like a fire

I just read this article over at Creating Passionate Users. The article makes a great case for building a community that is more dynamic and has faster integration that most communities. Sounds like some good tips for ministry.

In the explanation for how communities work, they give some ways to speed up the process, but also ask two questions.

“Most user communities take a typical path–the newbies ask questions, and a select group of more advanced users answer them. But that’s a slow path to building the community, and it leaves a huge gaping hole in the middle where most users drop out. If we want to keep beginning and intermediate users more engaged (and increase the pool of question answerers), we need them to shift from asker to answerer much earlier in their learning curve. But that leaves two big questions… 1) How do we motivate them? 2) How do we keep them from giving lame answers?”

Looking at what they say about users forcing noobs to ask better questions, I think the church has that one down. To get new users to ask better questions, the church shuns questions or just makes it hard to get a straight answer. I thought of a list of questions to think on for user integration.
How can the church be safe to new users?

How can we answer questions better?

How can we reasonably admit when we don’t have the answers?

I would love to hear from some of you readers if this resonates with you.