Re: Starting Up the Web Innovation Forum/New Ideas Forum

On Aug 19, 2010, at 14:13 , olivier Thereaux wrote:
> First, mailing-lists are very alien to a lot of people outside w3c, and not the most comfortable form of online communication for many

That is true, but are they alien to a large part of the crowd that we're looking to talk to?

That being said, I've always thought that mail archives that could be writable for people who are more comfortable in forum-like discussions would be a good idea (but I don't know that we have that handy).

> Second… I've tried using wikis for idea sharing, it doesn't work very well. Putting aside the fact that (again) wikis are not familiar to all, I have found that a wiki exhibits a number of issues when it comes to being an idea/innovation space. The main issue, I think, is that wikis seem to work best to document something that is going on elsewhere: news, knowledge, a software project... But when it comes to using a wiki as the innovation space itself, it doesn't provide the right social dynamics: no sense of "ownership" of the concepts, no guidance, comments tend to be put on a "talk" page, the difficulty of knowing where activity happens, and I won't get started on the thorny dynamics of editing the text of someone elses's idea.

I agree, wikis work when people can fall into editor/corrector categories but they don't work for exchange and creation.

> Although I can't of course suggest the perfect alternative, I would suggest considering this one, flawed but IMHO showing more potential. Start a blog where anyone can register and where the default role for user is that of author. 
> 
> Why?
> * The blog (or news, or social-network-status) and comment paradigm is comfortable to most of our contemporaries
> 
> * People can take as long as they want to let their ideas mature (draft), show them to the world (publish), discuss (comments, trackbacks, etc) and make their idea evolve (re-edit) based on the feedback while retaining some control and pride of "ownership"
> 
> * The popular (and thus familiar) wordpress software allows you to do just this, and is ridiculously easy to install and manage.
> 
> * Barrier to entry would be minimal
> 
> * A blog could also be used for more "guided" challenge-response topics. This I find is how a lot of successful (or budding) open innovation networks have chosen to work. See for example: http://www2.innocentive.com/ http://openideo.com/ or http://frogmob.frogdesign.com/

I like the idea. Blogs can work as a community of discussion. +1

--
Robin Berjon
  robineko — hired gun, higher standards
  http://robineko.com/

Received on Thursday, 19 August 2010 12:23:51 UTC