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

You might also want to consider the roles that you hope people will
assume in this phase of the process and then provide tools to serve
people who take on different roles.

Though some people may decide to play many or multiple roles, making
it easier to self-identify how or what one wishes to contribute might
help get this going.

Basic roles might include:

• researcher
• coordinator
• designer
• developer
• professional liaison
• recorder or documenter
• writer
• creative
• moderator
• leader

....and so on.

In the beginning it may also make sense to keep the number if roles
served to a minimum and then expand over time.

Starting off the conversation with a discussion of tools is a great
way to collect personal opinions and gain insight into different
approaches to achieving productivity, but until you spell out what
activities are pertinent to the success of the group, it is premature
to determine which tools the participants should (or will be willing
to) use.

Chris

On Thursday, August 19, 2010, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@w3.org> wrote:
>> 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
>
> OK, I'm seeing:
>
> 1) Mailing list
> 2) hashtag
> 3) blog
> 4) Wiki (I know,I know, but sometimes it does help to be able to
> collectively edit documents, like draft charters or specs).
>
> Again, this can be done I assume more or less right after the task force
> phone call assuming we get consensus on the name/hashtag and whatnot
> during the call.
>
>
>>
>> --
>> Robin Berjon
>>   robineko — hired gun, higher standards
>>   http://robineko.com/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>

-- 
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate, Google

Web: http://factoryjoe.com
Phone: 412.225.1051
Follow me on Buzz:
http://buzz.google.com/chrismessina<http://google.com/profiles/chrismessina>

....or Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrismessina

This email is: [ ] shareable [ ] ask first [X] private

Received on Saturday, 21 August 2010 11:26:11 UTC