CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

CiviCRM users have numerous at their fingertips numerous means of finding assistance and useful information about CiviCRM products. These include the development lists, the team blog, the IRC channel, the wiki and the support forums.  There are also opportunities to participate at different levels in these, reflecting the wide variety of users’ skills, abilities and motivations in interacting with the project in the first place. But if community support mechanisms are not coordinated around the level of ability of members to contribute, members will exclude themselves from contributing. This embeds dependency for meaningful, systematic support on the development team.

Back in the summer, Lobo wrote on the team blog that user support “was working quite nicely on the mailing list, but the switch to the forums has decreased this significantly”.  In response, I suggested that a non-programmer volunteer could create a weekly rundown of unresolved forum questions. This would be sent out to all forum users. On reflection, I do not think this would be quite useful enough to enough people to devote volunteer time to. I also think that the problem the project faces in broadening community support is the age-old one of collective inaction.

Forum users watching a thread or a topic on the support forum will not help out if they think that another user’s problem will be eventually resolved by someone they perceive as having with one or more of the following characteristics:

• more involved in the project
• more active on the forums on that topic
• more competent

This presents a big problem for the CiviCRM development team, who respond to questions quickly and thoroughly. Their efficiency and commitment may be deterring others from contributing support on the forums.

It may cause other users who could assist to underestimate their knowledge and reduce their confidence. This reluctance to get stuck in also deprives those asking questions of the other (softer) parts of community life that are not just focussed on getting a plain answer. These include feeling welcomed, the satisfying fact of connecting with someone about your problem, senses of solidarity, reciprocity and shared concerns.

An answer to this collective inactivity problem would be to build into the forum a mechanism which signals to all users that a particular issue is not significantly challenging for the development team to answer. Such a “triage” would require an assessment from the topic moderator familiar with the product suite; they would set a visible flag on a post signifying the degree of complexity.

Built around the triage would be notification systems which all users would be strongly encouraged, and regularly prompted to engage with from the point at which they signed up. Instead of email/RSS alerts like “Email me every time someone posts in CiviMail”, the user would see “Email me when laughable / basic / intermediate / complex / lobo-level questions are posted in CiviMail”. Digests could also be published at user-customisable intervals. If a question is not resolved adequately within a set time period, its difficulty rating could be upped.

To reduce the core-periphery distance in the community, forum facilitators/hosts could proactively network within the wider forum user-base, pressing the flesh (in the digital sense). Their first task would be to ensure each level was covered. Their second would be to persuade inactive forum users to at least sign up for a weekly digest at a particular level. The aim would be to create cohorts of users confident enough to assist, and confident that their contribution was of value immediately.

What do you think?

Hi Tom L, I think your ideas are good ones, but first I would like to say that I've found the discussion forums very useful and people do reply to my mosts with good information.

That said and email lists may be worse, discussion forums do tend to repeat questions and answers as topics get buried.  FAQ are designed to help.   

However, along the lines of your discussion, there may be some issues that everyone should know if they use CiviCRM.

It's funny how the same patterns tend to repeat, across seemingly unrelated domains.

This one could be the same as the small business that becomes successful, but the owner won't quit making the pizza sauce (or whatever), because "nobody else can do it as well".  Old habits are easy to maintain, new ones are challenging for most humans.  Maybe the more we others contribute, the more at peace Lobo and Dave will be relying on the community, and not fearing that support for Civi will be called into question.

Best,
Ken