@JackDunaway wrote:
@Deirdre wrote:
... here are the best practices for using each of these resources:
NI Discussion Forums (ni.com/forums)
*Obtain product-specific technical support
*Share your expertise by answering questions from your peers
*Post LabVIEW feature ideas for R&D or vote on your favorites (ni.com/ideas)
NI Developer Community (ni.com/community)
*Download or submit LabVIEW code
*Read or write technical blogs and tutorials
*Join more than 500 online groups based on your location, industry or application area
These specifications may look good on a marketing brochure, but in reality, the Forums and the Communities are completely disjointed. Are you familiar with Joel Spolsky's and Jeff Atwood's Stack Exchange story? Here's a brief history, and I'll paraphrase here:
...The saving grace of the Communities is the influx of NI employees who contribute there, as if executively incentivized or mandated (again, this is my perception).
The Communities are about a year and a half old, which should have been enough time to reach that critical mass, or at least enough time to develop a seamless interface between the Forums and the Communities. If they were seamlessly integrated, the Communities would be bolstered by the critical mass already present on the Forums, and the Forum users would benefit from the features of the Communities!
Bottom line, it's evident that the two mechanisms have absolutely nothing in common, and are probably even developed by two totally independent groups at Lithium that don't so much as have a carrier pigeon between them for communication. It doesn't make technical or business sense for NI to support two independent mechanisms that are going to fight each other for information sharing.
You made some good points there Jack!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Speaking for myself here are some of thought on this subject.
The forums are question looking for answers while the Community is answers looking for questions.
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The forums main boards act as billboards publishing list of question that need answered. Those of us who get a kick out of helping others can check the billboard when its conveinent and if we have an answer, offer it. So the need is fisrt identified and we decide if we have info to meet that need.
The Community contributors have to guess at the need and try to post the answer before the question.
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The time required to post to each differs due to the formats.
Forums; Questioner has to set up the question. Those who reply only have to provide minimal facts. Compare the average sentance count from the more prolific poster on the forums with the sentance count on the Community.
I can answer a Q on the fourms while on the way to the Men's room but a Community post would look a lot like one of my Uber-Nuggets that took me a couple of weeks to write.
The Community format require too much time!
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Your observation that most of what is on the Community is from NI is consitant with what I observed as well. It appears that anytime an AE developed a code example for a customer, they posted it to the community. So this has bumped up the post count but the level of skill shown in those examples, are limited to the questions asked by Non-LV trained customers.
So for the frequent flyers on the Forum, a lot of those examples look like ...
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What would help the community?
Rock-solid knock you on your back-side content written by experienced developers. Until that happens the experts will hang out in the forums where there always something happening.
Ben
