Difference between revisions of "BeABuilder"

Other types of building. Part of being a builder is building a strong community. Building a foundation level, creating networks. Build more than just page, portal, or user page. Building community. Different types of builders suit different types of people. Some people may not be good writers themselves, but are great at encouraging others in building the pages. Part of being a builder is collaboration (communication). Anything on the wiki that is collaborative in nature is part of building the community. Patrolling changes etc.

Building community is totally about being a builder, but patrolling changes it kind of depends on how you approach it. If you just basically watching for vandalism and reverting it and letting constructive edits pass through, that is gardening. if on the other hand you are watching for opportunities to help people grow in the wiki way and in their fluency with the technology then you are building the community. So it's not just watching for, it's watching for and capitalizing on opportunities too.

Gardening as a separate thing. Do we want to encourage building over gardening, knowing that gardening is happening. Gardening has to happen to keep from sliding into the dump (morass).

What being a builder is not

Not just building for yourself and for your own purposes. That doesn't mean that your objectives can't be met while building for the community.

Be a builder is not gardening (although gardening needs to happen).

Be a builder is never finished.

Be a builder is not perfect. Perfect is the enemy of good enough and right now.

Try to Build Something of Lasting Value

BeABuilder means, in some ways having a argeted goal. You want to build something. You are coming to do something and be constructive. You're not comeing to teardown. If you are refactoring you are adding to it. Not just building your ow stuff, building off of everyones. Knowing that you might be laying the foundation tat someone else might build on top of.

Be a builder is also about not just coming and hanging and out and chatting/shooting the breeze. It's about TRYING to creating something that has lasting value.

Click Edit and Save A Lot

Don't sweat the small stuff. Change is cheap. You can change those later. The big picture. Other people can fine tune or biuld on top.

ChangeIsCheap It's not unlike leogs where you can refactor ad cange.. You can reguild. You don't have plan up front. Just start working on it.

It's like in making a group decisions this is true as well, that the first idea you have is a lousy one, and the next idea is a lousy one and you just want to have as many lousy ideas as you can so you can get to the good idea that comes after the lousy one.

Creating a wiki page is the same way. You want to make a lot of lousy edits so that the difference between when you started and when you end is one great edit. It never happens in one fare swoop, that there are a lot more missteps than there are strong, sure steps.

So there's a related value here... it's about just working on it, like a release early, release often kind of thing. So maybe we need to talk about phases of a wiki page:

1) People seeds with an idea that's often vague and poorly worded. Rough and that's okay, that's expected. 2) Then other people come along and refactor it. What I want people to have here is a freedom from fear that others are going to judge their effort as unworthy.

Create and Demand a Safe Environment for Experiments

That touches on AssumeGoodFaith, the inverse of that is that you can expect people to assume good faith about your effort so you don't have to worry that you've got everything perfect.

AssumeGoodFaith Assume that what has been built before you that those people want you to improve it and feel like it's great if other people come along and improve the things you've built. Its like a tapestry that you are always improving.