[australia] Engaging contributors

[Marius Coomans]

Matt,

Good points, but I wouldn't be so quick in dismissing wikipedia as a red
herring.

Yes, it's driven by passionate people, but is that a bad thing? By making it
easy for readers to become writers, and employing, in effect, a reverse
workflow (publish before editing) it successfully engages a broad audience.


You might not want to manage your website's front page the same way, but
perhaps a mix of anonymity and low friction editing would work well when
documenting internal processes etc. in an intranet application. That's where
we don't always do a great job encouraging contributions from people at "the
rockface".

Marius



On 7/13/06, Matthew Moore < matthew.moore at oracle.com> wrote:

>  Hi Marius,
>
> Random thoughts:
> - Because for most people this is still something "extra" to their jobs,
> not seen as part of their actual work activities. All this stuff will be the
> responsibility of the "content fairy".
> - Many content management systems are still very complicated.
> - Unless the people that provide content are close to users you have a
> problem.
>
> I think Wikipedia is a red herring. It has a dedicated editorial team (1%
> of its visitors)
> http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/charting_wiki_p.html and
> it's driven by what contributors feel passionate about.
>
> The thing with blogs is you have to look at the whole blogging ecosystem.
> IBM was pretty far ahead with interrnal blogging (I used to work there).
> About 300 or 0.1% of IBM employees were regular internal bloggers (and
> this is a hi-tech organisation). About 15,000 or 5% of employees viewed &
> commented on the blog posts.
>
> Regards,
>
> Matt
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> *From:* australia-bounces at lists.cmprofessionals.org [mailto:australia-bounces at lists.cmprofessionals.org
> ]*On Behalf Of *Marius Coomans
> *Sent:* Thursday, 13 July 2006 9:18 AM
> *To:* australia at lists.cmprofessionals.org
> *Subject:* [australia] Engaging contributors
>
> I received some encouraging emails in response to my last message, so I'm
> sufficiently emboldened to help breath a bit of life into this list. With
> its eclectic array of subscribers, there is bound to be a great store of
> wisdom and experience here.
>
> So:
>
> Over the past 10 years, our industry has (largely) mastered the technology
> and processes to successfully implement Content Management Systems. However,
> in many cases, those systems still fail to engage those who have most
> content to contribute.
>
> Why is that? How can our success rate be improved? How do we balance
> "process" with "creativity"? Can we leverage the success of Weblogs and that
> of Wikipedia?
>
>
> Marius Coomans
> Active Web Communications
>
>
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