The idea is that in order to involve the campus community more in the services we offer and guage/increase the number of people who are aware of the services, we thought it might be interesting to create a message board for discussing web publishing topics.
I see that there are potential problems and potential gains from this, as well as the possibility that noone will use it at all.
UW Web Publishing Discussion Board
Since the scope of the discussion will be limited to web publishing topics, other staff need not be involved. When questions on other topics that we support are asked, I will feed these questions into the standard support structure (email help@cac and phone CCI & tech support).
When topics that we do not support are discussed, such as the intricacies of specific php web applications or coding practices, I will keep these discussions a low priority, with responses by me limited to keeping users constructive and providing general reference material.
6 months?
The following items will be used as the primary criteria for evaluating the success or failure of this pilot project. As the exact outcome of the project cannot be known beforehand, these criteria may have to be combined with other considerations when evaluating the usefulness of continuing the project.
Upkeep of the board should take as little as 3 hours a week. This includes time for reviewing, deleting, responding to questions and advice from users, and moving requests for changes in software or server configuration into other support channels.
My responses on the board will include encouraging users who answer each other's questions in a positive helpful manner, as well as correcting and/or removing replies that are incorrect, inappropriate, or off-topic. This is intended to communicate that the board is a well-maintained forum for communication with the user community and amongst the user community. If this proves effective in focusing the community toward constructive discourse, this will be considered successful.
The board will provide a ready interface to the user community, allowing us to directly ask users what services should get priority, ask for testing of new services by a larger audience, and other communication tasks involving our user community.
One way we should be able to tell when we have communicated with the user community is by asking ourselves what we have learned about the community's needs, desires and problems. Another way that we should be able to determine this is by observing whether users are aware of announcement and published documentation that we use to communicate with them. We can judge whether we have done a thorough enough job of communicating with the user community by looking at ...(to be continued)
Please submit suggestions for further evaluation criteria to me.