The Hourglass Notes Community
Jack Dausman mentions the hourglass nature of our little clan -- with heavy concentrations of talent at the top and at the bottom, without much of a middle. He continues...
I don't know how to push the starter administrators and developers into the upper strata of the hourglass
What a great question! What ARE some ways to elevate the starting level of N/D devs and admins?
To me, the big problem is the disconnect between the product itself and our insular community. You have Domino Designer with a link to the Lotus Developer Domain (note: that's in 8.0, too... shouldn't it be developerWorks by now?) and a few other IBM-hosted forum, and that's basically it. In R4, when Notes.Net debuted, the Lotus forum was the leading place to get great advice and great solutions. Now, most of the best practices gurus have moved away from the forum model and into the blogosphere.
So how can we increase visibility on this new vector? Notes 8 has a great key into that: an integrated RSS reader. As many reservations as I've had about the reader, there's one place where it could be enormously useful, and that's directing the novice dev & admin to the incredibly vibrant community we already have.
What do we need for that? A "preset feed" for developers would be perfect, and obviously a corresponding one for administrators. Because anything that's a preset would be set by IBM, I'm thinking that a gateway through IBM would be in order. Something that says "here's what should be in the feed that we're seeing in the community at large."
At a minimum, I would expect Lotus blogs to be on such a list. Every novice developer should be reading Best Practice Makes Perfect and the Tuxedo Guy on a daily basis. The SnTT feed should be on the list, too. Of course, I'd love to see Escape Velocity in the feed -- or maybe just every site that wears the Lotusgeek banner. But even just a constantly available meta-reference would push things along -- a sticky page on the feed reader that says "here's IBMs list of community provided resources for Lotus professionals. IBM not affiliated with blah blah blah..."
There's also, of course, OpenNTF.org, who's entire raison d'être has been the demonstration of best practices in development. OpenNTF suffers from a legacy problem of having been born out of defiance against IBM during the Dark Times. Because the entire original attitude was "we will continue to make this platform a success in spite of your mismanagement of it," OpenNTF and IBM have never established the kind of close relationship that would ultimately benefit Notes/Domino customers. Old attitudes have stuck, even in the face of IBM's great new commitment to the platform.
With the release of Notes 8, now would be an excellent time for both sides to step forward in the spirit of cooperation and figure out what it will take to maximize the positive impact for customers. Alas, despite my efforts since Lotusphere, this hasn't happened. But there is hope. There is always hope.
What all of this DOES make me think is that it would be great for Lotus to recognize the scope of Notes as a platform, and create a role that corresponds to Alan Lepofsky's, but for the technical part of the community. Someone who's an evangelist not for the corporate user of Notes/Domino, but for the developers and administrators -- with a specific eye on connecting the product itself to this active, passionate community that offers up so much customer value. Someone who's a liason between the product's strategic positioning, and all the great public resources that come from the in-crowd.
In the end, the only organization with enough resources to change the way Notes customers work with Notes is IBM. There's only two ways for them to elevate their customer experience with the platform: change their own relationship with the customer, or introduce new relationships to the customer. And if they can find it in their hearts and souls to push those new relationships -- to MAKE THE COMMUNITY PART OF THE PRODUCT -- then there's a whole new level of customer value available.
Five years ago I'd have considered such a move impossible, but with Notes 8 being built on a community-created platform in the first place, and having a major focus on leveraging open platforms, maybe.... just maybe... there's a shot.
There is always hope.
Comments
They *could* possibly have an OPML of the Developer and Admin-track feeds available on their site or preloaded onto the rss feed reader, but with our (the content editors/site admins/etc.) opting-in to said OPML. I could see IBM having us sign a "we won't post nude pics of our editors waving signs that says IBM=SATAN" or something like that... but then you get into content editing for corporate "sponsership".
I mean, we all know that there are people in our own community who readily Ctrl+Print Screen whenever they find a "gotcha" with ANYTHING that IBM does. Just imagine those people going on about "I check out the RSS Feed Reader that's new with Notes 8, and I see THIS:".
Posted by Chris Toohey At 11:12:21 AM On 08/14/2007 | - Website - |
I'd point out that I have personally received links from Alan Lepofsky, Bob Balaban and Andre Guirard. I think I might have gotten a pointer from Mary Beth at some point as well.
These things are already happening. They might as well be organized and leveraged for customer benefit.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 11:43:40 AM On 08/14/2007 | - Website - |
The IBM Gatekeeper is a good idea - but I would go one step further. I'd have a position in the organization that specifically dealt with our community and the like, and coordinate how we could better deliver our expertise to their customers and such.
While I'm certain that such a position exists today in some way, shape, or form - I think they can take it beyond what's being done today. We're the evangelists for their product, and we could potentially be more potent than a sneakernet sales force in 1) showing the non-customer world what can be done with their products and 2) showing their current customers just how they can extend their technology investment.
Posted by Chris Toohey At 11:58:12 AM On 08/14/2007 | - Website - |
i think there are a lot of mechanisms by which the community comes together. i don't know that centralizing feeds within the product is necessarily a good idea. i saw early betas of nd8 where some feeds were automatically linked in the reader. what happens if ed brill gets hit by a bus? you could think of many more situations i'm sure where that kind of hard coding could be detrimental in some way. if the reader in nd8 called a web service at ibm to update those kinds of things, maybe... i dunno.
the thing i like about the way the blogosphere has shaped up is that it is appropriately decentralized and centralized in all the right places. my blog is my own, and your blog is your own. it's like living in a house in a neighborhood. ownership in that sense is centralized to each author in the system - unlike a random public message board. but the overall "neighborhood" is configurable. i don't have to link to your blog and you don't have to link to mine. i can include your rss feed in my reader and you can include mine in yours, if you want to. or not. connectivity takes a lot of forms and they are all useful.
i do get what you are saying about bringing junior people upward. and i completely 100% agree that the community is the appropriate place to do it. my involvement in the community has been almost 100% powered, at least initially, by my blog. i met all kinds of people and i've been enriched in so many ways, and i'm even a better coder than i was. sometimes just watching the way people talk about things and attack problems is a way to grow tremendously.
the community seems to be somewhat defined by the blogosphere. it is hard for it not to be, the blogosphere is incredibly compelling, because of the inherent balance of decentralization and ownership. it's a social network that is hard to beat. how do you let junior developers and admins know about it? how do you get them involved? not everyone wants to blog. many, many people read blogs but will never blog themselves.
perhaps the answer is something we haven't developed yet. maybe it's wikis. or "blikis" as steve castledine proposed recently. not everyone wants to own their own house, some prefer to rent. renters tend to go away. ppl involved in wikis tend to drift off (i know i do anyway), unless there is a strong community around the wiki, like say, wikipedia.
there might be an element in here somewhere where, you can't make the horse drink the water. heck, how many blogs have died off that started out great?
to me, involvement in the community means, well, involvement. it means communicating, writing, chatting, podcasting, something... maybe what you are trying to say is, it also involves education. you have to know the community is out there before you can get involved in it.
perhaps if someone at ibm had a blog that focused on the community itself, that would be a good blog to include in the standard list of feeds.
just thinking out loud...
Posted by jonvon At 01:31:19 PM On 08/14/2007 | - Website - |
{ Link }
"FGOTO: proposing a new tag"
Posted by Tim Tripcony At 02:56:23 PM On 08/14/2007 | - Website - |
I feel selfish sometimes in that I tend to post a lot more (main articles) on the blog than in devWorks. Sometimes I will cross-post and I think others probably should do the same. And you can access it with Notes and add a signature block that can point readers to your blog. Then maybe people will get hooked by going to other blogs.
Posted by Chris Whisonant At 03:53:37 PM On 08/14/2007 | - Website - |
i have found lately that I get more out of blogs like Escape Velocity than i do out of the forums. but i've gotten past the point where i need forum type help--the kind of questions i ask don't get answered. the problem is i notice a lot of posts in the forums where users are trying their best to effectively use LotusScript and its obvious to me that they are where i was seven years ago.
how to fasttrack them? no idea.
Posted by brandt fundak At 04:06:50 PM On 08/14/2007 | - Website - |
1) I'm not really knocking devWorks. There's some good stuff out there. But really, is this what should be the dominant vector for people learning the technology?
2) Where are the suggestions beyond feeds? How about a little script that I can slap into Blogsphere that says "did this article help you" that gives feedback directly to IBM? How about a public implementation of Dogear so anyone can tag a blog article and it gets picked up in a general "notesdev" feed?
3) Why not have devWorks itself include this stuff?
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 04:11:59 PM On 08/14/2007 | - Website - |
Back when the way to follow content was a web browser you had to stick around and press "reload" but now when I get all my contents via RSS. I don't want to use my web browser for this kind of stuff. And what's with the e-mail notifications? Are we still in the year 2000?
I have a couple of suggestions for updating the features in the forum to make sure it stays the preferred place to ask questions:
1. A RSS feed per post/thread including all comments. This will make it easier for me to keep up with replies to a post and easily let me stay involved and constributing.
2. Make the respondant rate the reply or at least indicate that the question has been answered.
3. Allow me to ignore threads that haven't been closed/answered when searching (see #2).
4. Allow me to tag questions and replies to ease future searching.
5. Allow me to subscribe to all posts containing a given tag or the results of a search. There are a number of areas I want to contribute answers to in the forum. By letting me subscribe to a RSS feed for a search I would be more inclined to get help since I'm only notified about posts I want to answer.
Posted by Mikkel Heisterberg At 04:47:17 PM On 08/14/2007 | - Website - |
It sparks of a bit of brainstorm which I would like to share albeit sketchy, I think it will further the idea.
What would be really neat is something that aggregates and facilitates access/searching. A tool to lessen reinvention of the wheel, especially since you can reinvent the wheel in sooo many different ways in Notes. Selecting a slightly optimal manner in which to invent the wheel and in what place already is part of the hourglass separation. To help with finding the wheel:
My minds eye sees something that melds a wiki with a tag cloud. Hypertext 3D. The content that drives it would be: the devWorks fora, the knowledge base, the blogs, the sandbox, technotes etcetera, with all the words in the documents hyperlinked (except and, the, you get the picture). You can click on a word to add it to the search. with the word is shown the number of hits, (could be visual, bigger is more hits, search supports and/or logic, and number of hits for the total query.
Posted by Lars Berntrop-Bos At 07:51:27 PM On 08/14/2007 | - Website - |
I know you talked about how you tried to do something there Nathan, but the lack of any activity is just disappointing.
John
Posted by John Head At 03:41:49 PM On 08/15/2007 | - Website - |
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 07:03:49 PM On 08/15/2007 | - Website - |
devWorks was a good start as a beginner to build your fundamentals and get answers to basic questions. With the ever growing blogger community and great content in there, my visits to devWorks have dropped from daily to weekly, while blogger bookmarks list has expanded to 30+ in my "Lotus" bookmark folder.
[quote=Nathan]Why not have devWorks itself include this stuff?[/quote]
Good idea. Would definitely facilitate the search for more in depth information when you're beyond beginner level.
Posted by Patrick M At 11:56:29 AM On 08/16/2007 | - Website - |