
From stagefright to encouraged participation
In any community of practice, it is natural that some people will have more experience and more words of wisdom to contribute than others; we expect (nay, we hope) that these people will contribute disproportionately more. Others will join to listen and to learn. A third form of participation is by asking questions, and if a well-formed question is responded to with one or more considered answers, the whole community benefits from the knowledge shared. Independently of this, there is the personality factor. It is clear that some people are simply more confident than others in launching a message into public arena, for a variety of reasons to do with their family background, life experience, command of language or whatever. And in any new setting, even a confident person may take time to speak up, though it be only to ask a question. When people are averse to speaking out in public, we call it ‘stagefright’. In a face-to-face setting, such as a workshop, we can diminish this barrier by splitting a large group into smaller groups. For most people, speaking up in a small group feels less risky, and a good workshop leader will ensure some icebreaking activity precedes the discussion to increase trust. (Face-to-face in a small group, there is actually also some pressure in favour of contributing: if two out of seven around a table remain silent, it will feel very odd.) ‘Stagefright’ operates in online settings too. Nonnecke and Preece found that the proportion of lurkers rises in larger, more anonymous online communities. The difference here is the cloak of invisibility. If you are totally invisible to others unless you speak, which is usual online, lurking is a comfortable, risk-free strategy — and it takes more energy to move people on from there.Don’t bite the newbies!
We probably do not put enough effort into devising ways of inducting people into online communities so that they feel comfortable and confident in adding what they know and asking about what they don’t. It would be useful to know whether online systems where people establish a profile and add a photo are less scary than more anonymous forums. It certainly sounds reasonable that having a known identity and a reputation to care for should at least dissuade the kind of verbal ‘terrorism’ that some online denizens inflict on their fellows. Sadly, in many online knowledge-sharing communities, especially those with a technical support or knowledge curation function, there has been a long history of ‘newbies’ being savaged verbally, or subjected to dismissive sarcasm. Sometimes this is understandable: long-term community members can get sick and tired of seeing the same basic ‘dumb’ questions raised again and again by newcomers. This of course is why ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ lists were first devised, and it is not unreasonable in such circumstances to direct new members to the FAQ as a first resort.Foreground the knowledge, acknowledge the contribution
Where a community of practice, or a knowledge community, functions primarily through an email list or online forum such as those operated by LinkedIn, there is always a risk of previous expressions of knowledge getting lost, of repetition of topics, and of such discouraging attacks on newbies. But if the online system puts the knowledge in the foreground, and keeps it permanently accessible, so that discussion happen around the knowledgebase, we should expect those problems at least to go away. However, this still leave the matter of how to encourage contributions of knowledge.
Stacking up knowledge
Do knowledge communities function best when someone acts as the facilitator and moderator? It is an idea I have often heard expressed, and I myself have often seen discussion lists function better because someone has stepped informally into this ‘pastoral’ role.
30,000 tags organise 2 million Q&As
They have found that their user community is generally quite good at assigning relevant descriptive tags to the problem they are describing. Only high-privilege users can create new tags, but over time a library of over 30,000 has built up, and you shoul apply as many as are relevant. Each tag has an ‘info’ page, which combines the attributes of a concise introductory description, and what in a thesaurus would be called a ‘scope note’, an explanation of when it is appropriate to use that tag. (All these tag ‘info’ pages combined are known as the system’s ‘tag wiki’.) The site makes it very easy to browse Q&A sets by tag, also to view which ones are actively looking for answers, which ones are most popular, etc. If you register as a Stack Overflow member, you get to customise your personal interface to the site, selecting the tags in which you are most interested. Regular visitors will thus be presented on arrival with stuff that interests them. The site also usies the tags to track what kind of questions you have answered in the past and will alert you to new questions in that field which you might want to answer.Wiki-like editing improves the quality
Interestingly, unlike the Xerox Eureka approach which gave ownership of knowledge to the contributor, Stack Overflow permits senior members who have earned enough privileges (see below) to edit both the questions and the answers, and to keep editing them. Spolsky remarks that this was directly inspired by Wikipedia, with the aim that the quality of question-and-answer sets can improve over time.Voting sifts content, assigns reputation

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