Killer Mold Wipes Out Office Building

Stale, moldy data can be an insurmountable problem for your team. It probably won’t kill anyone, but the mere threat of outdated data can be enough to get a promising new collaboration system vetoed. “What’s to stop people from taking our outdated documentation at face value”, people will ask you. I maintain that properly labeled documentation of any kind is more useful than no documentation at all.

The frustration of outdated contact information
This week I decided to update my avatar on this and several other sites. That meant I had to take a big photo, crop it into a square, create a zillion different versions of it (full size, 125 pixels, 100px, 65px, ad nauseam), and then hunt around the web finding my last avatar and squishing it. Inevitably, I’m going to miss fifteen different sites that still have that one horrible picture of me I thought I’d burned. It’s going to be okay. Thanks to the magic of Google we’re never going to be able to control our identities again, and we’re all going to have to learn to live with it. Those old pictures are still me, even if I prefer the way I look today to the way I looked a year ago.

Every community needs a gardener
There are lots of ways to keep your data scrubbed and appealing to users. First and foremost, you need a person or group tasked with tending the corpus of information generated by community members. Maybe I’m going to go back and consolidate my “wiki” tag with my “wikis” tag on del.icio.us some day soon. Maybe someone needs to revisit the front page or the sidebar of your site and decide if it still meets users’ needs. It probably doesn’t fit as well as it did on the day it was released. No community-driven resource can ever be completely consistent, but the key is that the system is always growing and collecting more value. Get someone to feed and water your community and then stay out of everyone’s way as much as possible.

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