The Expert/Novice problem
The internet is incredibly deep and wide when it comes to all types of information. Need to find some software or some computer info? No problem. Need to find competitive prices on a product - easy. Famous people, history, dictionaries, maps, city guides, movie schedules, it’s all there. The only real gap in this huge collection of information is the basic question and answer.
There are tons of discussion forums covering all types of topics. People debate politics, parenting, product reviews, and technical subjects. What is all too common is that someone asks a question; it’s read by plenty of people who could answer it, but it sits unanswered. What incentive do ‘experts’ have to take their precious time to answer ‘newbie’ questions? None! There seem to be two types of people who do answer these questions - those who are kind and try to help their fellow man and those who want to show off their knowledge of a particular subject.
Amazon has tried to correct this situation by creating a system of incentives so that questions get answered. They created a site called AskVille . This site creates a complicated system of levels of expertise and rewards for answering questions. It’s a reasonable attempt, but for me it fails because you earn points which have no clear value. If Amazon would define precisely what you can do with the points (e.g. buy their products) it would go a long way towards making the system viable.
A system of monetary rewards makes much more sense for a software company such as Microsoft. They have a group of employees which “evangelize” new products and operating systems. When things are newly hatched, they give away free tools and offer all sorts of help to get you “hooked” on their new stuff. Once the product has matured, the free tools vanish and it suddenly becomes quite expensive to work with. They maintain several discussion groups to help developers, but the same basic problem remains of answering simple questions. Microsoft is in a good position to use their software products as incentive. MS Office, Vista, Visual Studio all cost hundreds of dollars, but really cost nearly nothing to Microsoft. A reasonable system of incentives to reward experts with free software would probably work well. This could also be used by other software companies such as Nokia to get more developers to flock to their system.
Thoughts?
