Nellie, Interesting reading on how informal and formal interaction patterns are thought to effect outcomes. The informal social/work setting is much more appealing, no argument from me on that. Certainly we should be striving for open, spontaneous, loose (as opposed to tight) and fun places to be. We're volunteers donating our precious free time :-) -- WE deserve some fun.
I think Ben's right that it's possible to achieve the benefits of behavioral and situational informality within a structured situation. Speaking personally, I'm looking to be part of groups that have (or could have if we worked on it) a bit of structure so I can be productive, but fun along the way will be essential to keep me going. I agree with you that simplicity is also one of these cornerstones to encouraging community volunteers and keeping them engaged. In my post promoting the idea of a community workgroup, I was hoping to advertise how easy it is to get started. Go ahead. Make a workgroup. Use the Workgroup: namespace. Invite people to join. It's fun! (OK, looking back at my post, it seems much too stodgy to be implying these ideas, but I'll continue anyway.) Yes, the "official policy for community workgroups" is full of required steps and lots of "musts", and maybe what we're hearing here and in other discussions is that it's a demotivator...it's too much, at least right now. One way to deal with that is to just put it all off. I saw the following on Wikipedia in my on-going search to understand how wiki's work: If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, *ignore it*. (It's in the wikipedia policy article Ignore_all_rules<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules> .) I think community workgroups are a good idea, and they can work to the betterment of the WE community. But, in my opinion, the promotion of these "formal" groups, should not in any way discount Informal groups that arise out of a shared vision or need. WE need both tools in our toolkit. Alison --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
