ConFigures

Visibility, Visualization, and Knowledge Gardening

When you want lots of people to contribute specific kinds of content, how can you encourage them?

One can always try to influence the culture (storytelling, glory boards, begging). One can give individual incentives (rewards for best contributors, points systems). One can send out reminders … or put reminders right into the interface itself, so the people who are already using the system (and may already be contributing to it at least on some level) will see them every time they use it. One can try to get people to send each other reminders. One can even try to make a game of it. Each of these approaches may meet with some success, but also has drawbacks.

Culture influence is hard without a critical mass of enthusiasts. Incentives may be difficult to distribute appropriately if tracking information/access is poorly set up, and incentives may get people into a mindset where one has to *keep* giving incentives to keep the contributions coming. Emailed reminders are all too easy to ignore (or filter straight to trash). Reminders inserted into the system’s interface may take up valuable real estate onscreen, which can make users unhappy (see previous comments exchange with Tim Spalding following my entry about LibraryThing’s fielded wiki “Common Knowledge” insertion onto each main page for books). LiveJournal’s “nudge” feature has annoyed users who don’t want to be guilted into blogging (it might be more appropriate for task-oriented communities). Games such as CMU’s The Name Game (picked up by Google for their Image Labeler game) may have a high start-up cost.

I really like LinkedIn’s graphic reminder approach. LinkedIn is a professional networking site; profiles have more value (to the business, not just to its users) when they have more than just a person’s name and connections. At the top of my profile on LinkedIn, my view shows a little “Profile Completeness” graphic, with a green bar showing my progress, and a suggestion of what to add next. It’s given me satisfaction to see that green bar grow toward completion (I’m at 95%).

I think Wikipedia and other online information sources could profit by a similar approach — Wikipedia, for instance, could have a little globe on each page showing fill-in for completeness, perhaps with different colors indicating different needs (more references? more category links?). As with my profile or any kind of knowledge garden, “complete” need not indicate “set in stone”; it can just be an indicator of whether the sorts of info one might expect to find on a given page is there yet.