Results tagged “quora”

Summary: The White House is looking to build a web community to get its questions answered, sort of their own Quora, and they're trying to do it the right way. They're asking those who would participate to help shape how the community itself works. They're not trying to create a network from scratch, but instead trying to connect to networks that already exist. And they're not just making a community for the hell of it — they're trying to build one with purpose.

But they've asked for our help, from those of us who build, and know, and love web communities. We're being asked to share our expertise in what does, and doesn't work on successful web communities. Our deadline for participating is on Monday Sunday. Giving them insights into our hard-earned lessons will only take 15 minutes of your time this weekend, and will keep us from having to wonder, "Why wasn't I consulted?"

You can go get started, or read on to find out more.

ExpertNet

The White House is advancing this project under the working title "ExpertNet". (There's no official link between ExpertNet and Expert Labs, except that we at Expert Labs are trying to help in the effort, too.) In short, ExpertNet as it stands right now is a spec for a platform for getting questions answered by experts, similar to what sites like Quora and Stack Overflow do. The project was announced in December, and the deadline for responding was extended for two more weeks, but those two weeks are up on Monday Sunday, and we're running out of time.

Submitting ideas to ExpertNet is as easy as editing a wiki. Many of the key questions they're trying to address are straightforward:

• Decisions around participation: How do you tap in to existing networks of experts?
• Should there be leaderboards for things like a Top Ten? I don't happen to think so, but if not, then what are the right motivational methods?
• How do you get people with the right expertise and knowledge to know about, and use, this network?
• What's the best way to demonstrate the qualifications of people who submit ideas on such a network?
• And, from a purely tech standpoint, what tools exist to already perform some or all of these functions? Are they free/open source? (Obviously, at Expert Labs, we think ThinkUp is a great answer for many of these questions, since it was meant to address many of these particular requirements.)

We Have The Information They Need

The community of people who care about web communities have a responsibility to share what we know. We know what works on Quora or StackOverflow, and what goes wrong on Yahoo Answers. We've learned for years from Ask MetaFilter. Andy Baio collected a short list of links to best practices just today. But none of those lessons are obvious to people who've been busy defining policy — they haven't been in the trenches like we have.

And it's important to remember that perspective, because even if we don't help, this thing is going to get built. And if we don't help, it's going to be broken or wrong or weird or a failure. The White House has already done one amazing thing, by defining the budget for the technology as zero. The official notice in the Federal Register says:

To be clear, there is currently no funding identified for building this platform nor is it clear if future funding will be available. Hence, respondents should be sure that feedback, when possible, addresses opportunities for implementing solutions at little to no cost, including multi-sector partnerships.

That's government-speak for "if you're just reading this to see what you can sell to the Federal government, bug off." They've reduced the chance of vendors getting in and taking control of the process, which reduces the chance that we end up with some sort of National SharePoint Network. In short, they've met us more than half way and avoided a major pitfall, and now all we have to do is guide them to the tech they should use.

If you care about web communities, and think the right web community with the proper design could positively impact the way our elected officials work, then dive in. I'll make note of some of the people making valuable contributions to the effort, so that we can track this as it evolves. You can get started by following these few simple steps:

• Register for an account on the wiki
• Find one of the relevant topic pages and contribute your insights. Simply adding relevant links could be very valuable here, and of course writing out longer ideas would be great too.
• Tweet or blog with mention that you are participating in helping with ExpertNet, so that we can let people know what you did, and prompt them to respond. We've been using the #expertnet hashtag.

My Agenda

Obviously, there are some disclaimers to throw in here. I'm an unabashed fan of the ideas behind ExpertNet, and it aligns very closely with the mission of Expert Labs, so we're hoping our work and our tech is a big part of the solution. We're a non-profit and all our work is free, so we're not motivated by anything except the desire to see our efforts go to their best possible use. And one of the sites I've mentioned learning from is Stack Overflow, where I'm an advisor. But I think anyone who cares about these things can clearly see that they are succeeding in getting highly technical questions answered by expert responders, and I hope our government can learn from that as well.

I urge you to join the folks who are participating in ExpertNet, whether it's working on building a platform, or simply coming up with a better name for the project. They're asking for our help, and it's our fault if we don't give it to them.

There's been a recent re-emergence of the perennial tech industry conversation about how the venture capital industry can stop excluding women from both joining VC firms and from having their businesses funded by VCs. Fred Wilson covered some specifics about what it would take to make an incubator for women-run startups, and ReadWriteWeb's Audrey Watters offered a broader overview of the declining participation of women in the tech industry.

But of course, this conversation comes up every year, and the people who haven't been excluded always say "The tech industry's a meritocracy! Anybody who wants to participate isn't barred from doing so!" So I thought it'd be useful to illustrate exactly how exclusion happens — not through a malicious, deliberate act, but through men not realizing they're doing it.

Here's a Quora question thread asking how one could get to meet ubiquitous tech investor Ron Conway. Quora's heavily populated with tech industry insiders, including many with extensive experience in venture capital. The answer I've linked to there is the consensus favorite, with an answer that begins:

The best way to get a meeting with Ron and the SV Angel team is through referral. In fact, we haven't invested in any company without a referral from someone we know, ie, a fellow investor, an entrepreneur that we know, someone at a big co, etc.

I acknowledge that this is an imperfect filter and may not be the most equitable way, but like many investment firms, we receive a high volume of opportunities and it would be virtually impossible to speak to all the founders without some initial filter. Another filter is sector focus - for example, if someone referred an opportunity in consumer internet, that would be 'higher in the queue' than if the same person referred something in the biotech area.

(One analogy is the NFL draft. It would be virtually impossible to evaluate ALL players who want to play in the NFL - scouts usually look at the same players since the top prospects are known quantities and "diamonds in the rough" are found through word of mouth, ie, referrals. For example, Bill Belichick, head coach of the Patriots, is known to draft only college players that are referenced highly by college coaches that he knows. Sorry, I analogize everything to sports.)

Now, I'm privileged enough to have a lot of access, but just a few years ago, I certainly didn't have a social network that connected to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, despite having a relatively large network. And I still don't know the first thing about sports, so a sports analogy only emphasizes that I'm not part of the cultural assumptions baked into interactions with some parts of the VC world. So even somebody like me who's male, connected and willing to cross cultural barriers can't get in. And that reality isn't just accepted, it's known. Known well enough to be documented by others, in an industry where perception is as important as reality.

How It Works

The best answer for how to get access to the man who's arguably the most powerful angel investor in the tech industry is an example of an explicitly closed network that's illustrated with an implicitly closed analogy to a sport that women are prohibited from playing. "Hey, I'll fund anybody. I meet entrepreneurs in the ladies' restroom outside of screenings of Eat, Pray, Love. All are welcome."

I'm not maligning the person who wrote the answer on Quora — he's accurately describing reality. I'm not maligning Ron Conway — I don't think he intends to exclude. What I am maligning, explicitly is closed networks that, while arguably reducing the number of unqualified solicitations for funding, also serve as de facto mechanisms of exclusion. It's a broken, inefficient, short-sighted system.

Let's look at it like a usability problem, like a website with a front door that has more than 50% of visitors failing to complete the simple task of being able to join the site. Maybe one of the new wave of "super angels" is going to get enormously higher returns by simply ending the process of eliminating half of the potential successes out of the gate. Maybe not.