I’m Bill Johnston, the new Director of Community and Research for Forum One Communications.

I’ll be a regular contributor to the Online Community Report moving forward. My focus will be on highlighting how organizations are realizing value by engaging with their communities online – and vice versa.

I’ve been involved in Online Community space since 1999. I got my “big break” that year when I helped launch TechRepublic, a community for IT professionals. 1999 and 2000 are a big blur as we worked around the clock to crank out multiple versions of the TechRepublic community (based on member feedback, of course) and grow from 0 to 2 million members in less than 2 years.

I come to Forum One from Autodesk, where I spent the last 6 years designing user experiences and, more recently, driving online strategy for the company, including our blogs, discussion groups, and community sites. I am especially proud of the Autodesk Discussion Groups, our blog program, and of our industry community sites like AREA.

A really fun part of being in the online community space is meeting all the great people who are actively developing communities for their organizations. I plan on attending all of the community-related events that I can, so if you’d like to meet in person, please drop me a line at bjohnston@forumone.com .

For those of you in the Bay Area, I also direct a (free) quarterly networking event for Online Community pros called the Online Community Roundtable. If you are interested in attending, please send me an email.

You will also be hearing more from me about the Online Community Business Forum to be held in Sonoma May 3-4. Details will be posted here and on the Forum One site in the next few days.

OK, enough with the intros, now on to the blogging!