Nitpicker's dashboard

Thomas,
The tone of the post at 37 signals is so different from that under your name above that it confuses me. Please write me at my gmail account called DickKarpinski to continue this conversation.

I was so unhappy with them that I called them Get Frustration. But recently I said it felt like they were lying to me and got an instant complaint. I did not say or even imply that they had lied, but now it rather looks as though I should have had I but known of these other practices. Aren't they open for a class action suit that would be devastating and successful? – Nitpicker, on April 20, 2009 01:34

When this is working better than other folks customer service operations, you could allow folks who already interact here to bring up problems they are having with other companies that you don't support.

Those companies will eventually discover you and might well complain, but they could also happen to see the benefit and join officially to get even more benefit from the process.

It's a weird way to show off your service but it could work and it sure doesn't cost a lot to try out. Disk space and server cycles are so cheap that their cost is negligible. But of course your lawyers will tell you not to even try. Kill them.

Of course, I would take that idea further. Let lots of us help in myriad ways.

Aha! Eric, I see what one problem is. You are called a "Community Manager" but a modern community does not want to be managed. Managers are not allowed to participate in any Scrum. But Scrum Masters are allowed. The difference is that managers tell folks what to do while Scrum Masters just provide coaching and assistance.

Well, OK, Toyota has managers, but their managers are carefully trained to assist and coach and attack problems that the company creates inadvertently which impede progress for worker teams. They do so well that not only have they become the biggest car company in the world, their market capitalization exceeds that of all other car companies in the world put together.

Read about them. Hell, start with "Out of the Crisis" by W. Edwards Deming, and pay close attention to Tom and Mary Poppendieck and Tom Gilb and his "Competitive Engineering". The ideas are out there, freely available for anyone bold enough to embrace them.

You folks had a really fine idea, but so far the implementation is imperfect. Get help from everyone. Even putting ideas up for comment and vote would completely change the feel of this community and make your popularity soar. Doing it in the form suggested in "Dialogue Mapping" is virtually guaranteed to build knowledge and understanding in mere weeks of community involvement.

I have to give you credit for making this work better than I had feared. I followed an interesting link before posting this response, and it was still here when I returned. Kudos. Some things you got right.

I know it's scary even to contemplate this, but read "Wikinomics" and Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" and let eager participants sign non-disclosures and offer to provide code for improved features for your system. You may be able to get a hundred programmers to work for free and speed up progress by an order of magnitude. Just give them recognition in public as you roll out features that clients provided.

Make a list of the problems that seem most pressing and provide prizes for the best ideas for solving those problems. See Conklin's "Dialogue Mapping" and let qualified applicants address exploring those problems in detail and propose solutions which in turn can be examined in detail including pros and cons for any aspect of any proposed solution. Questions serve as the index into the discussion as well as clarifying the ideas or answers which respond to them.

SORRY.

I specifically agreed with you in advance and further explained why I might be even more wrong.

YOU DID NOT LIE

and I did not imply that you did, only that my sadness is as if you had. I think you are well meaning and honest but still the lack of rapid response and meaningful change is disappointing to this nitpicker.

And thanks for the link to more info. I appreciate that. That actually feels more like a conversation than what has gone before. I highly value conversation. But my goals seem unrealistic.

When i visited a science museum in London, I was very disappointed because all I got was the stuff they put on display and the text they put with the objects. No way was offered to explore each exhibit.

Nowadays, I expect to be able to search with Google and in Wikipedia on anything that matters to me, but the museum works pretty much as it did before World War II. Talk about slow to adapt to new realities. And that's among the best of breed.

No wonder then that Get Satisfaction disappoints me. How could it not? They'd have to emulate Toyota to satisfy me. GM and Ford have failed even though they did actually try, and they depend on such skills directly.

If this discussion were in a wiki, anyone could condense it into a smaller, more refined essay.

It is hard to imagine a posting more full of misleading claims and blatant lies.

Vote for Obama for real change and an improving democracy. His organization is not in the business of suppressing the vote and disenfranchising legitimate voters as the Republicriminals have repeatedly used to frustrate the will of the people.

I recently read "Made to Stick" about features which make information understandable and memorable. It goes on at some length about "the curse of knowledge" which makes it hard for experts in any subject to understand how unclear they are being to those who are not at all expert. It's a fundamental flaw in human reasoning. You have to fight it. – Nitpicker, on September 05, 2008 18:03

Every interaction here is about at least one problem. Just solve them. In this case, when the system sends you somewhere, that place should provide useful information such as that the trouble ticket will be responded to in email within three days. But it seems like nobody is in charge of fixing the problems in the user interface or letting anyone else fix them. This GetFrustration system makes me angry, and I've learned to use the energy in my anger to try again to fix what made me angry. It may not work, but I break less pottery around my house that way. – Nitpicker, on September 05, 2008 17:22

Despite running a wiki, these folks do a great job of obfuscating how to do stuff. They seem also quite practiced at not responding to user issues with concrete helpful information. If they used their own tool, wikis, for this support function, then WE could fill in the blanks and help each other figure out stuff. Instead, we GetSuffering which uses obsolete and unhelpful forum style interaction so that instead of getting better over time, these discussions just get longer. This constrains the best answers to get burried deeper and deeper in irrelevant material. I do not understand why they don't read "Wikinomics" and try to be more open and to make use of their own tools. It's frustrating whether you pay or even it you don't. As one tiny example, this madness of providing a postage stamp size box for composing a comment virtually guarantees that the quality of the comments will be greatly reduced. We don't even get to see what we are saying. How dumb is that? – Nitpicker, on September 05, 2008 17:12

Scott, I don't know the details of what Google Reader does, though I know it doesn't work well for me. Still, don't let perfection be the enemy of better (and doable). – Nitpicker, on May 19, 2008 07:15

You have a problem with that? Contact me or BZWebTech.com for an affordable, no cure, no pay contract to fix that within a month. Disks are cheap and the problem is not so big. I guarantee it. – Nitpicker, on May 19, 2008 02:09

Ask me for help. Please. 707-546-6760 (home) 707-228-9716 (cell) – Nitpicker, on May 19, 2008 01:57

We should learn from the success of Wikipedia and create topic articles (at the top of each topic) to summarize and continually refine the best understanding of the topic. The original question/problem/whatever with its replies and comments constitutes the Talk page for the topic article.

The largely time sequenced replies and comments just make the topic LONGER. The gems of value get buried. The article at the top can get BETTER over time. That's a tremendous advantage.

Treat the article as in a wiki so damage can be reverted and attribution for changes is hidden in the history. You can make the history a third part of the topic at the bottom if you like.

The forum style replies and comments should, I feel, remain subject to deletion and revision by only their authors, but not for a mere 15 minutes, forever. History? I don't know. We don't even have access to the goals for the whole Get Satisafaction process. Let's have explicit goals and an actual user's manual highly visible (by link) at the top of every single topic. Links don't take much room.

This is a major comment and suggests to me that, again like wikis, it should be made easy to fork off another topic from any existing topic, leaving a link to the new topic at the location of the reply or comment which fostered it. This is a more complex system than we have now, but visualize how much richer and easier to understand things could become if this were done. It could make GS into a truly remarkable and compelling resource for participating companies and their customers.

If the idea intrigues but seems too complicated for you to accomplish on your own, I can help you find experts who can accomplish this from scratch in a matter of months, and not so many, either. Private comments can be sent to dick at cfcl dot com, but to get past my spam filters, please include Nitpicker in the subject line

Should be a comment. Good content. See reply below. Replies offer better formatting. Where is the manual that distinguishes comments from replies??? – Nitpicker, on May 19, 2008 01:18

Subscribers to a topic get email re new replies. My ideal would send them the original topic entry and all of every new or newly commented reply. It's easy to do. – Nitpicker, on May 19, 2008 01:04

That's quite clever. If the timestamps are kept, and the timestamps for each subscriber to a topic are kept, it would be easy to highlight new stuff for you. – Nitpicker, on May 19, 2008 01:01

But Amy, that should be a comment, it's not a reply to the topic in general. Let's discuss the GOALS of having both replies and comments in detail. (I am a – Nitpicker, on May 19, 2008 00:57

Oh yes, please. My eyes are getting mature and high contrast is valuable to me. – Nitpicker, on May 19, 2008 00:53