h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The problems you discussed above are one of the reasons that a) the current ACE role needs completely overhauling and b) the reason my ACE message is so long (A80671296). ACEs just not quite fulfilling their function - getting newbies to 'stick' - as it stands.
And by they, I mean the three of us that are left (and with lil off sick that's just me and Bel).

I suggest that we don't discuss the changes to the ACEs in any great depth in the Document. That discussion needs to be done with those designing the new site, as there's several key pieces of functionality in the site that need to be added. If those things can't happen, we'll need to start again from scratch anyway.

Glad I wrote something that can be of use. I leave it to your capable hands.

Vip, help, I think I may be completely confused or confusing.

There are two related topics here under the general topic of Engaging The Rest Of The Internet:

1) Engaging The Rest Of The Internet A82589377 (The one I'm trying to shepherd through Magrathea's Workshop more or less addresses how we want to do things in the long run.

2) Engaging The Rest of the Internet During Rupert II This may be what you were talking about? Sorry if I dragged things off topic.

I know it is getting really late for many of you. Sorry.

I was talking about the "Attracting and keeping new Researchers" subheading.

Crap, I think I made a mistake. There will be some crossover, but you will be addressing the immediate needs of new researchers, not the needs of the general Community.

Engaging the Community (A82658703) isn't the same thing at all, is it. Even when I talk about Pupert II, I am focussing on the needs of the Community, not the rest of the web-o-tubes.

The Volunteer page (A82661051) might be mentioned but realistically the place for discussing the changing role of the ACEs is right here in A82589377.

So ignore my invitation to merge the documents, there is no need to do so. It may be useful to take each other's ideas, but the documents should remain seperate.

My fault there. Sorry for adding to the confusion. You're right, it is late.

There are only three ACEs? Good grief, when you said there was a problem I didn;t think it was that bad. Ummm. Need a hand? That sort of thing I do have time for, because it;s quite bitty work, as I recall, and ten minutes here are there is what I have plenty of.

Right.

Have been thinking about this while doing the washing up - very good thinking time I always find and here are some thoughts.

I've been hanging out with the mummy blogging crowd for a bit, and specificaly in one community group devoted to mummy blogging. Now at first I was quite sceptical when they called themselves a community, because compared to this place... But lately, there's been a lot more going on. Some of that's just because people have got to know each other, but it's also because there are a lot of joining in things people can participate in. Blogging carnivals, where people submit posts on a theme to be all published together, blog hops, where people agree to follow and comment on (five) new blogs from a list for the next mnoth at least, and lots of memes, like posting just a picture every Wednesday.

Now I know that hootoo has that sort of joining in via contributing to the Guide, and that there are any number of societies and so on going on, but I was remembering that the most fun I've had on hootoo recently, apart from this noohootoo project, was the Stretcher, and I didn;t even take part in that. And part of that was that the EG has been very individualistic - one entry per subject, wheras the Stretcher linked people up by inviting submissions on a theme/ to meet certain criteria and the fun of it was seeing how everybody had responded. The other part was that joining in was... solicited, I think is the word in a way in which signing up for a club or plucking up the nerve to sidle into Lil's and such isn't. I remember feeling quite odd about joining in with established games/ threads/ clubs when I first came, and that was when things were still pretty active.

So I think that plenty of 'authority sponsored' activities to join in on. We have the Talking Points now, but these seem a bit dead. Of course, it could be part of the ACEs duties to chatter away on these, all three of them, and to join in like mad generally to make it seem popular. Some big projects like the Stretcher, but some more managable ones as well. Like a one off call for entries which all... Or something. Sorry, didn;t have quite that much washing up.

Thing is, a lot of the blogging ones are about mutual back scratching though. The people who run them get links, which boosts their status and the people who join in get noticed and visited too. Not quite sure how to replicate that here, exactly, although a comment club or some such might work in the sense that people would agree to pay particular attention to anyone in that club's entries in whatever we have for PR/ once they are published etc.

Plus as well as badges or something for writing entries, something for commenting on entries? Top ten commenters (on entries) on the front page? There's nothing like getting people writing for hootoo like the thought people would actually comment later. Plus, it might solve that problem that HN mentioned earlier about 'this entry is dead'. Which I also got when I arrived, ten years ago. Well, not so much that the person had elvised, but that I'd find a really good debate had gone on, want to join in, and find that that conversation seemed to be over.

So I'm rambling, but encouraging comment about entries would be a good way forward. I'm afraid that Ask h2g2 might be the problem here though, as that's where people tend to hang out now to engage in the sorts of things that went on with entries when there wasn't an Ask, or at least it was less established.

So after that brain dump, will try to think it through a bit more tommorrow.

In my suggestion about a new Front Page I already added a list of 'most recent comments on approved Entries'. I hope that helps to get more attention on them.

Ah. Sorry, having trouble keeping up.

Good idea, that Tavaron!

Yes, I know, it's difficult to keep track of everything.

Most of the U.K. researchers are probably asleep now as I post this, and the few who aren't are probably racing against the clock to put the finishing touches to the Big Document, or fine-tune the many Documents at GoogleDocs and elsewhere at H2G2.

I'm trying not to panic. I'm mostly succeeding. I find that there are a lot of links to the various entries and documents and discussion threads. Those links, in turn, have further links to other related things. I worry that an important piece of information is in an entry that is several links away from where I am.

I think the writing standard for the documents and entries is very high. The comments in threads like this one are full of imaginative suggestions, and will likely result in more great documents. Deadline-itis is a scary thing, sure, but the shoes won't fall all at once. For instance, the point where we have to know what our financial underpinnings will be is not here yet. The March 17 deadline was for expressing interest. Or was it supposed to be March 19, which is Saturday?

I'm pretty sure the deadline to express an interest to buy h2g2 was March 17, paulh. We are now racing against a different deadline. This one is sort of self-imposed, and sort of absolutely necessary. We (the interim committee - aka h2g2c3) are trying to get all parts of our business plan together so we don't look like complete internet weirdos during the next part of the transition.

Obviously we won't make it. But we want to do the best job we can now. That way as many members of h2g2c2 can have a chance to read and comment.

And you are absolutely right, there are some awesome ideas in here. We are trying to get them all in the right part of a Magrathea document. But if we miss something please point it out.

The deadline for expressing interest was the 17th. The idea is to get the Great Big Document completed so that the BBC and any buyers have an idea of what we want from a buyer and how we expect things to work. The more they are aware of it (*waves to buyers*) the more we can hope that they understand how importantly we take this.

There are loads of links at the moment and it's making my head spin a bit too. To top it off, I'm going to be away from my computer, starting in about two hours. Deadlines are always closer than you think, eh.

Deadlines are audible, too. They make a whooshing sound as they roar past. Anyway, I didn't get to make any business plans when I worked for a living.

As I read the documents, I don't think we come across as Internet weirdos. Given that this site was designed from the beginning to run with a high percentage of volunteers, and that our volunteers are involved in writing the documents now, we have a remarkable view from the inside. No one else could have this view.

That leaves the parts that we have been shielded from. We don't know how the outsourced moderators organize their operations. The budgetary side of running the site is not visible to us either, nor is the chain of response when computer or software problems rear their ugly heads.

Actually, I modded for Get Writing back in the day, and I'm sure former Italics would talk informally about modding in principle even i they couldn't be specific.

I'm glad we don't come across as wierdos, Paul. That is the most important point of all, really. So I worry a little about the smileys.

This is probably a matter of taste, but I've seen some of the smileys that are used at Yahoo or Google mail. I like ours better, a lot better.

The funny thing about smileys is that they predate the graphic user interface that dominates the Internet now. They were designed to humanize text messages. I remember the dumb terminals that I used to use. Smileys lightened the mood...

In the old days, I resisted using smileys, especially with people who knew me in Real Life. I figured since they knew me for years, they would know when I was being sarcastic, ironic, meditative, just plain silly, etc.

Turns out that's not necessarily true.

Of all the smileys in all the forums, h2g2's are easily the best.

Sol's post about blogging in this thread inspired me with this idea:

Introducing Imprints: A82710326

I've not put it into Magrathea's Workshop because it's not something we could do in the short term - it requires substantial technical change and we'll be busy moving the site in the short term. But I think this may be a way of offering writers something blogging sites don't, and of combining the best features of h2g2 (collaboration) with the best features of blogging (simplicity and control).

I'm posting it in three threads, and a lot of the same folk will be subscribed to all three, so I'm sorry if it looks like spam.

Ben

Oooooh. I've always wanted to be a muse. Will get over there, Ben, but first must brain dump some more. I knwo this is stupidly close to the deadline and I haven't got many practical things to say, but still.

I was thinking that what hootoo lacks is a bit of enlightened self interest incentives. Mummy blogging for example, is in quite a large part about being high in the rankings of such blogs and being able to make money out of it/ get free stuff out of it. Facebook is about the number of friends you have and generally the feeling that you don;t want to be left out and twitter is about followers and retweets and (we are back to mummy bloggers again) driving people back to your blog, and raising your ranking score.

Now I know we are supposed to be in the Guide making business for the love of it, and when there was less competition for our Internet time, and the Guide was less full, so there was a sort of feeling that we had to rush to fill it, that probably was enough. I'm not sure any more. Even if we did put the focus much more on being a writing site than a Guide creation site. Or at least, it wouldn't have a hugely wide appeal, and we might as well aim big.

Essentially we need more incentives and ego boosts. For example, hit stats. Somewhere in our promotional material is says that the thing hootoo has over blogging is that unless you are very successful, you don;t get 150000 hits every day (or whatever the number was). Thing is, how many of those visit my entries? That's the sort of info you get on blogs and it cheers me up even if I haven;t got many comments to see how many people have read it. I have an entry I thought had sunk without trace - no comments ever - that I was surprised that someone had linked an academic article to it (thanks Ben for that info). Knowing you have readers for your personal stuff is quite cool.

Rankings. We have a sort of quantity ranking at the moment, which is a source of pride (quite rightly too) to those at the top. Hit rankings could be published too. Also, if we do the 'like' thing, 'like' rankings. Or a sort of combination to publish a 'most influential researcher' list or something.

The blogging world also likes to do awards. They do it by topic, best parent bog, best travel blog, best technology blog. Or within topics (*cough* mummy blogging *cough*) Best writer, best blog design, most inspirational, funniest etc etc. It's annual usually. We could have something similar. Like the 'post of the month' thing, only bigger.

I still think getting more people to comment on the entries is key. I still think the biggest barrier to this is Ask. There are a lot f topics in Ask which don;t have much to do with entries, I'm sure, but probably quite a lot that do, and could be debates hanging off entries. I realised today that if I had a question/ debate topic in mind I'd be more likely to ask Ask than to see if there was something written about it in the Guide first. I wonder if some kind of code could be written so that if yo are posting a question in Ask, based on keywords or something, a pop up box could suggest an entry to read/ hang it off. Combined with Tavaron's front page 'latest comments on articles' thing, this would be quite helpful in shifting some of the focus perhaps? A more laborious way would be to have it as part of one of the volunteer groups duties to post to Ask questions as early as possible with links to possibly relevant entries. Combined with some kind of bonus/ incentive scheme for commenters, this might also help. Or could that be done automatically by a programme too? (It helps not to know anything about what is possible...).

Anyway, the point is that I like the Showcase incentive and the idea of having competitions, but I don't think they go far enough if you want to get people really engaged and invested in writing for the Guide.

I daresay this has been discussed in the site design section, but being able to customise personal spaces is very popular. We have skins, but just being able to fiddle with colour schemes gives people a kick. But what I'd want is widgets that allow me to have buttons or whatever on my page to access bits of the site that I'm interested in customised. So I get to decide if I want a link to peer review or the post and such, but also that I could have links to specific feeds, like if I want to follow a writer who does a regular column in the post, I could have a widget on my ps that shows her feed, so I can click straight across every time a new article comes out. Likewise, new entries on topics I have specified or by writers I have specified. I miss out on quite a lot, because I simply forget to visit certain places on a regular basis.

Sorry. I meant to add that people complain bitterly about the underhand tactics FB uses to keep people engaged, like endlessly suggesting friends or to contact people in your friends list or to emotionally blackmail you into not cancelling your account by pointing out how much you'll miss and so on and so on, but it does work. I don;t think we could possibly e that ruthless, because of course, some of the point of FB now is that it has become so huge that there is the feeling you cannot not be on it, and obviously that's not the case here, but still.

I think this particular conversation has a way to go yet, and I'd rather get it right a bit later than get it half-cocked a bit sooner.

Now... let me read your posts.

I SO agree with all you say, Sol. I'd really like to provide the tools to enable that sort of behaviour *among the users*. Wordpress and Blogger don't organize blogging events; bloggers do. I'd like to see the same level of freedom and creativity here, but with cooler tools and better recognition...