I often find it amusing to see a discussion forum about a broad topic, carefully drilled down into more specific topics – all neat and organised, and then you’ll typically have some sort of “General discussion” forum, and that general discussion forum category will have ten times as many posts as the other threads.
At a high level you might expect that without the context of a specific topic such a free-for-all forum might be a bit empty. It’s like a community building that houses several support groups: you’ll have your Alcoholics Anonymous, Prostate Cancer Support Group and so on … and then an empty room down the end with no sign on it. Yet this is the equivalent of those general discussion areas of fora that attract ridiculous amounts of traffic.
I should mention that discussions inside that general discussion forum category of course have context, set by the person who starts the thread and with established communities any new discussion comes loaded with the context of relationships between that user and others in the community and the history and culture of that community. But that’s getting down into a level of detail below what I want to use the example for here.
So is specifying a topic for a forum a constraint on discussion?
Blogs aren’t really social media. Well, yes technically they are – but they’re not a true two-way conversation. It requires the blog owner to post an article to which people can respond but it’s expected that they’ll keep on topic. They don’t always, as we’ve seen with our Australian Government Training.gov.au Project Blog so those constraints are not solid boundaries but nonetheless those boundaries are there.
So, define topics to provide context for conversation – sure, but keep in mind the suppressing effect that defining boxes for conversation can have. Monitor where conversation is flowing outside those boxes and adjust your approach accordingly.
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
