Comments on: APR: Scope and Vision

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 16:53:17 +0000

Got it! Yes, I agree – completely exclude “project goal focused” collaboration approaches, but rather have a “knowledge finding” goal that can be used for projects, exactly as you said.

By: Rolf

Rolf — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:40:24 +0000

“collaborate to achieve a goal” – tough one.
First, I intended to stress “goal”.
I thought of APR as an endeavor to help people in our niche “in general”, i.e. NOT something like ProjectSpace or TeamSpace where people share a space that supports project work. Maybe “non-project” is the right track. Of course people share knowledge for and collaborate in achieving their goals – which includes projects, but they do not connect or collaborate using APR to do a (commercial) project.
IOW, APR should (also) be used like tyner blain is used now, as a set of knowledge units for our niche, not for a specific purpose with one or more goals to achieve by date x. (in my head that is a characteristic of a commercial project: achieve goal x in time y).
To make a long story short I suggest to EXCLUDE approaches like ProjectSpace or TeamSpace from the APR scope.

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:30:50 +0000

Rolf – on the “collaborate to achieve a goal” idea, I’m not sure I completely understand what you mean. Can you give an example or two?

In my head, and possibly not in the language I used, this site is about collaboration. Maybe a tangible (however hypothetical) example or two would help me understand better what you’re explaining.

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:27:03 +0000

Rolf – great contributions!

On “knowledge repostitory management” – it is a tough one. Del.icio.us, as you point out, is a pretty great tool for doing that right now. I don’t think we would have a lot of success if we asked people to duplicate what they already do there. That leaves two choices – either try and supplant delicious as the “organizational tool”, or find a way to leverage/augment/mashup with delicious so that people can use delicious as their primary tool, and achieve some benefit here.

Personally, I would want to keep using delicious, because I also organize other stuff as part of my “Sehlhorst Body of Knowledge” [SBoK :)]. And much of that doesn’t apply to our space. It might be CSS styling or Ruby on Rails programming techniques, or road-biking articles, or great recipes.

And with that need happily sated, I wouldn’t want to split it out so that I have separate repositories for my SBoK. What I do want to do is to be able to leverage the SBoK work I do at delicious (when appropriate) to help everyone else on this site.

So I would categorize the approach as “leverage existing BoK tools to make it easy to share relevant content with the community.” I think that falls under the current “broad vision” statement, and would ask you to make sure I don’t forget about this as part of the use cases we define. Then we can prioritize the approach.

Another way someone might do this is to create a personal wiki, and link to the articles that they like and find through the site. We may be able to find a way to make that easier too – but I think of it as a “second order problem” right now. I do want to use the feedback from everyone here to prioritize this approach properly – if it is more important then we will definitely tackle it.

By: Rolf

Rolf — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:37:02 +0000

Another thought to include or explicitly exclude from scope: “Collaborate with other users for achieving an individual goal”, with goal meaning something like an industry project. Maybe this is already excluded by the idea that users do things on the site for all other users, and with the help of all other users.

By: Rolf

Rolf — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:52:10 +0000

Hi,
may I suggest to add “help the website’s users in organising their own ‘knowledge repository’” to the vision.
I don’t find a better word for this. I don’t think of something non-public. An individual user should not just contribute for the sake of others (like suggesting a great article, which means he has alread read it), but should also be able to use it personally. I have no idea how to do it, but that’s a good thing when talking about visions :-)
I am aware that the community does something for the individual, and that the individual is part of the community. Some parallel could be del.icio.us, were the user benefits from his own favorites, as well as from other people’s favorites.

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:46:35 +0000

Craig – Awesome idea. Yes you can. I’ll include it with other feature ideas for prioritization.

Aaron – thanks!

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:34:41 +0000

I agree that combining the scope and vision document helps simplify the process.

Great start!

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:00:22 +0000

Hi Scott

Can I suggest a feature that let’s people recommend to a friend/friends via email (and maybe other features)