Why is common sense so uncommon?
And this continues to puzzle me….
Through the Agile Software Community of India, I’m organizing three workshops by Mary and Tom Poppendieck in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. As a way to ensure quality (passionate and committed) individuals get to attend this workshop, I introduced the concept of a position paper. To participate in the workshop interested people have to add their position papers to ASCI wiki. The position paper is a simple, plain text response to 3 basic questions. The idea is we have an index page (home page) for the workshop in each city. People are supposed to add their name to the table (index) and link their position paper page from this index. This helps each one create a position paper page on the wiki, add what they want to add to the page and then link it up to the index, so that anyone can see who all have signed-up and if they want to know details about any person, they can click on their position paper link.
This might sound a little cryptic, but when you have an example to see, it all seems to make perfect sense to me. But if you see what has been happening on our wiki with these position papers is:
- Some people don’t know wikis and they just email me saying here is my position paper. I’m happy at least these folks are not messing the whole wiki
- Some people can add their name to the index, but don’t know how to create link. Even if there are 30 other people who have create a link one line above their text, they cannot figure out how to create a link. There is a link to the guide, but that apparently is not helping people either.
- Some people don’t understand or don’t want to understand how to edit a table on a wiki. Even if there are lots of other people who have added their rows to the table, some people cannot figure out how to. They keep doing wired things like randomly adding pipes and that messes the whole table up.
- There is a description on the top of the page linking to the position paper description page. Some people click on this link, delete the position paper definition and add their position paper right there.
- Some folks just clicking on the first person’s position paper, deleting the content on the page and adding their own content. So you click on person A’s position paper and you’ll see Person X’s position paper
- Worst of all, some people are deleting the whole index page and just adding their position paper without any name or any other details.
In all these instances, people are not try to knowingly mess the wiki, but unknowingly are doing all this non-sense. Now one might feel this is common sense, why is this so difficult? If nothing else copy what others have done and that seems to work. My big question is “How can these guys build complex software applications for their clients, if they can’t work with a wiki”?
You know what scares the shit out of me, when I think of over 1 million people in the Indian IT industry who are out there. At least these people are taking an initiative and trying to learn something by attending these sessions. But what about those over million software professionals who don’t even have the drive or energy to learn something new?
June 21st, 2008 at 2:12 am
Naresh, I love the effort you put into the workshops, and I look forward to attending the Poppendieck workshop, but…
Maybe TikiWiki is not the most intuitive software?
Maybe a wiki is not the best interface for RSVP + submitting a document?
Maybe there’s something wrong with the GUI of this application?
Maybe double click to edit is annoying as heck?
Maybe not everyone has time to learn yet another wiki syntax just to edit one page and add a short text.
The position paper is a good idea but the wiki really gets in the way.
FYI, suggestion:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/02/add-data-to-google-spreadsheets-using.html
June 21st, 2008 at 9:20 am
Thanks CBas for your feedback. I agree with all your points. I don’t deny that its a bit complicated to get your position paper in. But, I have used this wiki for 2 other conferences in US and both times we never faced this issue. It might not have been the best wiki from usability point of view, but it did its job.
A part of me feels like we should simplify it and make it really dumb-proof. Another part of me says, its should be a little bit more complicated to really gauge the quality of people.
I’m planning to start a tech conf soon. It would be a free conf, but to attend the conf, I’ll put something as complicated (or simple, depends how you look at it) as sshing into a linux box, cracking a puzzle which would be the password to open a file. Using VI to update the file with your position paper.
BTW the google linke is a good alternative for simple solution.
June 22nd, 2008 at 1:29 am
I don’t intend to be critical here.
However, shouldn’t this be “Keep it simple”?
Isn’t one of the mantra of agile is not to add complexity unless required?
June 24th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I am totally disagree with you for following statement:
You know what scares the shit out of me, when I think of over 1 million people in the Indian IT industry who are out there. At least these people are taking an initiative and trying to learn something by attending these sessions. But what about those over million software professionals who don’t even have the drive or energy to learn something new?
How can we say people attending conference on their own or sent by their organization?
Decision for implementing Agile or any other New Technology are always taken at management level (or Customer, basically we are service oriented industry) so not all the people are required to attend the conference or training sessions which is not used by them any time soon.
Don\’t blame all the people for the mistake made by few people.
July 11th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I would expand to include an analytical ability. People with common sense tend to work problems out in real time by the application of simple reasoning.some medical examples of the lack of common sense which is uncommon sense.
Ravi Shankar
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July 26th, 2008 at 9:57 am
I know you wanted to keep a barrier for people so that you get the right people for the conference, which is good in my opinion. I would have really gone out of my way to figure out how the wiki thing works to get to meet Poppendiek\’s and Michael. I did have a similar experience in one of the companies I worked for - I created a wiki to share interesting tidbits on the legacy code that we were working on and how to re-engineer it. Though many folks were interested in the topic, they could never get to terms wiki that I thought was very simple. But then I gave up because I concluded that in that particular team, wiki was ineffective. So your target audience sounds very similar - so unless you really want to involve them, keep the wiki. You are not going to miss anyone who really want to attend the conference, they will figure it out.