The Contribution Revolution

Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, coined the term. Basically, it is how companies use volunteer contribution of their customers to improve their products and services. Here is a little taxonomy with examples to make sense of it. But we all know it already. When your hair drier or remote control, or your Word break down, you probably google the question, and yep, there is a forum somewhere. No matter how obscure or unlikely your problem is, someone somewhere had exactly the same, figured out how to solve it, and is kind enough to share. I remember when Microsoft was starting, they tried to answer every question, and absolutely failed at it. Now they have user groups, and everyone is happy. Facebook does not even have anyone at all you can contact. All they have is user input; someone from Facebook read them, figures out the most complex issues, and posts.

Which brings me to the issue of college advising. Here is how it goes: We create very complicated rules and procedures, then we explain them in the language no one can understand, and we place our explanations in multiple places no one can find. And after we have done all of this, we spent an extraordinary amount of time translating what we created into a human language to one student at a time. We call this advising. Very little of it is about actually giving anyone advice: how to live one’s life, which career choice is better for you, etc. Most of it involves reading the catalog, the bulletin, the websites, and handout sheets together with each student, explaining them what it all means, - And then doing it over and over and over again. Highly educated people spend their time translating what they themselves wrote, hundreds of times. What a waste! Sometimes we get frustrated and create yet another advising sheet which explains a particular topic, but then we create so many of these sheets, pages, catalog entries, websites, and handouts that they start contradicting each other. To bring something to students’ attention, we mass-email, talk to their advisers, and generally have to yell at the top of our lungs to cover the information noise created by ourselves and others like we. It becomes even more difficult for students to find the right piece of information. So they come to us for help. It’s not like they want to talk to us necessarily; they simply cannot figure out what to do! This creates a vicious circle: a student who cannot figure out a simple thing learns to mistrust the written word, and next time goes straight to the advisor to get the only form of reliable information.

Well there are two lessons from this:

1. One: our “manual,” or a book of rules has to be very clear, very brief, and be located in one and only one place. Why do we still have the catalog AND the bulletin, AND the websites, AND handouts? Those are all vestiges of pre-internet technologies. If we had only one authoritative information source (I suggest the website), we would invest more time and energy in making it simple and clear, and we would actually keep it current.
2. Two: we need user forums just like anyone else. We need the contribution revolution. There is no replacement for the collective human experiences. Hundreds of students figure out our policies and procedures, and some would be happy to share it with others. Moreover, the user forums can go beyond policy and procedures; they can extend into the world of learning, too. How do you create a killer work sample? What does effect size really mean? What kinds of paper Dr. A actually like in the end, despite what his rubric says? How do you explain multiplication when everything else fails? And then who knows, maybe our students will give us ideas how to improve, revise, streamline, simplify?

It will probably take us a while to address the lesson # one. Don’t ask, it is complicated. An organization has its own rhythm and logic, very different from the normal human rhythm and logic. I still think there is no imaginable alternative. In the long run, we need to do it; figure out the outstanding issues like archiving of old websites, control over their accuracy and quality, some sensible and clear structure. But I cannot imagine printed catalogs and semi-dead websites twenty years from now.

On the lesson two, I encourage all to experiment and think together. OK, here is a prototype on our website. What if we embed them in most of our websites? Let the kids speak right there, as they read our pages. I am curious if it is going to change anything.