The TiddlyWiki community has provided some good feedback and interesting discussions since my previous post. First, a number of people have taken the time to fill out and submit the feedback form. A big thank you to all those folks. You can see a snapshot of responses on the summary feedback page.
Secondly, Alex Hough and Morris Gray provided some really great commentary on the overall process. Here’s my takeaway from those discussions:
- Feedback forms tend to be associated with the commercial interactions of a customer – worker relationship rather than the “neighborly” or peer-to-peer relationships which dominate in the TiddlyWiki groups and other communities.
- We should be looking for feedback mechanisms that help bind the community more closely in a common cause rather than comparative or competitive mechanisms, such as rankings, that tend to separate people.
These comments helped put into words some of the concerns voiced regarding the introduction of any type of assessment measures. They also help lay out the challenges for us and everyone else working to improve social services.
One approach prompted by the above thinking involves asking people to use the TiddlyWikis they create as a tool to acknowledge and demonstrate the help they received from the community. To some extent, this already happens informally. For example, if Alice asks a question about using or writing a plugin, and Bob responds with some help, Alice will often post the new plugin back to the group, sometimes in the same thread. We’re now considering how we might extend that practice and make it easier for both sides.
Thanks, everyone, for your comments. Keep them coming and we’ll keep trying things until we find something that really works.
-Greg
