For one of my other classes, I'm attempting to build a web-based online survey administration software package. A big problem that I had a few days ago was how to go about implementing exporting all of the data for all the participants for a given survey to a document that could be read by SPSS - a statistics software package commonly used by researchers in the social sciences. By myself, I had no idea how to go about this because I had never used SPSS before and had no idea what formats it could understand or if it was even possible. I'm sure that other programmers in the world have tried to tackle this problem before, I have even run into features on similar websites that actually accomplish this task. I tried Googling around the web to find a solution with not much luck. I ended up spending a lot of time analyzing SPSS and figuring out something that worked.
It would be nice if there was a database or forum where these types of technical questions could be asked and answered. As Vieweg et al talks about, this site could function similarly to the Facebook group for the Virginia Tech victims, providing a "large, distributed group of pepole who [exhibit] problem-solving capabilities" (2). This site would function as a "knowledge base" where programmers could answer other's questions as well as post cool things they've done or tutorials about how to accomplish a task that they have found difficult. I know that I would definitely take advantage of both of these use cases - I would definitely have posted about how I solved the problem of exporting to SPSS, because I don't think anyone else should have to endure the pain and suffering I did.
A major issue here would be how to know information is of proper quality or trustworthy. I think it would be very important to implement a rating feature for posts so that users can develop a reputation on the site that other users will respect (this is similar to the idea of social capital as described by Vieweg et al). Therefore, when someone posts a solution to a problem, you'll have a good idea of whether it would be worthwhile trying to implement it that way or not.
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There are a lot of sites like this for other kinds of systems that developers use and also for other question answering services. For example, answers.yahoo does implement a rating system and the question's poser can also indicate his "favorite" answer so that future Googlers can discriminate against unhelpful/bad answers.
ReplyDeleteYou bring up an interesting point that quality and trustworthiness is an important factor in these web sites, since system development is costly and often time-crucial. As the Virginia Tech paper discussed that VT networks were given more credibility than other networks, your site could show credentials such as degrees, years of experience, and overall rating.
The quintessential web app of this kind is Stack Overflow [http://stackoverflow.com]. It’s a Q&A site for programming questions, and includes a reputation system that works in much the same way Kayla described above for Yahoo! Answers (although in Stack Overflow people can vote down answers too).
ReplyDeleteOne issue that we touched on in class with systems like this is how to provide users with incentive to answer questions. For more difficult questions, Stack Overflow provides an interesting incentive: users can sacrifice some of their own reputation points as a “bounty” for anyone who can provide an acceptable answer. Using something like this in your system would encourage people to answer harder questions as well as easy ones.