Steve Jones sent me a link to a presentation Joel Spolsky did at Google about Stack Overflow (SO) and it’s worth watching. It’s not a community – well, not a traditional one anyway – the goal is to provide answers to questions and beyond that, to make sure answers get updated as the world changes. If you’ve looked at things like Yahoo Answers they aren’t very good, what I’ve seen on SO so far looks very good. Like any eco system they’ve spent some time figuring out what drives good behavior and how to thwart bad behavior, and doing pretty good at it as far as I can tell. It’s a lot like a wiki to me, less formal and more active.
I mention SSC at the same time for a couple reasons. One is he references the site in his presentation – one as an example of ‘community’, then again as a site that requires a login to see the answers. So while SSC isn’t ‘mine’ exactly any more, I know enough about it to find it interesting to think about the options that might lead to a good result. Way back in the beginning we required registration for a few reasons:
I give you all that as background to come back to the point – is SO a better model than SSC? Or perhaps stated better, is a better forum model? People visit the SSC forums in droves to ask and answer questions, would they be better served by the SO model? I can see the beauty in searching for something and bam, there’s a single highly rated answer (followed by lesser rated ones), where on SSC you have to follow the thread to see it evolve. I think there’s value in following the thread. Some of it incidental learning, maybe a little bit is earning the answer! But I’m not sure it’s the best way.
I look at it from a couple perspectives. One, does it threaten SSC, SQLTeam, and other technical web sites? What happens if all the pros move there to answer questions? Does a new set of pros take over, or does everyone move to the new platform for questions/answers? If they do, is SSC still a community? If they don’t move…why not?
Take a look. I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts on community, forums, and all the rest.
Following up on my post about Wikipedia, I read an article in Eweek, 25 Tips for a Better Wiki Deployment that seemed interesting, but hardly earthshaking. In my view building a successful wiki depends on a confluence of events, mainly a problem or subject that lends itself to the format, and the willingness of users to contribute and maintain the content that addresses that problem or subject. I think Wiki's excel at answering questions, but that assumes you are asking the right question! It's very common in forum posts for someone to ask a question after not being able to find the answers via a search engine because they were using the "wrong" word or phrase, where someone with more experience often finds the answer right away because they know the words.
I've been looking at Wiki's out of curiousity - love the technology, but still not sure I recognize all the value everyone else does. I need to capture and organize a bunch of information about conducting a SQLSaturday, would that work well in a Wiki rather than the Word doc I'm using now? My doc representation is serial, start to finish, can I build a wiki so someone can follow the information the same way, or extract it and order it the same way? Or is that anti-wiki?
I think wiki's succeed just like Sharepoint does, not because of the technology, but because it enables (dare I say empowers) non IT users to post useful information on the intranet. I'm looking for a wiki project just to try it out first hand, but waiting for one that seems like a good fit!
Recently I posted about an interview with Jimmy Wales and only a couple days after that I ran across What Motivates Wikipedians in the November issue of ACM Communications. The motivations varied, with the primary ones being fun and ideology (knowledge should be free). There didn't seem to be one hugely compelling reason, but according to their numbers the average contributor puts in 8 hours a week.
That had me thinking about two things. First, maybe I should be contributing, both to give back some value and to better understand the work that goes into it. Adding that to my list, now to find a topic about which I can say something meaningful. The other point was a reiteration of something I already know; that communities are incredibly powerful things.
