Good question.Which sport do you think they'll invent next?
I suspect we'll see a higher speed, more action orientated version of an existing sport - especially as we're starting to do more research into biomechanical augmentation.
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Good question.Which sport do you think they'll invent next?
This is kind of abstract for me. Can you give 2 or 3 examples of what you mean?Why we keep making the same mistakes. Even veterans make the same mistakes over and over - the fact that we keep having the same discussions on dealing with problem members, with the same outcomes (which almost always lead to technological crutches propping up not solving the social problems) shows that collectively we're not learning.
I don't think you should let a particular admin zone forum be representative of the conversations that are happening on community development.The other big talking point I'd love to see more of is to talk about the next generation. There is no shortage of discussion about 'the death of forums' - attributing blame, such as it is, to social media, to Reddit, to fickle youth, to mobile devices. While all of these can be proximate causes, any time there's a discussion about 'how we might think about moving past it', it's inevitably mired in doom-mongering. The next iteration of forum experience isn't going to bring back the 2000s gold rush era, nor is it going to be the Next Big Thing.
I agree! Documentation is so generic and high level, but it doesn't apply to real world situations.Consider it this way: you decide you want a community space, and none of the forum vendors is *that* interested in onboarding you into what that means. Yes, there's documentation on the platforms themselves but imagine if that were actually presented in a course fashion rather than a dusty manual or dry wiki. Break things into courses with outcomes and a learning journey - take people through 'you have a problem', 'this is the solution', 'this is how you do it'. It kills me how much we don't do that with user-facing documentation. I miss the days when applications came with weight manuals that had tutorials and how-to guides in them where it would take you through 'here's what we're going to do, here's how we're going to do it, this will be the outcome'.
This is very abstract. Can you identify 2 or 3 examples where you'd like to see substantive conversation?There is a corollary discussion to that, and probably the single biggest conversation we're not having as community admins: we talk a lot about the tools, we talk about platforms and themes and add-ons and plugins and widgets and components and APIs and apps and... does any of it actually matter? Does any of it help or hinder people *talking*? Because at heart, that's what a community is about, people talking and sharing ideas. The allure of any one community is that it has the kinds of thoughts and things shared that help you and provoke you into doing something with them, as well as being able to find what you want, what you need and what interests you further.
Imagine if we talked about cars the way we talk about communities: we'd spend forever arguing other whether you should hang fuzzy dice on the rear-view mirror, what colour they should be, exactly how fuzzy. We'd be debating whether different shapes of steering wheel make a radical difference to driver safety (like the weird steering wheel in Knight Rider, that's not really a *wheel*). We might be talk about whether a given manufacturer can consistently turn out reliable models, whether a given manufacturer's models run efficiently with a given amount of fuel - things that are important in making sensible informed decisions, but ultimately things that are ancillary to 'how does it do getting me from A to B when I want to, does it drive where I need and want to go'. No point getting a low-chassis supercar with supercharged engine that can go 0-60 in seconds if you're needing to deal with hilly terrain.
The obvious example is dealing with troublemakers (separate from spammers). We talk about bans, we talk about escalations of ban evasion - user vs IP vs the issues with banning IPs - this points to a) a lack of information on how to do this in the first place (see thoughts on training courses) but also b) rule 1 of dealing with trolls is to not give them the attention they so richly desire. We've never had the best tools for doing this - and if you look back to newsgroups and even BBSes, you'll see the same behaviours thereThis is kind of abstract for me. Can you give 2 or 3 examples of what you mean?
While I have seen them, naturally, at The Other Place (tm), I've seen them here, I've seen them on the forum vendors' communities too.I don't think you should let a particular admin zone forum be representative of the conversations that are happening on community development.
With that said, I embrace and invite you and others to have these conversations.
Well, there's Sturgeon's Law at work, there's the fact that a staggering percentage of all new ventures fail across the board in general and oftentimes in spite of any planning carried out. But there's also a deafening silence in the spaces where you'd think 'how to make communities' would be a hot topic for discussion.I agree! Documentation is so generic and high level, but it doesn't apply to real world situations.
Which is also why, I believe, so many new forums are set to fail. There are no best practices or guidance.
Much as I hate to admit it, this is the place where I find myself agreeing enthusiastically with Jeff Atwood and $deity knows he and I have had enthusiastic debates in the past.This is very abstract. Can you identify 2 or 3 examples where you'd like to see substantive conversation?
I agree. There's a real need for something truly focused on community management and strategy.But there's other examples, e.g. how often new forums start with too many empty sections, how often new forums start with too little content. How often forums spend a lot of time in the early days fretting over plugins and themes and choices that will never be as important as getting content in good and early.
You see these same topics of conversations cropping up on admin forums, on the forum vendors' own sites etc. because people don't change even if the tech does. I feel like it points to the fact that the tools aren't really the solution - but they're used in place of actual people management skills.
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