At the fwiki hangout on Wednesday March 29 2017 we discussed roles in fwiki.
At the core of fwiki are the coders, the creators of the present structure and functionality.
At the hangout a distinction was made between two kinds of users. There are authors (content creators) and readers (or potential readers).
Some authors are also coders. They don't need help in finding their way around the fwiki.
The fwiki is starting to attract authors (like Pamela) who see the benefit and potential of the fwiki.
She writes and she is active in many communities online and offline
She got her first computer when microcomputers first cam on the scene in the late 1970s.
She cares passionately about the relationship between people and digital technologies i.e she wants a world where the tech genuinely "works for the people" rather than "the people working for the tech".
By "the people working for the tech" she means people having to adapt their behaviour to serve the requirements of the tech.
There is no way that an author like Pamela could find her way around the fwiki unaided, given its current support systems for authors.
In her case that problem is being overcome through one-to-one mentoring.
David Bovill and Pamela McLean work together and David patiently provides the user support that the fwiki software doesn't.
While the number of new authors is low, one-to-one mentoring is the most effective way to get newcomers up to speed. Later, until the fwiki has a user-friendly interface for authors, it may make sense to have some group training and/or peer-to-peer support group to help authors.
The other user role that we recognised at the hangout was readers.
Federated wiki needs to decide if it is simply a kind of closed writing-and-thinking place, where authors meet and work on ideas, or if it is a place where authors can publish their work and share it with readers.
At the hangout a plea was made for the consideration of the needs of readers. A minimum and urgent need is for the creation of read only pages so that readers can read fwiki content without it doing unexpected things and frightening them away.
That comparatively quick fix would make it much easier for authors to encourage readers (or at least some of the more intrepid ones) to come and read what is on the fwiki.
Another comparatively quick fix would be a publish button of some kind, so that "rough work" and "thinking aloud" is easily available amongst authors, but will not "leak out" to bewilder (and possibly alienate) the readers who are expecting reader-ready, coherent content.
It is fine for an author to publish information about an idea or project that is a work in progress.
But the author doesn't want the piece of published writing in itself, to be some kind of messy work in progress.
For the sake of quick fixes and bringing in "authors and readers" it is important to focus first on the immediate needs of readers. If the authors know the readers are okay to read what has been written then they will be more motivated to create content on fwiki.
Readers who want to become authors will be fewer in number and can be mentored initially.
We have some useful lessons to learn from other sites and the relationship between authors and readers via the comment boxes.
Medium is a particularly useful example because of the way it treats (and welcomes in ) people who write comments.
Related thoughts written in a discussion before this post. TAP - Readers Writers and Medium