Sociocorpus

Way up in the remote valleys of Westland are a sprinkling of old alpine huts. Frequented by hunters and hardy trampers, these huts have been deemed too hard to maintain by the Department of Conservation.

Outdoor enthusiast Andrew Buglass has formed a band of like souls to maintain these huts. To promote the cause and record information about the state of the huts, Andrew decided to establish a website.

GroupSense Collaboration consultant Simon Gurnsey helped Andrew to create the Remote Huts Westland site. It took Simon about 25 hours.

Simon also helped Andrew to start Permolat, an Online Group for people participating in the maintenance of the remote huts. Permolat is on the Online Groups site. Permolat is venetian blind material, recognised by back country folks in small strips nailed to tree trunks to mark little-trodden tracks.

Simon lives with his partner Sara on a patch of regenerating bush in the Lyttelton Harbour basin. Over the last three Sundays, Andrew has clocked up 25 hours up the back of Sara and Simon’s place, on his own, slashing at the noxious weed, old man’s beard.

Glen asks: how to get users to add useful subject headings.

For starters, the “naming” of conversation topics/subject lines that you want depends on the medium. It always matters but there is no one right way.

In multi-level (tree-style) threading like most web boards, you might want a new title for each post. In linear threading, you want the same one, as long as it’s the same topic being discussed. My view is that linear threading works best in email groups and we have supported that in the “conversations” view in GroupServer.

Whichever type of threading you want, you can only encourage it and tolerate people not doing it. It seems best to me for the software to encourage but not require effective participation. As an example, we are just implementing posting from the web interface of GroupServer email groups. We aren’t calling it “post” tho. We are providing two options, one called “contribute to this conversation” (in which the subject line stays intact) and one called “start a new conversation” (where the participant is encouraged to make sure their subject isn’t already being discussed and if not, think of a good subject line). Well I say “is” but we’re designing those bits right now .

The other way is to have the Participation Coach model and encourage effective participation and to accept the rest. It is only reasonable to ask people to do what makes sense to them and that sense making, especially when it is shared (ie culture), takes time to develop.

Ideally, the Participation Coach, and others who have taken up that role in the group, quickly create new conversations for ones that have “drifted” or “forked” or have just been poorly named in the first place.