User Roles in Development
Summary
- There are 4 posts — by 3 authors — in this topic.
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Posts with files From File Date John S Veitch 2007 Aug 08 22:41 UTC - Latest post made by Michael JasonSmith at 2007 Aug 09 01:38 UTC
When creating an enhancement for GroupServer, OnlineGroups.Net try to answer three questions, before we even start looking at solutions. 1. Who is the user? 2. What is the user's task? 3. What is preventing the task from being done now? I would like to open up a discussion on the first question: who is the user? More specifically, I would like to put forward the different roles Dan and I have identified. By clearly identifying the roles, and getting agreement on the importance of the roles, it should help us identify and prioritise the maintenance and development of GroupServer, and enhance the usability of the software. I will hold off discussing the other two questions for now :) Dan and I have identified three major roles: * The Owner, * Group members, and * Administrators. The roles are in order of importance, as we see it. The Owner is the person, or organisation, that benefits from existence of the group. In the case of GroupServer Development, the owner is OnlineGroups.Net. It is normally the case that the owner is itself a group, rather than a person, and the owner does not directly participate in the group. The Owner provides the impetus to form the group, and evaluates the success or failure of the group, so it is a rather important stake holder. A group member is the next most important role. The members are the individuals that collaborate, share ideas, and swap opinions. There are at least four different roles within the basic "member" role: 1. Reading, 2. Posting, 3. Unverified, and 4. Participation Coaches. The importance of these roles, and the "member" role in general, is due to the number of individuals in each role: people read more than they post, more people are verified than unverified (we hope) and there are few participation coaches, compared with the other member-roles. There is at least one role that I have left out: moderated members. Where should that go? Is a moderated member more or less important than an unverified member? Finally, the users with the least-important roles are those that have the greatest power: the administrators. There are few administrators, and they carry out few tasks compared with the members, and the administrators have a lower stake in the success or failure of the group than The Owner. There are at least three sub-roles within the administration role: 1. Group Administrator, 2. Moderator, and 3. Site Administrator. Like group members, the importance of the different administrators is mostly due to the number of individuals with those roles. I have one question about managers: should the participation coaches should be classified as a manager or a group-member? Normally, we present the participation coach as having a social role, keeping the group focused on its purpose. However, the coaches have one (minor) administrative role: they can make topics sticky :) Can you break our roles? Are there any we have left out? Is there anything that is not clear? Does anyone make it to the end of my long messages?
On Aug 7, 2007, at 8:00 PM, Michael JasonSmith wrote:
> Can you break our roles? Are there any we have left out? Is there
> anything that is not clear? Does anyone make it to the end of my
> long messages?
Michael:
I did read your message, all the way through - a couple of times.
:-)
I think that your goal is interesting. My first reaction is that
while I see the value in defining these roles, I have a very hard
time putting them into a hierarchy of importance. It would seem to
me, that focusing development on any sub-section of the roles, would
be dangerous.
Rather than deciding which is more important, it seems to me, to be
more important to simply make sure that none of the roles are being
forgotten during development. It seems to me, that we ought to be
making sure that we're addressing the needs of everyone in the
spectrum of users (but, I'm just making this up, it might not make
any sense).
I'm going to provide a slightly different set of definitions for the
purposes of E-Democracy.Org. For the most part, only a variation on
the roles that you have defined. This is not meant to be a critique
of your model, just an exercise to see if there is another way of
looking at this that might spark some ideas.
I'm going to suggest the following roles, using the E-Democracy.Org
scheme and vocabulary:
0) Über Owner = E-Democracy.Org
1) Owner = Local steering committee that is
responsible for maintaining each
forum
2) Site Admin = Tim & Steve (E-Democracy.Org)
3) Group Admin = Forum Manager
4) Moderators = Forum Manager and assistants (if any)
5) Participation = Discussion Managers (another name for the
Coach same thing - we don't
have any, but would like to)
6) Subscribed Member - Poster
7) Subscribed Member - Read Only / Lurker
8) Unverified Member
9) Non-subscribed - Read Only / Lurker
As I engage in this exercise, I can't help but take it a bit further
(for my own selfish purposes). These following categories might be
useless for Groupserver development, but they are very interesting to
me - and might spark some thoughts of your own.
1) The Learner
2) The Preacher
3) The Disrupter
4) The Self-Promoter
5) The Analyst / Policy Wonk / Teacher
6) The Catalyst
7) The Mediator
8) The Activist
9) The Shapeshifter
10) The Reporter / Media
11) The Official or Elected
These roles are important as we plan the social development of our
groups (as opposed to the software development).
Not sure that ANY of this was of ANY use to you, but it was interesting.
Tim Erickson
Michael JasonSmith wrote: > Can you break our roles? Are there any we have left out? Is there anything that is not clear? Does anyone make it to the end of my long message? > Michael, there is lots of misunderstanding still. Owners for instance. There is often an owner of record, the legal owner, which may as you say be some sort of group, and an effective owner who is likely to be a person. The owner of record may have little interest in the group. Owners often participate in groups, but that's a role in addition to their ownership. There's confusion about membership status and members activities. Membership Status: Non-member - Unaware Non-member - Aware - Has visited the web site. Member - Unverified - Moderated? Member - Moderated? Member - Member - Mentor to one or more new members Member - Moderator Member - Participation Coach Member - Group Administrator Member - Sub-domain Administrator Users Tasks: Ignoring posts Subject Skimming Sender Skimming Reading online a single post Reading online a thread of posts Writing a quick response to a post. Choosing to print a post or a series of posts. Printing a post or series of posts. Re-reading the printed copy. Making notes - Thinking about it. Considered response to a previous post. New topic arising from the previous work. New Topic on an unrelated subject. There is a huge difference in INVOLVEMENT between "online reading" and "active posting". It's the difference between the hen and the pig regarding breakfast. The hen contributes the egg, but the pig's involvement is deeply personal. The comment "Does anyone make it to the end of my long message?" is important. I've noticed that programmers in general and Linux users in particular tend to write LOTS of very short precise and often pointed messages. These are best read online, and down the thread they become understandable. Most of the people using the internet don't have the confidence to write anything at all. They are silent. "Those who stand and wait are also important." These users are likely to begin to participate like the "hen". Making a non-involved comment. Even asking a question, but not a serious question. At some stage that reluctance to become the "pig" is likely to pass. Then there are people who've overcome their stage fright and are willing to engage in the debate. Such people often write long considered letters. These letters can't be read and digested by reading online. (at least someone with my limited abilities can't do it that way.) So every day I print a good number of pages for reading and consideration. I use - highlight - copy - paste - auto-format - print - to do this. It's a pain to extract the pertinent detail from several letters to make one readable file that doesn't print into pages and pages. I don't know of an alternative. I hope that's useful John
The following file was added to this topic:
Thanks for your replies, Tim and John. I used the hierarchy of roles (such as manager/site admin and manager/group admin) as a nice way to introduce the different types of users, and break up the post. It was not my suggestion that there is necessarily an actual hierarchy! (Maybe there is…) I do consider the order of the roles to be important. One of the reasons for the order is to help inform the design of the UI. For example, the group administration tasks are less important that the task of following the group, which is why the admin tasks are lower down on the group homepage, compared to the latest topics. The ordering of the roles is also used to prioritise development. While it would be nice to satisfy everyone, scarce resources prevents this. It is not the only factor that will be used to set priorities, as you alluded, Tim. Indeed, the order of roles is not even needed: it is possible to archive (almost) the same effect by ordering the roles by the number of users that have that role. The only role that does not fit is The Owner. There are multiple roles, in multiple collections of roles. My list of roles is what Dan terms “technical” roles. Tim's list of roles on e-Dem are “social” roles. I suspect every site will have its own social roles: Richard and I have the “developer” role on this site, Dan and Tim have “GroupServer Administrator” role ☺ Similarly, I think John's mentor role is a social one, rather than a technical one. It is possible to have multiple roles simultaneously. For example, Helen Clarke currently has the roles “Prime Minister”, “Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage”, “Leader of the Labour Party”, and “Member of Parliament for Mt. Albert”. In GroupServer, it is also possible to have multiple roles at the same time. So I would not combine roles (such as reading-manager), as it is possible to get a combinatorial explosion! I am sorry you are confused about roles, John. However, in your post you never identified what you are confused about! I did explicitly define The Owner, and I was careful to always write it in title-case. You are correct that I never addressed the legal ownership of work in a group, as that is outside the scope of this topic. I do not think we are up to addressing tasks yet, John. We still need to address who the different users are. It may not be possible to seperate users from tasks (such as reading group-member, and posting group-member) and as we identify new tasks we may need to revisit the different roles. However, lets start with roles. Once we have some roles identified, we can use them in our discussions about tasks. Finally, thanks for pointing out that you read to the bottom of my post! I sometimes wonder if anyone gets through my dense text ☺
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