How would you like this community to evolve, keeping in mind that the audience is only likely to grow and based on the influx of new blood - mine included - to be with less experience in local manufacturing than the early-early adopters.
The background to this post lies in having participated in this forum since the end of August. I’ve set my account to forward posts from everything to my email, so I’ve seen most of what’s happened (subject to the 100 emails a day limit), all in all, across about 1000 threads, over 6800 emails, about 66 emails a day on average.
As the SM gets more popular, the activity on this forum is increasing, which from a community perspective is excellent.
Unfortunately the side-effect is that an increasing amount of traffic is rehashing information that’s already been asked, dissected, opinionated, answered and resolved.
For some people searching the forum leads them to an answer, for many others it does not. This is likely to get worse as traffic increases.
There is an attempt at classifying messages by breaking them into Categories, but in my experience, this is not sufficient.
I toyed with the idea of constructing a community editable FAQ document in Google Docs, or a Wiki in Google Sites, or a Wiki in GitHub, but none of those seem to be scalable or leverage the community information that is embodied by this forum.
We could as a community start tagging posts, but I’m not sure if that will lead to success or more chaos.
What would you like to see and what do you suggest or have experience with that might be relevant here?
Look forward to seeing your comments.
Onno