Looking for good souls

Brad Fuller brad at sonaural.com
Sat Apr 22 19:43:58 UTC 2006


tim Rowledge wrote:
> I feel the need to make a couple of points here:-
>
> a mailing list for newcomers and other learners to ask questions is a
> good thing so long as enough people already knowledgeable and able to
> spend time helping actually take part. A mailing list is not a good
> place to look for answers to questions previously asked, for when a
> user feels a little more confident and wants to do some research
> themself. I'm not much of a fan of web-based forae because of the
> fragmentation they seem to engender BUT they are an excellent
> mechanism to provide an easily growable knowledge base of answers and
> advice. A swiki should be at least as good but they do seem to get
> horribly disorganised very quickly so perhaps using a web forum in the
> style of www.osxfaq.com's would be useful. Some threads are open to
> post questions and some are closed as a record of an answer that
> should stand alone.
>
> more importantly we need *content*. I'd bet that almost every
> plausible newcomer question has been asked and answered but we have no
> sensible record. Searching a mailing list archive isn't really very
> helpful, especially if the subject was contentious and generated more
> heat than light. There are almost certainly hundreds of useful
> tutorial snippets  - some much more than snippets - lying around the
> web. Surely an effective tactic would be to dig them all out, review
> them for accuracy, contemporary relevance, completeness and quality
> and then try to build a reasonably coherent body of  guidance out of
> them?
Let me offer some ideas.

We have started, what we call, an "Answer Board."  It is nothing more
than a moderated forum where people can ask specific questions. Those
questions are answered by "experts." We understand that questions by
beginners may not yield the answer the beginner has in mind -- the
question may be vague, the beginner may not know how to ask the
question, etc. So, a forum seemed to be a good way to "bat around" the
question to ultimately arrive at a/the solution. (plus there are not 100
emails for a beginner to wade through.)

The "answers" are then reformulated and stored on a wiki for reference
later. A beginner can always go to the wiki first to search. The Wiki is
managed by people that are responsible for organizing and managing the
question/answer - but they are not necessarily the "experts."

Let me reiterate Tim's urging that a Wiki *must* be maintained
regularly. The squeak swiki is so outdated that it's very hard to use
and I believe beginners will find it difficult and may, in the end, just
give up. A well groomed, up-to-date Wiki is required to pull this off.

We are at the beginning of this exercise, but it proves to be
worthwhile. We might consider this approach or a derivative.

Also, please count me in. I sure to learn a lot!

brad



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