On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 10:11:40PM -0500, cdent@blueoxen.org wrote: (01)
> > Here are my thoughts. First, the obvious disclaimer. This was
> > obviously an unscientific, self-selecting experiment, and we'd need to
> > play with it some more to do it proper justice. That said, H2O is
> > definitely not well-suited to small, motivated teams, which we were.
> > None of the threads reached resolution, and I suspect a big reason was
> > that we were not given a choice as to which threads to respond.
> > Rotisserie's theory of maximizing participation seems to be a good way
> > of encouraging many voices, but a poor way of reaching resolution.
>
> I'm not sure if I agree with this. I think there are several
> other variables that may have had an impact:
>
> - we didn't go into the discussion with a shared understanding
> of the question being asked (02)
And I would argue that H2O was not helpful in facilitating that shared
understanding. I responded to two posts asking for clarification and
further discussion, and yet the original authors could not respond,
because H2O wouldn't let them. (03)
> - We were not "trained" in the tool (04)
Agreed. (05)
> - there was no compelling reason to be successful (no cost for
> failure, no concrete gain from success) (06)
I don't agree with this statement. But even if I did, this doesn't
affect my evaluation of the tool. (07)
Given enough motivation and shared commitment, a team will most likely
overcome the inadequacies of their tools. Given a choice between a
kick-butt team of programmers with the worst tools known to man, and a
mediocre team of programmers with the best tools known to man, I'd
take the kick-butt team. (08)
In the interest of being as objective as possible when doing tool
evaluation and comparison, "motivation" has to be one of your
controls. (09)
> - the rotisserie settings were wrong for the type of discussion
> we were trying to have:
> - 24 hours was too short for people who have other things they
> need to be doing
> - 4 rounds was just enough to get us started (010)
Agreed. (011)
Who controls these parameters? Were there guidelines for determining
what these parameters should be? (012)
> - while we don't have any apparent winnowing of discussion in
> the threads we produced we do have three postings that
> received high evaluations (where high is defined as greater
> than the maximum points one reviewer could apply): (013)
Several gripes here. My first is starting to become mantra for me: In
order for community rating systems to have any value, there must be
some shared understanding about those metrics. A rating of two has to
mean about the same for me as for you. You could argue that in a
larger group, there is more likely to be that shared understanding,
and hence, the metrics will have more meaning. However, in a smaller
group, one outlier can throw off the ratings entirely. This is
another reason I don't think H2O works well for small groups. (014)
Also, I believed that ratings determined what threads would continue.
In a small group, one person could easily throw everyone off a thread,
even if everyone else in the group believes it's important. (015)
> I went away for the weekend without computer access. I withdrew
> from the project to ensure that I wouldn't be selected for
> further followups. An improvement I would suggest for H2O is an
> option to declare weekends "off". I'm assuming some announcements
> went out over the weekend? (016)
Agreed. (017)
-Eugene (018)
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