2013 Community Member of the Year

Member of the year? Me? You shouldn't have done that! Oh, you didn't

Last thursday I got a bit rebellious when I saw the results for member of the year poll. With a recent celebration of 200k members on element14, seeing only 36 reactions on the 'community member of the year' poll seemed to showcase the level of involvement of the members of this 'community' .

0.018% of the members responded!

Well, that's still double the members that responded to the celebration post.... Apparently there's a huge gap between the number of members and the number of active members.

In my rebellious mood I decided to show how easy it is to manipulate a poll with one email to a hackerspace versus a 200k-member community. I sent an mail around midnight to my local hackerspace, Tkkrlab, to ask them to vote for me. Within a day I was able to quadruple my votes, by getting 13 people to vote for me! One of the Tkkrlab members was even so nice to make a second account to cast more votes, which led to a new bug report. Hackers are helping to report vulnerabilities!

Why I got rebellious, and 'frauded' the poll

Technically, I didn't fraud. It's perfectly legal to get people to vote for you in an election. With 227 votes, the Product of the year was a much more popular poll, probably partly due to the Tweeting and Google+ing by Cypress and TI about this.

The reason I did this, was because I think it deserves attention that while bragging about 200k members, and showing flashy polls, the community as such is not as tight as presented. Of course, most communities exist of a small top layer of frequent contributors and a large user base  that does a lot less, but at element14 I get the feeling that the maintainers and moderators are missing a large, large opportunity here. This is supposed to be an engineering community, but that is exactly where this site is NOT focussing! Whether that's caused by confllicting commercial interest  unfamiliarity with the subject of engineering is unclear to me, The promoted stuff on the front page is tidbits (polls) and commercial (Rpi / Eagle) stuff. Reviews, challenges and interesting engineering discussions get zero-to-nothing attention, where those should be the places this site could excel! Look at the currently runnign PSOC challenge; 15 engineers working hard, and almost no focus / banners on the front page. These guys would love to get reaction from 0.1% of the members!

A poll like this is like a red flag distracting from 'real' content, and I think I've shown that this is not the kind of 'icing on the cake' that this 'community' is waiting for! Please give us content! Please try to get a community going! Gelmi's project got on hackaday, and got more feedback there (both useful and stupid) in one post than here in the complete challenge!

So who won this election?

There can only be one answer to that: Shabaz!

In the picture attached you can see that he had taken the lead in the poll (00:18, 6th of december. No other votes cast except by those I asked for the rest of the day). Although the poll in itself doesn't say that much, he's one of the contributors with a steady flow of very, very well written technical publications, especially in the BBB sections. Next to that, he's very interested in what others are doing, and doesn't shy from contributing his knowledge. To me, you earned the Member of the Year Award, even without a poll!

Victor Sluiter wrote:

 

Reviews, challenges and interesting engineering discussions get zero-to-nothing attention, where those should be the places this site could excel!  Look at the currently running PSoC challenge; 15 engineers working hard, and almost no focus / banners on the front page. These guys would love to get reaction from 0.1% of the members!

A poll like this is like a red flag distracting from 'real' content, and I think I've shown that this is not the kind of 'icing on the cake' that this 'community' is waiting for! Please give us content! Please try to get a community going!

Actually, there are have been and still are some great engineering discussions, but they can be hard to find.  In many cases, the discussion begins in one category (e.g., Raspberry Pi) but the topic veers off to something else (e.g., FPGAs) but since it's not in the FPGA group a subscriber to that group wouldn't see it.  Similarly, there are some great 'blogs out there but they're often hidden as personal 'blogs, whereas if they were in an existing group (such as FPGA) they would get a bit more visibility.  A lot of it is chicken/egg: people aren't active in a group like FPGA if there's little to no activity.

'Blogs are a particular problem, since it's hard to see what's there.  I have a rather successful RasPi 'blog entry (62 comments!) about a subtle Atrix Lapdock issue.  I suspect most of the traffic comes from outside element14, either from links at raspberrypi.org -- possibly broken by now --or from the RasPi Hardware Wiki.  Now, these links didn't happen by themselves.  The raspberrypi.org links are from comments I made to help other users, and I wrote the Wiki section myself and maintain it.  So if a user wants to get some activity on a 'blog or similar content, he or she will probably have to do some self-promotion elsewhere.

One thing I'm toying with is changing my "status" information on a regular basis.  It used to be something that showed up when someone hovered over my avatar, but now it shows up as Activity -- kind of like "tweets".  Might be a good avenue for shameless self-promotion :-)

Regarding "getting a community going", element14 has given us some pretty good tools.  (We can argue about whether things were better before the Revolution Update.)  But it's really up to the community itself to use those tools to build the community.

Thanks for your comment!

I think it's a shame that the website organization is put up this incoherent. To me, that's something the webmasters / content people should do, instead of creating useless polls

I started out on this website just because of the Wireless Charging roadtest. Over the months I found out on the previous site layout how to get into interesting sections. As everyone can/could make groups, the amount of invisible content is huge. I discovered Freescale Sensors and Embedded as active and  useful places.  With the upgrade I didn't get any emails anymore, and there was no 'mySite' (or whatever it was called) anymore. I've restructured a bit now to get going on the new layout, but apart from the upgrade issues, I still miss some people (content maintainers?) overseeing the amount of input and putting interesting discussions (also the technically inclined!!!) in the limelight for everyone.

In my own experience as a RoadTest Challenge competitor, as with Linda's Road Test and the PSOC smarter life challenge, I see very, very, very little feedback on huge amounts of effort put in. A post last week by Dave, pointing to this poll and the Wearables discussion, but not the Smarter Life challenge  (15 engineers and a lot of effort and money involved) inflamed me a bit..... Very happy to have this discussion with you know, that already calms me down a bit!

Somehow interesting content of any group should be brought under the attention of all users. That way this could be getting a real community, with people teaching and influencing each other!

Thanks for your comment!

I think it's a shame that the website organization is put up this incoherent. To me, that's something the webmasters / content people should do, instead of creating useless polls

I started out on this website just because of the Wireless Charging roadtest. Over the months I found out on the previous site layout how to get into interesting sections. As everyone can/could make groups, the amount of invisible content is huge. I discovered Freescale Sensors and Embedded as active and  useful places.  With the upgrade I didn't get any emails anymore, and there was no 'mySite' (or whatever it was called) anymore. I've restructured a bit now to get going on the new layout, but apart from the upgrade issues, I still miss some people (content maintainers?) overseeing the amount of input and putting interesting discussions (also the technically inclined!!!) in the limelight for everyone.

In my own experience as a RoadTest Challenge competitor, as with Linda's Road Test and the PSOC smarter life challenge, I see very, very, very little feedback on huge amounts of effort put in. A post last week by Dave, pointing to this poll and the Wearables discussion, but not the Smarter Life challenge  (15 engineers and a lot of effort and money involved) inflamed me a bit..... Very happy to have this discussion with you know, that already calms me down a bit!

Somehow interesting content of any group should be brought under the attention of all users. That way this could be getting a real community, with people teaching and influencing each other!

I didn't even know there was a poll, I don't seem to get these community event invites/notifications. This may be one reason for such a small turn out, if people don't know they can't vote, comment or participate.

Hey Kas,

And that proves my point that somehow there's something way off in how users are addressed here. This poll was mentioned in the ''weekly update' by Dave, and there's a small banner on the main page somewhere. But I guess most people come here to get an answer to their engineering question, so they create an account, post their question and leave. When you haven't assigned to a group, there's no  way that you're actively attracted to / involved into the community.

This feedback has been around for a while on several levels, but no serious response or action has been publicly given yet.

Maybe I missed it partly because in the weekly update there is a lot of stuff I'm not interested in so in a quick skim I missed it (if I even saw the update in the first place, I may not have even received it). Had I know there was a poll like this I would definitely have voted, I believe  in acknowledging those who help others.