Online Communities of Practice
From:
Adam Monty
Date:
Apr 22 20:18 UTC
Short link
On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:21:42AM -0500, Steven Clift wrote:
> Actually Pete, you proved my point by using a web feed to follow this forum.
:-)
>
> People should be able to choose their preferred method of participation -
e-mail, web forum, web feed, even a Facebook application - and still be part of
the same online community of practice.
>
> If it took someone as wired as you, X years to covert to web feeds
> (something like 7% of net users have used them directly), imagine
> how many years it will take for others.
Whilst nominally, amongst other hats, I'm a technologist (and a geek),
i'm a self-confessed non-RSS user (i.e., i don't use RSS)
(I'd love to use RSS, but I've yet to find a client that doesn't annoy
me. I might get around to writing one I could use, at some point)
> What I have found is that the invasive, broadcast character of e-mail
> is essential to reach busy people. People you need to be part of the
> exchange or it dies. They may not read most messages, but they will
> tune in if the subject is compelling.
Email, to me, has the advantage that it's easy to killfile senders, I
can filter stuff out of the way, and have my mail client organize things
nicely (assuming not too much brokenness in other participants/their
mail clients).
It's trivial for me to connect to the web (from anywhere, really), and
resume my mail from where I left it too. I don't usually need to worry
about "oh, this site's blocked by $overzealous-proxy" when it comes to
email.
That it arrives to me, and i don't need to visit a webpage is great.
> If you are trying to get local government staff for example to share
> knowledge, making participation a "destination" versus part of their
> daily online experience (location, location, location), excludes 50%
> of your audience. (Of course, if folks can't turn off e-mail you
> lose the other 50%!)
Also, email's now, almost universal, at least amongst most people
intended. One thing worth noting is that whilst people may (want to)
use some sort of collaborative-working software, it *has* to be something
familiar, or easy to pick-up: at the recent BarcampUKGovWeb, a few
participants were bewildered with the barcamp wiki; in setting up
http://www.govhack.com, I chose Mediawiki: it's familiar to people
given that's what Wikipedia uses.