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ChannelConfusion

"Channel Confusion" is what you have when you don't know which channel you should post something to. It's a form of AccessFailure, in particular, TooManyChoices.

Demonstration Scenario

I had an idea, which I call "local names". [IntComm:LocalName]

Where should I write about it?

Eventually, I decided on [the Internet Public Communications Scratch Wiki,] because the idea was "scratch," had to do with linking a lot of different communications systems together, and there's been some activity there.

What did I miss out on? I wanted AlexSchroeder and other participants here to be aware of the posting. They didn't get to see it.

However, I did get to keep it "scratch," and CommunityWiki requires a little more structure in the page.

Anti-solution

Just post it everywhere.

Solutions

To some degree, this is unavoidable. If this was perfectly avoidable, we would have a perfect indexing system, and we'd have perfect Intelligence. People would always have their messages sent exactly where they were needed.

However, I think we can reduce ChannelConfusion a lot, besides just making fewer channels (like BigBucketsFirst.)

Not having a solution, I think out loud here:

Things that make it so you can connect a channel with information, either by tagging (categorization, MetaData, whatever) or by notification (RaisedChanges?, or KuroShin's "MLP"- MindlessLinkPropagation?, whatever), seem like good things to think about.

WikiFeatures:MobileContent helps do a degree, because if you put something in the wrong place, you'll be able to forward it to another place. Or, if you want it in two places (violating ConsolidateInformation...), copy it to another place at the same time.

But I don't think this is really a good long-term solution.

Part of the problem seems to be the idea of TheAudience. A given idea can be adapted in many ways to meet many different audiences. It may use different names and links to talk about things. It may focus on different details.

However- I will make up a rule for reasoning about this kind of thing- You should only have to seperate different articles for different channels when the audiences involved are large. If you have 10 people that you are conversing with, ChannelConfusion should not be a problem. When you are dealing with 100's of people, then you can start thinking about, "Okay, I need this document to describe the idea for these people, and I need this document to describe the idea for those people.

So, there's a piece in our puzzle as well.

Discussion

[new] I think there are (at least) 2 very different ideas getting mixed up in your last paragraph.

1. If you know who you are talking to, you often tailor the presentation to that person -- leaving out stuff he already knows, or that (you think) he wouldn't be interested in. When you talk to someone else, you usually tailor the presentation differently -- because it's a different target audience. (Perhaps you also recieved some feedback from the first presentation, helping you hone the presentation).

2. Wasting an hour of time for one or two people is no big deal. Some people would say that wasting an hour of a million people's time is the same as murder. So it's worth spending more time refining the idea before presenting it to a large audience.

3. A message tailored for a well-understood group of 5 people may be very different from "the same" message tailored for a different group of 5 people. But a message tailored for one group of 1000 will tend to be pretty close to a message tailored for a different group of 1000. With very large audience of 1000s of people, you tend to tailor the message close to "the lowest common denominator". And is it even possible for any one to "well-understand" even one group of 1000 people?

-- DavidCary

Diese Seiten lokal erstellen: TheAudience KuroShin PatrickAnderson

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