Educating computer users: the need for community/author collaboration (Part 2 of 2)

(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.