency and allow employees to make more connections with their colleagues throughout the company.

The VeriSign technical community still maintains its own presence on the Matrix but so do the customer support and web properties communities. And we expect other communities to form. In addition, numerous collaborative groups and social interest groups have been created, a greater number of thought leaders are blogging, and employees are connecting with each other and enhancing their profiles. Our ability to roll this out companywide has been bolstered by an executive leadership team that values hearing from its employees, is committed to building a culture of trust and employee empowerment, and supports multiple communication channels—top down, peer-to-peer, and bottom up.