[clayniac]

I have suggested there be a committee of "laymen" players who regulary use BBO. I was advised to post this idea here. I would like feedback please.
The purpose of this group would be to offer suggestions to the BBO management and yellows and to discuss matters that arise on BBO with recommendations to BBO management and yellows.

This committee would be for suggestions and ideas and to discuss matters of interest that come up from the players' viewpoints. The main purpose of this committee would NOT be to mediate problems; hopefully those would be rare occurrences. However, certainly this committee could tackle problems as well and make suggestions and offer solutions to these problems to BBO management and "yellows." The whole idea is to discuss BBO from the players' viewpoints, offering ideas, suggestions and solutions to problems.

I see this as perhaps a group of 15, moderated by "yellows." (Perhaps "yellows" could rotate moderating this group; but the same "yellow" should moderate continued discussions about any one topic, idea, suggestion or problem.) I suggest a committee of 15, with no more than 3 people from any one country on this committee, with the official language of disucssion English. Terms would be for one year; and no one could serve more than three consecutive years. Meetings would best be weekends to accommodate the many time zones and would take place in a bbo chat room of the "explore bridge" section of BBO.

I suggest selection be by nomination and petition, with a minimum of x number of names from BBO players on a petition. There could be a url for submission of petitions and for people to sign the petitions supporting a candidate. Perhaps 25 names would be a suitable minimum number per petition. Then there would be a url for people to go to for voting on a specified date. Players can only vote once (even if they have multiple user names, they can only vote once), and they can vote for up to 15 people (but do not have to vote for 15), but they cannot vote for more than 3 from any one country. The top 15 vote-getters would be elected to a one-year term of this committee. If more than 3 of the top 15 vote getters are from any one country, then just go down the list by number of votes to get 15 elected with a maximum of 3 from any one country. Each candidate's name would have his or her country with it. And there would have to be a method of control to make sure no one votes more than once, no matter how many user names they have. This is something for technically sophisticated people to control.

FEEDBACK PLEASE! Remember the whole purpose of this is for laymen's viewpoints of the players.

Patsy aka "clayniac"

[clayniac]

Meant to say voting would be for a certain time period, perhaps for a month, with a beginning and ending date to vote. The only real problem I see with this is in preventing the same person from voting more than once. I leave that to the technical and computer geniuses to handle. Patsy aka clayniac

[hrothgar]

I very much believe that BBO can only be improved through the the development of an active user base that provides feedback to the management.

With this said and done, my experience with committees has typically been very negative. I don't think that they provide particularly good methods to gather/refine information from end users. From my perspective, scientific methods based on polls/surveys or even "auctions" provide a much better mechanism to distill information about feature set requirements.

Equally significant, committees have a tendency to get "political". This can backfire in couple of ways.

(A) Bureaucracies often become self-perpetuating, more concerned with their own position/status than the constituency that they represent.

( If this were my site, I would be worried about empowering a group of end users as some kind of sanctioned representatives. Too much chance that either the Committee with come to blows with

1. BBO management,
2. The users
3. Each other
4. All of the above

From my perspective, individuals who want to take a more direct role in improving BBO should focus of mechanism by which they can use the existing playing environment to provide new sets of services. The work that Yzerman is doing with the Internet bridge Domain is a great example...

[sceptic]

DONT do it, commitees have ruined too many a good thing, EGO's take over DONT DONT DONT do it

[sceptic]

I also agree with hrothgar, but my lack of grammer and spelling necesitate smaller words and comments

[clayniac]

Okay. If the reaction to this suggestion is negative, then that is fine. I just wanted to get feedback. Thanks for your input people! I totally respect your opinions. Will see what continued replies say. Drop the idea if this opinion is the prevalent one. Thanks again for your feedback! Patsy aka clayniac

[Deanrover]

We already have BB forums for those who want to offer feedback. You can also email the Management with your opinions. Also feel free to contact the Yellows with your views. We genuinely value them, and will pass them on.
For big issues such as ratings, it is possible for you to have a fair and frank discussion on here. If we relied on a committee report for their opinion, it would be less democratic, and the view would likely be distorted by individuals.

[uday]

But, in the BBO spirit, don't let this stop you from creating such a group. Will this work? I don't know. Will we pay more attention to suggestions from a group? Likely so.

One issue I run into is that as time passes, I play less and less on BBO, and it is easy to therefore lose touch with what is going on. I read all the forums, as does FG. We dont reply to eveything, or even most things.

Maybe, as an answer to this and another thread we should open up a 'what we're doing now' thread.

[Gweny]

EEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKKKK
RUN AWAY RUN AWAY!!!!

giggle...
I am with Sceptic and Hrothgar (dont faint H)

This is one of those "looks good on paper" things

[fred]

It should perhaps be noted that I was the one that suggested
to Patsy that she post her idea in forums.

As Uday said in his post, the growth of BBO has created a lot
of extra work for both of us. The result is that we are not as
much "in touch" with our members as we used to be.

We still receive suggestions for improvements from various
sources, but we often have to guess at how important various
initiatives might be to the membership in general.

Like some of the other posters, I have also had some negative
experiences working with committees, but I have also had some
good experiences.

The purpose of this post is not to push Patsy's idea on anyone,
but to let people know that, if it does get off the ground, it will
have the support of the management of our company (at least
at the beginning - we reserve the right to stop listening if the
committee degenerates into politics or egomania).

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Frosty]

LOL Gweny - we've been there, done that, right?!!!! YUCK!

Really - A committee IS a little like an iceberg - the obvious part is aesthetically pleasing but the part you don't see can be deadly. Even the process of electing committee members is lethal.

On the other hand, I DO think that this is an idea with some merit because, as Uday points out, those that are closest to the inner workings of BBO cannot help but lose the perspective of the ordinary BBO member. It generally happens that this type of idea comes to the surface when the right time has come for tweaking the administrative process in a new way ..... the birth of the idea comes when it is needed.

Is there a trend to kill the messenger if the message is percieved as one that challenges exsisting procedures, decisions or practices at BBO? The folks who have given all their time and talents to birth the site and see it thru infancy are understandably proud of, and protective of their "baby", which makes it tough to remain objective. But if reasonable voices of dissent are discouraged - and there are some signs that this is happening - only the very rabid, who are not likely to be heard, will be willing to speak up. Over time, the Forums and/or direct communication with BBO as a source of input for self correction becomes diminished.

The underlying need is certainly there. A possible alternative which would avoid a lot of the administrivia might be for BBO to ask for volunteers and select a small group (I'd keep it very small - say 4-6 people) of those they think might offer the most forward thinking input. So long as they don't stock the pulpit with members of the choir, (i.e. pick only those who will tell them what they want to hear), it could be a good thing to try.

Frosty

[clayniac]

Thanks for the replies. This is merely a suggestion for input. I am awed by Fred and others who run bbo replying. Thank you! Thanks for your most astute comments, Fred. Perhaps, as a compromise to the nay sayers to this suggestion and to those who like it, Frosy offers a viable and reasonable alternative. I only proposed an election so that all players would feel they had input on who serves on this group and thus feel that their voices were heard through this group. We will see how others feel. Then it will be up to the administrators of BBO to decide if or when to implement such a group, and if implemented how and in what form. Thanks again. I will continue to check the replies every few days at least. Patsy

[hrothgar]

Frosty, on Jul 26 2004, 05:46 PM, said:

LOL Gweny - we've been there, done that, right?!!!! YUCK!

Really - A committee IS a little like an iceberg - the obvious part is aesthetically pleasing but the part you don't see can be deadly. Even the process of electing committee members is lethal.

On the other hand, I DO think that this is an idea with some merit because, as Uday points out, those that are closest to the inner workings of BBO cannot help but lose the perspective of the ordinary BBO member. It generally happens that this type of idea comes to the surface when the right time has come for tweaking the administrative process in a new way ..... the birth of the idea comes when it is needed.

Is there a trend to kill the messenger if the message is percieved as one that challenges exsisting procedures, decisions or practices at BBO? The folks who have given all their time and talents to birth the site and see it thru infancy are understandably proud of, and protective of their "baby", which makes it tough to remain objective. But if reasonable voices of dissent are discouraged - and there are some signs that this is happening - only the very rabid, who are not likely to be heard, will be willing to speak up. Over time, the Forums and/or direct communication with BBO as a source of input for self correction becomes diminished.

The underlying need is certainly there. A possible alternative which would avoid a lot of the administrivia might be for BBO to ask for volunteers and select a small group (I'd keep it very small - say 4-6 people) of those they think might offer the most forward thinking input. So long as they don't stock the pulpit with members of the choir, (i.e. pick only those who will tell them what they want to hear), it could be a good thing to try.

Frosty :rolleyes:

In a past life, I worked as a product manager at a couple very large software houses. The position of product manager involves many of the same "issues" that we're discussing here. In particular, product managers need to be able to solicit information from a variety of sources and use this data to determine a logically consistent set of feature set enhancements. In some ways, this seems analagous to some of the discussions taking place here.

From my perspective, the "best" way to solict information is highly dependant on the stage of the development process that you are involved in.

If you are involved in a "sustaining" develop model, where your primary concern is incremental feature set enhancements, then a combination of polls and "auctions" typically produces the best information. [We were once able to implement a system in which individual members of the sales force were able to "bid" for feature set enhancements - Sounds silly, but it actually worked quite well...]

If you are involved in more "radical" re-engineering and need to make significant feature set enhancements for some reason - the market is just getting started or alternatively, the market is stagnating and you need to to shape things up - then the best course of action requires more extensive meetings with so-called "lead users" to solicit their feedback...

[Chamaco]

Just my 2 cents here.
Please remember we are guests here, we have free access to what seems the best bridge playing site online, included A LOT of free services available.

This does not mean we must necessarily agree with any of the BBO staff decisions nor with any parallel group that runs any initiatives on BBO.
This is why there are forums, and it seems to me that the possibility of polls and of opening threads, is a god enough way to give feedback to these people who devote much of their time for these activities.

But creating a committee seems going too far.

[inquiry]

Fred and Uday have listned to committee's of one, simply because someone post here an idea and they say "yes, why didn;t we think of that".. and they change the program.

So any group who wants to get togeher and condiser suggestions, and prioritize them, might not be a bad idea. Sure the group might self-select. Maybe a group unhappy with the way tournments are run will get togehter, and make suggestions. There already is a group of tournment diretors who get together and discuss issues and present a more or less united voice on what changes need to be made to the interface and tools tournmenet directors use. But of course, if you are not a TD, you wouldn't know what was there or how it works.

I see nothing wrong with any group banning together to make pioritized list and suggest them to fred and uday. In an ad hoc fashsion or orgainized orgianlly suggested in this thread. The only thing, these people should not get angry if their suggestions are ignored (for whatever reason) the BBO.

Ben

[JRG]

Seems to me that many of the directors seem to speak with one voice. They are pretty consistent with the type of enhancement they would like to see and tend to be supportive of each others better ideas. In a way, that is a form of committee (but a "special interest" one).

[Dwayne]

I've served on more committees in both bridge and political arena over the last 25 years than I care to remember and I can safely confirm the old adage that:

a camel is a horse designed by a committee.

'nuff said.

Dwayne-drops