Company: Cisco
Entry submitted by: Juana Dehanov (jdurande) Community Strategist
Community: Cisco Tech Zone
Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight
_____________________________________________
Tech Zone is Cisco’s internal engineer community that was built by engineers for engineers. Our users are extremely engaged in driving Tech Zone’s collaboration and content creation to the next level.
With this in mind, Tech Zone launched the “Best Greasemonkey Widget Contest” in which we asked all our engineers to create a widget that would enhance the Tech Zone user experience.
(Greasemonkey is a browser add-on that allows users to customize the behavior and display of a webpage using Javascript).
The idea behind this contest was to give engineers an opportunity to innovate within Tech Zone. In addition to the prizes the winners had their scripts natively integrated in to Tech Zone. One big advantage of the Lithium platform is that taking these scripts and integrating them as native features is a relatively simple process.
This initiative triggered the engineers to experiment and enhance a platform to make it more their own. They developed some incredible new features such as:
A Table of Contents option on the rich text editor
A Tech Zone Navigator that will show in all the pages
A "Kudo Givers" widget to allow users to view the list of kudo givers for a thread or TKB article
Over 300 engineers submitted, commented and voted on the contest entries. After much deliberation, the Tech Zone community selected the winners.
“You know, what people like today is to have very powerful tools that are very easy to use.
If the tools are amazingly powerful (as Tech Zone is), but not easy to use, then people might not use it which is really sad. Also, it will make Tech Zone a bit faster, as users can jump directly to the category they need, without the need of an additional jump to the homepage.
I know that it is only a matter of a few seconds, but the difference between Usain Bolt and an average person on a 100 meter run is also a matter of a couple of seconds :-)” - GreaseMonkey Winner Tristan Van Egroo.