Have you ever posted a question to a newsgroup and received a helpful response?
Has a teacher ever spent some extra time with you or your child?
Are these everyday occurrences becoming more or less common in modern society?
My own experience suggests that doctors, nurses, teachers, journalists, and even open-source programmers have become less willing or able to create such personalized experiences. I do believe that most people want to provide a very high level of caring and compassionate service, but they find themselves under increasing pressure to “save time” even as the complexity and difficulty of their jobs continues to increase. Modern society sacrifices personalized care on the altar of efficiency.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead of paying people based on the time they spend, we could figure out ways to pay them based on the quality of the experiences they create. Suppose, for example, that the pay for a social service worker or a customer support person was directly tied to the feedback from the people they assist.
We already do this to some extent. In many regions, waiters and waitresses earn tips that depend in part on the dining experience of the patrons and in part on local customs or expectations.
From society’s point of view, reward and good service is a means to an end. The end should be allocating knowledge and resources to create the best experiences (the most “value”) for members of the society. Doing that probably requires more than simply making pay dependent upon feedback. We should go a step further to ensure that the feedback mechanisms result in better pairings between providers and clients. For example, visual learners might do better with visually oriented teachers and vice versa.
To achieve better pairings, we could do a few things:
- make the feedback public so that (potential) clients can make more informed decisions when seeking services
- likewise provide reliable information about clients to providers in advance
- give both providers and clients a choice in pairings
What does it mean to “give providers and clients a choice”? There are several answers to this question. One method used in matching medical students to residency training positions involves students selecting 3 or 4 preferred locations and then the providers “choosing” students through a matching process. Two sided auctions, where clients and providers “negotiate” a price would be another example. Something like this already goes on in online groups where people with a question post it to the list and other people (“the providers”) choose which questions they want to answer. Yahoo Answers and others have experimented with this method where the poster adds a dollar amount they are willing to pay for an answer to the question.
At the UnaMesa Association, the problem of rewarding good services affects us directly. As part of serving the community, UnaMesa Associates often answer questions and provide other assistance through online groups. Unfortunately, currently we have no principled method for gauging the value of the assistance being provided. This means that decisions often come down to very rough guesses about what we could do to best serve the community. Should we spend more time answering community questions or should we spend more effort on developing new features? Which features should we add? Who could we serve better?
In an effort to do better, we’re starting a little experiment in getting feedback from community members who have been assisted by UnaMesa Associates. This will be an optional feedback form for those who have received help. Unlike most such surveys, we plan to use this feedback to partially determine compensation to be paid to the associate. Furthermore, we’re not limiting the feedback just to current associates, but allowing people to provide feedback on help received from others who may or may not be affiliated with the UnaMesa Association. If and when these people become affiliates of the association, they will be eligible for “back pay” based on such feedback.
In addition to simple feedback, we also allow people to donate money to those who have helped them. These tax deductible (in the US) donations will go directly to support the designated associate in addition to the funds provided by the UnaMesa Association. Over time we hope this process helps us to serve the community better.
Here are a few things we expect might happen:
- Associates will include “How’s my driving” style tag lines that invite people to give feedback on the help they receive
- Associates will be more likely to help people who have provided feedback in the past, and even more likely to help people who have donated
- Community members may start tailoring their request to specific associates who have received good feedback (all feedback will be aggregated and posted on a regular basis)
- As a group we’ll see what types of questions and help generate the most positive feedback and factor that into future decisions about where to spend UnaMesa resources.
You can see our initial attempt on the UnaMesa support wiki: http://support.unamesa.org/FeedbackForm
Of course, we all recognize that money isn’t everything. Society has also found ways to reward good service in addition to base pay. Doctors enjoy a certain level of prestige, organizations recognize excellent teaching through awards, and answering questions on a newsgroup and other altruistic acts can boost your reputation both online and offline.
Yet these ad hoc methods don’t provide much help when it comes down to allocating resources on a daily, quarterly, and annual basis. We hope to find methods that really do change the system and, for example, encourage students and teachers to form mentoring relationships that go beyond standardized testing. If you know of other approaches worth considering, please provide a link in the comments. We’d really love to find something that works.
February 20, 2009 at 11:17 pm
For me part of the pull of the Tw google groups is that you know that the people helping out with problems are also working on future developments. If I knew I was pulling them away from something exciting , getting them into some kind of trouble or that problems were possibly being assessed for difficulty before they were answered, i would be less inclined to follow and post to the group; some of the charm would have disappeared.
I am not sure that introducing performance measures for tiddly support is a good idea.
It is beyond reasonable doubt that Eric, FND et al are very important to the TW community. I wonder if it would make the community feel a little edgy that these guys were being managed using feedback forms. For me part of the attraction of the TW community is that the help I get is not part of a customer / worker relationship. I already spend too much time on TW, filling out forms to keep these guys stats up would become a full time job for me as the fear of them loosing their livelihoods would be too much!!!
It does appear that for many community simple problems are rapidly answered personally by people whose generosity and expertise exceeds the wildest expectations. It is a truly heart warming experience to feel involved and totally removed from the world of commerce.
I can imagine that documentation is quite boring for innovative and creative minds. But it would be a great learning experience for someone less qualified but with interest in learning more.
I wonder if some TW fans might consider a small monthly direct debit to sponsor Unamesa to show support, possibly even support someone on a Tiddly apprenticeship?
(I can’t help that notice that their has been some kind of global meltdown and also that the BT share price is kinda ‘heading south’ … worrying times when jobs are being cut every day.)
Development and support are distinct systems in organizations. In terms of monitoring, a ‘deep, sporadic audit’ might be more suitable, than continuous performance measurement.
Our organization had a workshop this week, which coincidentally had a case study of a software project where the blurring of boundaries between support and development were key issues in its viability.
As a TW user keen to learn more, keen to get into TiddlyWeb, keen to get into the jQuery, easier documentation would be a great help. Recipes, Svn etc.. dificult
February 22, 2009 at 11:57 am
Alex, thanks for the comments. You put into words one of my main concerns:
“attraction of the TW community is that the help I get is not part of a customer / worker relationship”
Your comment clarifies the uneasiness that I and other UnaMesa associates have felt about doing assessments and why it’s taken so long to try something even as simple as the feedback form.
So what is the right framing of the relationships within the TW community? Peers? Neighbors?
Within those relationships, what’s an appropriate way to make visible the value being created? It’s pretty clear that nobody in the TW community is “doing it for the money.” That simple fact gives people greater confidence that the motivations and intentions of others are, at least in part, serving the common good.
And yet it would be very helpful to have some dynamic feedback mechanism that helps individuals make better decisions about how to make the best use of their time and effort for both the individual and common good.
To pick one simple example, I’m unlikely to contribute to a question on the newsgroup regarding a javascript coding issue. On the other hand I might be very interested in seeing questions about using TW in schools. Since I don’t have time to read all the messages I end up missing opportunities to contribute while scanning through endless posts about browser compatibility issues.
At a higher level coordination issue, would it be better for somebody like Eric to spend time answering questions in the newsgroup or working on documentation? (Perhaps that one’s easy since nobody reads documentation…)
Seems like we could do much better as groups. Not just for TW but many other “peer” communities where the peers come from wide ranging backgrounds.
Very interested to hear your suggestions.
-Greg
February 22, 2009 at 6:51 pm
We could call the community ‘a community of practice’? It would help in education and health – they seem to love the term. Shared vocab with these groups would be good.
If the TW in schools ‘community of practice’ made sure that they put “TW in schools” in their posts, they could filter the messages in the groups using yahoo pipes. They could also bookmark messages on Delicious with ‘TwSchools’ or some agreed tag; adding ‘communityofpractice’ might serve some marketing function.
Eric is a great public face of TW. He makes the group welcoming, especially when you are a new user. I think he is teaching people about computer progaming with vehicle of TW, and this is a very valuable and useful task.
>Seems like we could do much better as groups. Not just for TW but many other “peer” communities where the peers come from wide ranging backgrounds.
Over here in Manchester, Reg Revans had a similar idea: Action Learning.
TW is realy well suited to learning i think. In the health org i work with, they use Action Learning with an ‘each one teach one’ motto. If learners could document their learning from Eric and post the solution on a single TW at the end of the thread, users would have something to play with.
I wrote something more detailed on the group.
Alex