Posted by fallsfall on February 11, 2004, at 7:47:15
This started as a response to Phil's question about male vs. female posters. But I'm putting my response in a new thread because I think that it asks a bigger question. There are two questions at the end, Dr. Bob, that I would like you to answer.
We DO want to help. We DO love Babble.
> > Didn't you post demographic info here a few years ago?
>
> It's still there:
>
> http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/stats
>
> > Do you know the demographics of the boards now?
>
> Sorry, I haven't checked lately...Is it hard for you to check? How busy are you these days? Is this something that you think you would put on your list of things to do? Could you give a guess as to when you might generate the numbers (or predict that you won't generate them)? In other words, are we likely to get numbers any time soon? Is there something that other people could do to help you get answers like these? How do you prioritize what "work" you do?
>
> You pose some interesting questions. I don't have any answers. Do you have any theories?I think that the theories would be hard to generate without some numbers to start with. Do you want to be involved in the discussion, or should this be a discussion among the board members?
>
> Bob
Dr. Bob,A lot of suggestions can come up on this board. You have a limited amount of time to spend on this stuff, and we understand that. It would help me to know what your priorities are and how big your backlog is. That would let me know if something that I consider important might make it to a spot where you might be able to work on it. I understand that sometimes you might want to say that a given suggestion doesn't meet your criteria for getting done right away - but you don't want to discourage people from making suggestions, and you don't want to make anyone feel that their ideas are not important. One way of doing this is by being vague and seeing who persues their ideas. That way you don't have to shoot ideas down and make people feel badly, the ideas just sort of go away on their own. But this strategy leaves me feeling that everything is unanswered.
I think that we are probably mostly reasonable people and able to understand that there are time constraints for changes etc. to this board. But since we have no visibility into what the priorities nor the time constraints it is hard for us to know what is reasonable and what is not.
In business, people frequently have a list of tasks with a schedule that indicates when things would be done. Schedules often slip, and I think that's OK - but at least the task list gives an indication of what things are important. It also gives other people a chance to comment on the prioritization, so that the order of the list will end up meeting everybody's needs better. Do you have such a list? Would you be willing to post it? I would be happy if the list didn't have dates - just priorities - it is not my intention to "make" you do things - I just want to know what things are in the pipeline.
I think that you have a lot of things to do - I think that we all recognize that. I think that you enjoy doing some of these things on Babble. But it seems like things are a little overwhelming. Would you like to have some help? I know that you have had deputies in the past, and that did seem to take some of the burden off of you. There are other ways that some of us could help, too, if you want. I know of at least two programmers in the Babble community (I am one), would you be interested in having help in tracking down problems or writing new features or collecting data (which is what this thread was about)? There are also people with management experience in this community. They could help with project management or prioritization or coordination of resources. I'm sure that some people would be happy to donate their time if you would like that kind of help.
Additionally, I think that people would be willing to enter discussions on particular topics. In these discussions, all of the questions could be asked (because I certainly agree that questions are important), but some kind of conclusion could be reached that could then be explained to the rest of the community. Perhaps, for each topic, a topic moderator could be chosen whose task it would be to make sure that questions were asked and that a conclusion was reached. You could participate with each one of these discussions (or not), and have veto power - but I guess that if you did veto something that I would really just like a short explanation (i.e. "the software is not capable of doing this", or "This would take more time than it is worth" or "I think that this would destabilize the community because..." or "This is really outside the scope of what Babble is supposed to be"). Hopefully, you could have as much input as you wanted, but someone else would be responsible for driving the issue to completion.
There are a lot of very smart people in this community, and there are a lot of people who care deeply about this community. Many of us would be happy to help in a variety of ways, but there doesn't really seem to be a way to get those people organized.
I'm assuming that you will not answer all of the questions that I have put in this post. So let me boil it all down to one question, and we can work from there:
Dr. Bob, would you be in favor of accepting help from Babble posters for the administration and direction of the Babble site?
Well, I guess it has to be two questions:
If your answer is yes, would you be willing and able to define what types of help you could use, or would you rather have a collection of people present you with a list of suggestions that you could choose from?
Fallsfall
poster:fallsfall
thread:311966
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20040112/msgs/311966.html