Re: case studies and school counts + one idea ( Re: [seul-edu]School Count new page)

[Doug Loss <drloss@suscom.net>]

"Prevett, Larry" wrote:
> 
> I can think of at least two ways that getting rid of
> Jennifers list, or the list at a lug, etc., in the interest
> of 'efficiency' can work against you:
> 
I understand your concern, Larry, and I agree that general consolidation
just for its own sake isn't necessarily good.  But I think in this
_specific_ case it likely is.

> You might think: "well ok, Jennifer's list is nice because
> it abbreviates the school count list in a way that is
> different from full-blown case histories. So let's put
> a feature in the Case Histories at the Schoolforge site
> that implements that." (That would be a great idea - in fact,
> it's an idea that might not have occurred if Jennifer hadn't
> done it in the first place.) Implementing new features
> and reaching a higher level of content and efficieny is important,
> but that's not what I'm talking about.
> 
You're right, it might not have occurred to Karl or anyone else here
without Jennifer's work.  We'll freely admit that.

> The point is that it is _her_ list: here is evidence of
> a single person, not associated with any organization, a
> student perhaps, that felt strongly enough about the idea
> to put some energy into it. I think that SEUL and Schoolforge
> should find ways to preserve and highlight evidence of that
> kind of energy and interest. In any case, I hope that Jennifer
> doesn't stop maintaining her list. I hope she keeps making the list
> bigger and bigger until it crawls out onto the street and
> takes over the world.
> 
And if Jennifer would prefer to maintain her list separately, we'll
support her fully in that decision.  I didn't issue an order; I made a
suggestion that Karl and Jennifer ought to consider merging their
efforts.  And I'm pretty sure that I didn't say that we should just take
over her school count list, but that both Karl and Jennifer work
together on the merged effort.  How would that not highlight and
preserver evidence of her energy and interest?  If anything, it would
say that other people doing similar things found her efforts worthy
enough to want to join their work with hers.

I understand that you don't want things to seem too faceless and
corporatized.  I agree that our humanity (well _most_ of us are human,
I'm sure) is one of our selling points over slicker efforts.  But I
think in this particular case we're not looking at an overly slick
effort.  There's no reason why Jennifer's page couldn't stay just as it
is, except that her osscount.html link would point to some fields in the
case studies database rather than to a flat page.  That way both the
individuality of the page and the comprehensiveness of the data (both
there and in the case studies database) would be maintained.  In this
case, I think competing (and they would be competing, even if the
competition were quite cordial) lists wouldn't serve the users as well
as a collaborative effort would.  Inevitably, each listing would have
entries the other didn't.  How would that be a good idea?

-- 
Doug Loss          As long as I have you there is just
drloss@suscom.net  one other thing I'll always need--
(570) 326-3987     tremendous self control.
                          Ashleigh Brilliant