(This is the second part of a two-part article. The
first part was
published yesterday. The complete article is
available on my web site.)
The context: membership dynamics and leadership roles
Every real-world and online community faces the same basic development
issues. How do potential members view the community they’re about to
join, and how can the community welcome them by giving them the
competencies they need? What opportunities do the leaders have for
training other members, and what responsibilities do they have to act
on these opportunities?
When it comes to recruitment, communities always have unwritten and
often unconscious rules concerning who’s in and who’s out. Although a
tight-knit elite sharing common values is useful for a few tasks, most
communities now understand that allowing the greatest possible
diversity of potential recruits will bolster the community’s chance of
success and bring in the strongest set of skills and ideas.
For this article, we’ll focus on broadening membership by helping new
members master the skills they need to succeed. The first tutorial
that a computer user tries when exploring a web framework may
determine whether she becomes an enthusiastic success story or
disappears from the site forever.
Difficulties in skill training abound everywhere, from businesses that
must quickly train new employees in their legal and accounting
requirements, to religious organizations that need to show new members
their doctrines and rituals. Online communities contain experts
willing to answer questions on forums, as well as tutorial and
reference documents. But as I suggested earlier in
a recent article,
technologies ill-suited to membership training limit the opportunities
available to leaders.
In addition, leaders often don’t know how to take advantage of
opportunities, or aren’t rewarded enough for doing so. for instance,
if attempts to help someone overcome difficulties in a technology lead
to flames excoriating it for being so difficult, a leader learns to
keep his head down and silently let the new member flounder–or worse,
to become defensive.
On the positive side, communities who identify competent leaders and
put them to use training new members can thrive in both new member
development and leadership development. Nothing is more precious in
education than the time and attention of a top-notch practitioner;
this time and attention should be put to the best possible use by
letting the practitioner hand the learner over to documentation at
every available opportunity.
In short, leaders need the proper tools and encouragement in order to
help new members. Among the crucial tools are good documents, but
documents (like communities) can’t do it alone.
The solution: a community can invest documentation with new value
As stated at the beginning of this article, computer users have two
types of resources: formal documentation (whether published books,
manuals, wikis, or articles) and informal help forums. Together, these
can be a powerful combination. They complement each other, and can
fill each other’s gaps.
The first task communities can perform is to find
information. People often come to mailing list and forums just to ask
whether a document exists that solves their problem. And the answer is
often a one-line message listing a book or URL.
The need for such exchanges clearly shows inefficiency in online
content. The person asking the question has probably invested
considerable time in a earnest search for the information, and others
must interrupt their work to give the answer. Therefore, better tools,
protocols, and community practices could do a lot to reduce the
findability problem. I treat this issue in the
other
articles
I pointed to earlier.
Another task that the community could perform is to interpret
the information. Some users need to be trained to read the material.
They may need to be told how to frame their questions productively and
what to look for in the documentation. On forums, one occasionally
sees a respondent successfully reframe the question this way. If
members of communities invested time into guiding new users through a
document, the communities might impart skills that would lift users to
new levels of competence and self-reliance.
This task is very difficult. Current forums and mailing lists provide
a poor foundation for it. People come and go pseudonymously. No one is
nominated to be a mentor, and attempts to mentor can appear
condescending. (How would you react to the offer “Let me show you how
to read a document…”?) On the other side of the conversation, there
is no way to tell whether a new entrant possesses the
stick-to-itiveness to benefit from the investment of time required by
the community.
So we need new, stronger ways to build communities. Experience with
the social networks that are springing up all over the place may
provide valuable insights. Social networks are oriented toward
promoting the people who are best-connected and most highly
respected. Perhaps these people could take the leadership role I laid
out. But the social networks are not so kind to new entrants without
impressive contacts of their own.
There has to be, first, a willingness to mentor and a willingness to
be an apprentice. Trust must be established for this to happen. And
then online tools need to bind mentors and apprentices more tightly
and with richer interactive media than current forums and mailing
lists allow. IRC is a tighter binding, but not a richer one. Virtual
worlds may provide the right medium, along with collaborative tools
such as the emerging online office suites.
During our focus on deepening the community experience, let’s not
forget the other term in the equation: formal documentation.
Basically, lessons that can help more than one person should be set
down in an easy-to-find location and subjected to extra effort (even
to professional editing). Documentation deserves further polishing if
it is:
-
Read by many people
-
Devoted to a topic that is complex, subtle, or fraught with risk
-
Expected to be relevant for long periods of time
Tools that reveal how often a forum posting or blog has been read can
reveal the first criterion, and authors can judge the others
intuitively. Thus, they can decide when to put extra effort into
formalizing a document.
And then some documents will rise to the level where professionalism
is rewarded. The original O’Reilly ventures–high-quality edited
content–prove their value after all.