Post
by hocus2004 » Fri Feb 18, 2005 2:16 am
Where's the 12 step program for this problem?
I know you are kidding around, Peterv. But I am going to give a little bit of a serious response.
People trying to build a board always want the lurkers to participate more. Boards where there are not many people participating get boring fast. You need that back and forth to give the thing life and blood.
Once you get some back and forth, the momentum just builds on itself. Getting a board started is like getting a fire started. The first spark is hard to come by. But once you have a solid flame, the thing just builds by itself. So the trick is generating that initial back and forth. And for that you need to get lurkers to cross the line and become posters.
My guess is that the question that the lurker is asking when he debates with himself whether to post or not is, What's in it for me? All of the information provided on a board is available by lurking. So you need to come up with some extra incentive beyond just getting access to the information.
The incentive that seems to me to work is the incentive of building a community of people with similar interests with whom you can trade ideas. Lurkers cannot influence the direction in which the community heads with its discussions. Their role is largely a passive one. Posters invest their time and energies in building something that they hope will have lasting value to them. Different posters do this to different degrees, of course. But I think this is in general terms the motivation that gets many people to shift from lurker to poster.
If you hope to entice people to make this sort of investment, you need to provide assurances as to how their investment will be protected. If every day all of the rules of the road can get thrown out and replaced with new ones, then most people are not going to see much benefit in building up the community. Why put six months of efforts into building something up if it can be torn down by someone else in six hours?
Discussion boards are NOT like television programs. What you hear some people say is, "Oh, if you don't like the way a board is run, just quit it and go to another one." That way of thinking makes sense when you are dealing with television programs because there is no loss of investment in changing the channel. It does not make sense when you are dealing with boards because each time that a good poster leaves a community, it makes the community weaker. The very act of "switching the channel" causes the program to start to stink.
Just as boards grow through momentum, they decline through momentum. One poster comes along and violates the community norms, no one dares to say anything, and then six good posters leave, and then six more leave because the first six left, and so on. If board administration is handled this way, we will all spend the remaining years of our lives building up boards that will be effective for short periods of time and then destroyed when the first abusive poster shows up on the scene.
I say that the people who have invested their time in building up a board should have a say in the future direction of that board. That's the payoff for participation, that by posting you gain a say in deciding where the board will be headed in future days. This is my "twelve-step program" for turning lurkers into posters--letting them know in advance of their participation what the rules of the road are and then ENFORCING those rules so that they become a reality and not just empty words. I think that people who give to us of their time and energy to make our boards successful are entitled to that much back from us in return for their contributions.