On Barn Raising again November 22, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, Community, Communities of Practice, Wiki , trackbackEarlier barn raising
Back in March this year, I was frantically running various exhibitions, gathering data and writing up reports for the degree course from which I graduate this week. Part of that was a Barn Raising event, which is explained here and here and here or view search results here . We didn’t exactly build a barn in the end, but there was a coffee shop for a while, and some useful development of the 4 dichotomies. My thoughts about that at the time were documented in an exhibition write up module.
With more passing of time and with further developments in the wikisphere such as the proliferation of wikispaces and now jotspot etc I would be less inclined to attempt an inter-community barn raising as envisaged back then. Wiki takeup has grown way beyond the boundaries of any single thing with a common purpose which could be described as THE wiki community. There are now legion.
FAQ building
But the metaphor of barn raising, of gathering people together to pool efforts for a limited period with a specific focus is still a useful one.
I’ve used it recently within some communities in order to get a FAQ document off the ground. In the first case, there wasn’t a wiki at all beforehand, but there was a strongly held belief that an old FAQ document existed somewhere, in people’s inboxes, waiting for time to update it. This had been the situation for at least three years such is the slow pace at which things actually get done in that place! It only took a suggestion from myself made twice, and then someone else to actually create the wikispace, then a tiny bit of adjustment and encouragment and all of a sudden the whole thing fell into place. A smallish group worked together to get the FAQ and the Wiki all sorted out within less than a week or so. Something had definitely been built which beforehand hadn’t existed. I got a nice acknowlegement, just for triggering the process really. (Don’t blame me if you go and read the FAQ and try to make sense of it)
Page of the week
Another practice which I’ve adopted is that of designating a “page of the week” on the DAR wiki. This is mainly a means of focussing my own attention on a page, usually in alignment with something that is going on in one of the communities I belong to. A week can be much longer than seven days, by the way.
ukcider wiki
Closer to the original concept, is the current push on the ukcider wiki to build up the cider makers FAQ. I initialised this originally by suggesting that sometime in November we should designate one week as “FAQ week” in which efforts are channeled together. This turned into a less specific FAQ month and has had considerable sucess, with a handful of people helping to develop the FAQ from a skeleton into a sizeable resource, at the same time encouraging wider and deeper discussion of the core practices on the mailing list. Should I perhaps write a separate entry entitled How to organise a FAQ month?
Wikipedia raids
Finally, I wanted to point to a related practice realated by Shawn Callahan at Anecdote, called “Wikipedia raids“, which is not so alarmingly Viking as it may sound. I can see a lot of value in using collaboration on a domain-related wikipedia page as a community building excercise, and I’m eager to try that out soon, taking care not to set up an instant all out conflict between the raiders and resident wikipedians!
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
No comments yet.