Fri 11 Dec 2009
The Political Science Department has a blog. Odds are, it will fail. And that would be too bad! It would be amazing if there were a central location at which Williams faculty, students, alumni, parents and local residents could talk about politics. EphBlog, sometimes, serves that function: see our 89 comment thread (none written by me) about the politics of Afghanistan/Vietnam last week. But the faculty/students in Political Science could do a much better job of it than we do. How? Here are the basic steps for creating a vibrant on-line community of Ephs:
1) New content every day. A community needs readers, and readers want new content. If you want them to come back, you have to provide it. Professor Darel Paul is a busy guy. He isn’t going to write interesting posts like this unless he is sure that someone is going to read them.
2) The easiest way to produce new content each day is to recruit more authors. (I approached the department about this. Current policy seems to be that only faculty are authors. That would be fine if faculty produced enough content but, right now, they don’t.) I would recommend recruiting/naming a Blog Advisory Council of 5 students, each of whom would be given posting privileges and each of whom would be expected to put up at least 2 or 3 items per week. The must be a score of political science students who would be interested in this role and good at it.
3) More readers. Readers-and-content is a chicken-and-egg problem: tough to know which comes first. But, just as the answer is eggs (since the dinosaur predecessors of chickens laid eggs) to the latter puzzle, content is the answer to the former. Once you have content, readers will come. But, at the same time, you want to engage and encourage those readers, involve them in the conversation and maintain their interest.
a) Make commenting easy. (The initial version of the comment settings seemed to require authors to approve each comment. That is a bad idea. You want, as much as possible, to have comments appear instantaneously.)
b) Engage with your readers. If someone leaves an interesting comment/question, you should reply, even if just to acknowledge her contribution. Readers want to feel a part of the dialogue.
c) Better outreach. Although you can’t expect the College to keep a link to the blog on the main homepage all the time — even though it is probably better content than the endlessly recycled Alumni Review articles which are there now! — you could ask Jim Kolesar to highlight the political science blog on occasion. You could also include it in the next Eph Notes mailing.
Do these three steps guarantee success? No! But not doing them (which seems to be the current plan) guarantees failure. Again, I think it would not be hard to create an interesting on-line discussion about politics among Williams people and that the Political Science faculty is the perfect group to lead that conversation. But do they really want to? That’s the question.
A few years ago, I might not have been so excited to see political discussions migrate away from EphBlog to some other site, even if that site was run by and for members of the Williams community. But the passage of time has made me more ecumenical. The most important thing is that the conversation about politics happens somewhere, that there be an electronic log at which Ephs of all generations might discuss important issues of the day. Until now, the only possible location for that conversation has been EphBlog. I hope that the Political Science Department — filled as it is with amazing teachers like Sam Crane, James McAllister, Cheryl Shanks and many others — picks up the torch.
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4 Responses to “Political Science Blog”
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rory says:
perhaps ephblog could do it’s part by making sure to cross-post and push readers to visit? it takes at least three times getting linked to a blog for me to give it much of a gander. I’ll count this as link 2:)
Ronit says:
I think having student bloggers is a great idea. Why not open it up to all polisci majors?
I’d also suggest making efforts to integrate the blog with Facebook.
kthomas says:
Hrr–umm.
My difficulty with this (and other academics blogs, though not limited to them) is simply, keeping up.
RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is one suggestion,– but it’s clear to me that only the most tech of readers, use RSS.
RSS does not really do what I want– inform me of interesting content and give me a low-time/cost way to reply. (Email notifications are another story: eB does them alright, but, for instance– it’s relatively expensive, in terms of overhead/time, to reply to JeffZ’s Q to me yesterday, off-blog).
On ephBlog, I check eB often enough to keep engaged in a conversation. The PSCI blog… lessee… is only one of about 2,000 pages I have open at the moment (in Firefox tabs).
I may not be typical– but one question is how you inform (notify) your readers of replies, and let them track the conversations they are a part of. (One-size-fits-all solutions tend to be terrible at this).
On this, I’m a curmudgeon. Without doubt, the best solution to these problem was the “threaded news reader” (TRN) I used while a student at Williams, and everything has been downhill from there.
More seriously, people have many more sources of “online” information in a day than twenty years ago– I receive as much email in a typical day, as I once did in a month or two, making simply keeping up (much less replying to all of it) difficult to impossible.
Management techniques, and software that encourages “best practices” (or at least effective practices) mean even more in this world. Alas, at this point I will be a curmudgeon and suggest that both on the web (blogs) and the desktop (email clients), we’ve moved towards lowest common denominator in the past twenty years– meaning the tools we use are generally poor, and ineffective.
My argument here is thus, on the one hand, that a blog (such as the current one) must do a lot more from an architectural standpoint, to make its information and conversations accessible and manageable; on the next hand, there’s a burden to educate readers in effective tools for managing and participating in the online conversation — “desktop” and otherwise; and on the third hand, there’s a need for some collective project-building, or tool-building, so that when a reader goes from blog to blog, from de Standaard to the New York Times to ephBlog to the Political Science blog at Williams, there are a similar series of tools and rules and conventions.
Ganesh help us! Did I just say from de Standaard to ephBlog to the PSCI blog? Hopkins forbid, and surely we’ll need a forth hand just to co-ordinate things.
That said, I’m criticizing the PSCI blog for being plain vanilla, and for lacking an evident, clear, articulated plan. There’s a lot of wonderful content on the blog, and just getting started is better than nothing, but– so often the idea today is that one just throws up WordPress, or some other blogging software, and begins, without any or much planning– and that the technology will miraculously lead to success.
This is rarely, if often, the case. Successful online ventures require work, thought, involvement, and expertise.
And the most evident problem with the PSCI blogs, are the lack of replies, which indicate a lack of ‘audience’ participation. Why? What are the barriers to participation– why does no one show up, or stick around, or come back– how do you make that better?
David says:
I left comments on three different posts. Initially, they went to moderation and did not appear for several days. I had to follow up with individual professors and the department to make something happen. That was fixed. (I don’t know why one comment never appeared.) I think that they now have it set up so that comments appear more quickly. I will add a comment now to the top thread.
Neither professor responded to my the comments I wrote that were published.
UPDATE: Good news. The settings now appear to provide for instant publication of comments. But this might just be for folks who have had other comments already approved. Someone else besides me should leave a test comment to check.