Just to let people know, we've now started to discuss the early development of the Question and Answer service in the Consultation Group. This should allow us to ask lots of questions and for your suggestions without overburdening the more public areas of the Community.
So if you'd like to have your say in this and other developments please feel free to join. We'll still talk in the public areas about upcoming services but that comes later, after we've been able to shape the service with a little more privacy.
To join the group you should already have a registered account with a Community profile and then you can join from the Groups link in the left hand menu.
It'd be great to have your input as we kick off this development.
Yes that sounds sensible. It would be great to have a chat/back and forth facility but I think you are right that most of this type of expert wouldnt have the time for that.
However, it would be good if we could have the expert back after a period of discussion on the forum (following the initial expert input) - the expert could then reflect back on the main points in the forum discussion.
I think this brings up some interesting issues about the difference between a forum and an expert question and answer service. In my experience there are some specific issues when working with experts.
They may not have a lot of time to give outside of a particular time slot and, especially when people have a high profile, may want to contain the level of discussion around the initial public area their answers may appear. This may mean that they'd be able to spend some time preparing answers to questions in a section dedicated to this but be less willing to enter ongoing discussions.
So the model I've seen work - based on forums as opposed to live chat based q&a's (which has lots of other issues) - would be a combination of a section for questions backed up by more detailed discussion in the forums.
So you'd have an area where perhaps a week in advance people could share questions for an expert. Other people could see these but not respond directly, it would mainly provide opportunities to see what other people have already asked and give an expert the chance to prepare answers.
We'd then ask the expert to respond to the questions so people could read the responses and then create a discussion where people could discuss the answers and provide different viewpoints. It'd allow for much longer discussion and also allow us to have experts who may be concerned about getting involved in discussions. Though of course we'd love anyone with an interest in autism to be involved in the Community.
But that's just a starting suggestion based of what I understand about he functionality we have, more than happy to consider any other viewpoints and please help us by suggesting other topics or experts you'd be interested in. :)
Challenges or alternative answers - I would hope there would be a facility for dialogue - so such an opportunity may stay open for say, a month, to give time for responses to get back and forth and for a good discussion to get going.
How about have a section where we can pose questions to specific people who have agreed to answer when they can.
I have seen this on other forums and it really works. It would need to have some rules, perhaps that it's something already discussed and we need clarification etc.
We've been concentrating on building the core functionality to allow people to share and support each other but there is also a 'Q&A' section we'll be able to develop.
It'll take a bit of time for us to get up and running but if that's too long it's always something we'll be able to trial using the forum.
What would really help would be suggestions about the experts people would like to see so we could start seeing who would like to help out. So any particular people or fields of expertise that you, or anyone else, would like to see?
