ARC: Community: ELMAR: Posting

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The March ELMAR User Survey has now closed with 217 voters availing themselves of providing feedback. Here are the results:

The new ELMAR interface is about a month old now. What do you think?

33% It’s awesome
18% It’s marginally better than the previous interface
1% About the same as the old way
33% I am a little annoyed
16% It’s a total disaster

I do hope you will forgive me the use of slightly whimsical answer categories.

There is a bare majority on the plus side of this scale. It is also interesting to note that we have a genuine bimodal distribution. While that is interesting from an academic point of view, it does make it tricky for coming up with "practitioner implications" – doing two different ELMARs is not an option!

Many of the comments concerned the login process. How to speed up the process by which you view postings has been the subject of several Administrivia notes (see link to related material below). Hopefully, now that everyone is more used to logging in, it is going more smoothly than a  month ago at the beginning of  the survey.

The question does remain: why do we need a login process at all? Here I might suggest two answers.  First, logins keep email address harvest software (i. e. spammers) out, which protects the identities and inboxes of anyone whose email is visible in an ELMAR posting.  Second, the design philosophy of the Community Zero platform (as compared to listserv) is predicated on the notion that email is doomed to get less useful over time while Web based social software will get more useful over time.  I am not 100% certain if that is true, but I wouldn’t want to bet against it. 

Other comments addressed the TOCs which I am still kind of mulling over.  It may be possible to create email inbox TOCs again but it will require some additional work each week on my part.  Maybe that could be the subject of a future survey.  And speaking of which, does anyone wish to provide some suggestions or  input on the next survey?

— ch