The performance of the Forum in the Sloan projects has demonstrated both its promise and room for improving its execution. This requires thinking about our audience; the ways in which we support the Forum, and use it as a tool for communicating with contributors; and the subjects we can profitably discuss on the Forum.
During the Sloan conference on August 20-21, several researchers spoke rather negatively about their experiences with the Forum portion of the STIM sites. The Forum, it seemed to them, was a failure in the sense that visitors to the sites-- particularly people involved in the histories of the projects described-- were not inspired to contribute their own thoughts, write their histories, and communicate with one another via the medium. However, I argue that the problem is not with the technology, or the underlying concept of using the Web for reaching historical subjects. The problems have to do with the absence of moderation and feedback, and the challenges involved in developing online communities.
Successful online groups (on iVillage, the Well, etc.) have moderators, who help set the intellectual tone, provide guidance and encouragement to new participants, draw out or challenge contributors, and generally serve to guarantee that SOMEONE is reading and responding to posts. To draw a parallel, the television camera is a great tool for doing interviews, but if you leave one unattended in a room, no one is going to sit in front of it and tell their life history; you need a Charlie Rose or David Frost to make it work.
With the Forum, it wasn't clear to visitors that anyone was really listening to them, as there was very little organized feedback. More fundamentally, visitors couldn't be assured that someone would eventually make use of their contributions (which for busy people is a serious consideration). Finally, there was no way to know whether their postings had any value as archival documents, nor any mechanism for getting feedback that would allow them to improve as informants. Even the most fluent talkers tend to shut up if they don't know the rules of a conversation, or can't tell if anyone's listening.
There was also an issue of community size and character. The Engelbart veterans are small in number, but most were on the whole busy enough to want to be interviewed in person (calculating that their time would be more efficiently spent in a face-to-face conversation, and the products taken more seriously). On the other hand, it seems to me that the social categories of "PCR user" and "blackout veteran" may not be strong enough to support imagined communities. The challenge is to find groups with potentially large memberships, but whose experiences are potentially vivid enough to attract comment and reflection. Of the five projects, the EV users come closest to constituting such a group.
The challenge in the future is to figure out what kinds of groups are more efficiently approached and interviewed via other means (i.e. with tape recorder and digital camera), and which ones might coalesce around an online forum. For example, I couldn't get anyone to contribute to a forum on paper use in postwar America-- "paper user" is not an identity, even though all of us use the stuff-- but would have much more success reaching people who were involved in the underground press movement in the 1960s. Further, we'd get a better response-- a kind of content that would be more useful in the long run-- if we redirected the Forum away from people who are accustomed to being the subjects of personal attention from journalists and historians, and toward those who are usually don't have the chance to become part of the historical record. The Forum could be directed at engineers and programmers whose lives and experiences are interesting, who have had some contact with important people and events, and whose stories can throw light on subjects we want to know about, but who might not themselves be candidates for formal interviews. (See a companion page for some suggested topics.)
As I see it, collecting data is a bit like fundraising: the degree of attention a person gets should be directly related to the richness of the information s/he has to offer. People like Douglas Engelbart, John Seely Brown, Ted Nelson, and Stewart Brand need to be cultivated, interviewed personally, and given plenty of undivided attention. The Forum would be more used for the information equivalent of people who give $50 to the annual fund drive: you want them to have a good experience and give again, but want to keep your time free for larger donors.
Regardless of who our target audience is, there are things we can do to be more responsive, thus encouraging better submisions, repeat visits, and establishing the basis for participation in future MouseSite and SiliconBase activities.
There are a few pieces of information that people have sent in, but they need to be exploited-- reintegrated into the captions, put into the archive, etc.. For example, several respondents have (as we asked) commented on the pictures, explaining who is who; we haven't yet worked that information back into the picture captions. Conversely, I want to be able to kill off the entries that either have no comments, or are requests for term papers.
More generally, we should pay more attention to integrating material we get from people into some repository, and just as important, let writers know that their contributions are being integrated. This will make it easier for people later on to find interesting comments, and give the contributors the sense that they're making a contribution to the core database. Having their comments just hang out provides little incentive to come back and give us more. This is less a programmatic issue than a workflow one. As long as someone keeps it on their radar, we'll be fine.
The key idea of the Forum-- that you can use the Web to collect material from historical actors-- is a good one; further, given the rate at which Silicon Valley and the computer industry change, oral history and personal reminiscence will have to be a key documentary source for future historians. However, our execution needs to be fine-tuned to make it worthwhile for those actors to share their experiences with us, and to keep them coming back to the site. Some points to consider:
It might help to change the topics-- or at least the artifacts we show-- every couple months or so. That would give people the chance to write on more than one picture, topic, etc.. It might also help to give people a gallery of pictures/video/etc. for them to look at and comment on, rather than a single picture. This would give visitors a reason to spend more time on the site, and perhaps make it seem like a more interesting place. We'd need some way to identify what comments attach to which artifacts, though. Indeed, it might be possible to generate interest in the site by targeting, say, Honors Coop graduates, and inviting them to visit the site and do an online survey about their participation in the program; then to invite them to look around at what else is on the site, and what other surveys are going on.
Finally, Jim Coleman has nearly finished work on a feature that would allow us to create new Forum topics with far greater ease than we can now (as he puts it, "will make it possible for you to make changes to the fora 'automagically' by updating the current 'question' and adding the necessary HTML to change the page."). The benefit of doing so would be several. This would make it possible to open up the technology to other researchers in the history of computing or Silicon Valley.