[Network-Centric Resources] Is a collaborative platform the best way to get input on your resource?

[Brendon Johnson]

Hi Kristin,

Been talking about this exact topic a lot with a lot of people – and what I am hearing over and over again is "don't focus on the platform, focus on the people".

If you have a structure in which people are regularly communicating, learning from one another, and exchanging around the tools (verbally, not in written format), then I think the platform could work. But you'd want to design a platform to fit that once it's in place.

A lot of networks I work with have done the opposite – design the platform (which costs a lot, and is very time-consuming to maintain). What tends to happen is one of two things: a) the platform sits there and does nothing; or b) the team (usually multiple people) has to spend a lot of time communicating, nudging slightly active people, tagging active people, drawing new people in, etc.

The other thing to consider is asking people to adopt yet another platform, on top of ones they are already using, is a very difficult ask. In my experience, it only works when people feel really connected to other people in the network.

My recommendation: keep it extremely simple (e.g. a Google Drive, maybe an AirTable database linked to a website front-end<https://www.softr.io/>) – and focus your limited team effort on building community learning groups around using the resources, and try to embed feedback & adaptive structures in all those community learning groups, so the feedback process becomes part of the pattern / routine of the group!

For reference though: here is also a list of platforms<https://airtable.com/shrIZu8HecXQRoYEK> I've been putting together (it's only partial, I have more), it gives an overview of pros & cons of each kind of platform. The one I like most is Ask Nature<https://asknature.org/>, but again I think it works because there's a very big and well-connected community behind it.
________________________________
From: Discuss <discuss-bounces at fabriders.net> on behalf of Kristin Antin <kristin at huridocs.org>
Sent: Friday, November 12, 2021 18:28
To: A discussion list about developing network-centred resources <discuss at fabriders.net>
Subject: [Network-Centric Resources] Is a collaborative platform the best way to get input on your resource?

Hello resource creators!

I have some questions for you about platforms for collaborative resources. (sorry for the long email!)

Short version:

If we go through the trouble of configuring a beautiful, collaborative wiki platform for our resources, how likely is it that people would actually use those collaboration features (e.g. commenting on specific words, sentences or paragraphs, suggested changes, making edits to the content, creating new content, have a discussion)? What has already been learned about collaboration platforms (or systems) in this space?

Does anyone have experience (successful or unsuccessful) using different approaches to getting feedback/input on content? I would be so grateful for any lessons you have learned.

Long version:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the right **platform(s)** to create and share our community-driven resources.

For resources that are created with and for a community of practitioners, ideally that resource would be: super easy to collaborate on (e.g. suggestions, questions, comments, edits, ideas, debate), very transparent in terms of who worked on what and when, and really accessible in terms of it being easy to find, search, navigate, download, translate and learn.

...but we are just one staff person, two interns, and no dedicated budget. So how do we approach this in a more iterative and realistic way, so that we can build and improve as we gain more support?

When I think about our platform requirements related to accessibility and transparency, these seem pretty straightforward. I know there are many platforms that address our needs regarding these. The place where I get stuck is knowing what our collaboration feature requirements are for a platform (or platforms).

I’ve narrowed down the options to some stand-alone open source wiki platforms (e.g. mediawiki, xwiki, dokuwiki), and using Wordpress plugins which would allow us to host all the content on our existing huridocs.org<http://huridocs.org> website. So I drafted some pros/cons:

* Pros to stand alone wiki: these platforms come with some great collaboration features. It would be awesome to build a community around the creation of these resources!

* Cons to stand alone wiki: it’s yet another platform for HURIDOCS to install, configure, maintain, and it’s yet another platform for our users to have to create an account and figure out how to do the tasks. Our audience would need to go to another place (away from our website), which might be confusing.

* Pros to the Wordpress plugin approach: people would know where to find it, there are some beautiful knowledge base plugins out there, and it’s easier to maintain for HURIDOCS.

* Cons to the Wordpress plugin approach: the collaboration would be limited to more superficial feedback forms.


So I wonder -- if we go through the trouble of configuring a beautiful, collaborative wiki platform for our resources, how likely is it that people would actually use those collaboration features (e.g. commenting on specific words, sentences or paragraphs, suggested changes, making edits to the content, creating new content, have a discussion)? I know there are many factors that go into this, including how much effort is made to engage people in contributing, and the usability of the platform. But I wonder what has already been learned about collaboration platforms (or systems) in this space? Is it really more about the process and discussion with people about the resource, than it is about the platform?

Does anyone have experience (successful or unsuccessful) using different approaches to getting feedback/input on content? I would be so grateful for any lessons you have learned.

Thank you!
Kristin

--
Kristin Antin
Knowledge Collaboration Lead
she/her

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