How To Use ChiefDelphi Constructively In Order To Reap And Sow Value

[JaneYoung]

All -

A comment in one of the Alamo threads made by one of my fellow Austin area mentors, Janice Trinidad, made me think about creating this thread as an opportunity to learn how to reap and sow value in CD.

What are some of your suggestions? What are tricks that you use to find the information that you are looking for? What do you find worthwhile about CD and how do you use it as a resource to help you/your team?

We are trying to grow teams in the central Texas area, helping them to become sustainable and to set a standard of excellence as they grow. CD can help us do that because so many CD members help to set a standard of excellence in your communities and regions.

Thanks for your input.

Jane

[ChrisH]

Wow Nobody has posted yet!??

Great topic Jane

I have been a participant on CD since 2001. I started by asking questions about sizing motors and gearboxes. They were patiently answered by Dr. Joe (Joe Johnson) among others.

Eventually I entered into the larger aspects of this community, and it became more of a social thing and I was answering more questions than I asked.

For a while I really spent too much time here, and in the process got my whole family (KarenH and EricH) involved. At least we have something to talk about at the dinner table.

ChrisH

[WizenedEE]

Originally Posted by ChrisH

too much time here

??? Don't get it.



I generally just ask questions when I have them and answer them when I know the answers. I don't really participate in the strategy discussions and the like, though.

To get a question answered, provide as much information as you possibly can (Don't "forget" to mention exactly what motor you're using or the fact that you've rebooted and reimaged the c RIO) and ask a clear question (Not "what do i do?"), and post in the correct forum (people that know about programming wouldn't tend to lurk in the "motors" section).

The first thing to do before answering a question is to ask more questions of the questioner. YOU MUST DO THIS. If you can't find a good question to ask, ask a question they already answered. Wait oops, that was the troll manual..

[JaneYoung]

Thanks for your response, Chris.

Here's a couple of thoughts - when I joined CD, it was out of desperation. I was looking for people who understood my questions and could provide answers. I was looking for a community. In many areas that I am interested in - the bigger picture, team/community development, sustainability, business plans, making the work for awards count for something beside the bling - I felt isolated and alone. Through CD, I found others who understood and could mentor me in those areas and in other areas that I was introduced to or stumbled upon.

Lurking in CD was easy. I spent a long time doing that. Then I took the plunge and began posting. I had never been a part of a web forum before and didn't know how to do the simplest tasks. Students, mentors, parents, and moderators helped me learn how to participate as a member of CD and I've been grateful ever since. My post count shows that gratitude.

What I'm thinking is that as new areas begin to develop and new teams form, the potential members may have questions like mine:

How do I upload a paper? How do I upload a photo? How do I edit my post? Where do I post a new thread? How do I search?

A lot of this can be explained in the FAQ, true - but having a thread to help guide/direct members who are not quite sure how to use CD as a tool or resource or for mentoring - would ease a lot of doubts, concern, and shyness.

That's why I created this thread. It could be an adventurous guide into the world of CD - complete with stories, anecdotes, and wisdom... if we would like for it to be. Another way of welcoming members to the community.

Jane

[keehun]

I think of utilities like ChiefDelphi as equivalent to a lesson.

You'll get as much out of a lesson with a professional as much as YOU want. If you hinder yourself by not practicing or not knowing the notes, you'll spend the lesson learning notes. If you get your homework done, you'll start deconstructing the harmonies and start getting in to the NEXT level of things at the lesson.

Likewise, ChiefDelphi, I believe, will become as useful as you WANT. That means using its utilities correctly, it means being respectful, it also means doing your homework before posting here. If it's an obvious rule stated in the hand book, really, you should've known about it if you're asking about it.

[Basel A]

On searching:

Well, do it. Whether you're looking for help, or looking for history, it works. And the more experienced Chief Delphi member will be less likely to yell at you to get off their lawn.

Remember, the search function does not know what you want. You may want to start specific (Kettering rookie regional 2008 pictures), but most times this won't work too well. Other times you may go a bit too general (kettering pictures), and this is just as difficult.

I like to start at the former end of the spectrum, using copious amounts of synonyms before moving to more generalised search terms (pictures = photos = photographs). If this doesn't work, you'll want to find threads relating to your topic, and see if the CD users went off on a tangent towards your topic. It may be worth searching CD-Media if your topic may be white-paper-able.

And, if ALL ELSE fails, you may want to start a thread to ask a question. if you do so, provide background information! mention that you searched, tell what you already know about the topic, and people will be more open to helping you.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Basel A

On searching:

Well, do it.

I've found that Google often does a more competent job of searching CD than the search engine built into vBulletin. Just add site:chiefdelphi.com to the Google search box along with your search phrases or keywords.

[davidthefat]

I met a mentor from 980 that saw my posts on CD, very interesting because the team he mentored ended up being pitted against us in the Quarter Finals and that the schools the team represented were our rivals. It was very interesting, because he managed to being rival schools together. I honestly enjoyed the experience even though I slept less than 4 hours every night trying to fix code...

[JaneYoung]

It's been brought to my attention that my title may be confusing because I placed reap ahead of sow. One must sow seeds in order to harvest or reap. This is true but, in this case, I placed reap ahead of sow for a reason. Here's the reason:

If one is new to an experience and uncertain as to the depth of their know-how, wisdom, knowledgeable applications, expertise - and there is a place that is teeming with it but the person/team isn't quite sure how to tap into that and use the resources available - then they have to learn to reap. When they have learned to reap: use CD-Media, search, the different forums, edit, learn how to discuss topics appropriately - then they can become efficient in sowing.

My thinking is - why waste seeds? We see a lot wasted seeds in CD that have been scattered carelessly or hastily. Here's an opportunity to help them take root.

So, that's the thinking behind the reap before sow = cart before horse.

Jane

[rsisk]

In order to reap or sow, Chiefdelphi needs to exist and regularly contributing to its operations is important. Donations can be at this page...

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/advertisers.php?

Beyond that, try to make your posts constructive. They should add to the base of knowledge already present on these forums. Well constructed questions and answers bring value to the readers. Unsupported or repetitive statements detract from the value.

When you post on CD, review your post before you hit submit. Check your spelling and grammar, ask yourself if you are adding to the discussion before you submit. It will go along way towards maintaining your credibility and improving your reputation. There are some posters on CD that I will read everyone of their posts because I know they very likely contain something I need to know or think about, and that is because of their reputation from past postings.

Finally, I like to have CD-SPY running in a separate tab to keep an eye out for an interesting thread or response to a posts, it also keeps you logged in when you are taking a long time reading a thread.

How to run CD-SPY


How to Preview your post before you submit it


How to Edit post (like I am doing right now)

[Bill_B]

Reaping, sowing, and agricultural analogies to CD content explained.

If you were to walk into an orchard, the fruit there would probably be recognizable, so after a quick glance around to find a good specimen, your trip could have a rapid, edible reward. Stopping in at a corn field could cause someone unfamiliar with the ears to wonder if there were anything edible to be had among those numerous tall stalks. If a wheat field is visited, I submit that there is a very small percentage of people that would recognize the major source of nutrition for the world. Who could guess that those tiny bumps with whiskers are useful at all? They aren't immediately edible and require significant processing to become nutritional source material.

Available on CD are apples, oranges, corn and wheat in varying degrees of abundance. However, just as you would not expect to raise your hands skyward and shout "Feed me!" at the clouds, you will do a lot better nourishing your FIRST psyche if you learn to recognize the places and methods used here to convey knowledge, speculation, and fun related to robotics activities.

As Harold Hill says in "The Music Man", You've gotta know the territory. For instance, if you haven't tried clicking through each of the ten items in the orange bar above, you are most assuredly missing some fundamental knowledge about how CD is organized. There are three of them that sport a small white triangle next to the black word as linkage signal. That's your sign that there are refinements to the linking that can be made.

Of the ten, I consider the one called "search" to be the most important for using CD effectively. When you click there, a small box appears into which you enter some words or click on the scary-sounding "Advanced Search". It's not obvious at first that there is a link there for some reason. It's not a secret spot you will reach by clicking there, but rather, a place where you can give a larger group of refinements to your search.

The advanced search page is distressingly devoid of explanation or cogent directions. It can even collapse into a two-place specifier that might make you wonder why it deserves to be called advanced. At the far right of the "search options" bar is a tiny icon that can expand the options section when clicked. If you don't see significant stuff between "search options" and "search now", you need to click that little blue devil on the right side. You can think of it as uncovering carrots, potatoes or peanuts.

Everyone using CD should have working knowledge of how search and all of its options works. If you can't look at each of the fields on the advanced search page and have a mental picture of the kind of result it will generate, you need to keep experimenting with searching until you do have that picture. I wish there were more explanation about searching on that advanced page so that it would be more user friendly for newer users.

If you look at the search options, you will see on the right, a concise outline of the names of the forums here on CD. These are the places in which you can concentrate your searches. If I were king of CD, I'd have topics and threads summarily moved to their "proper" forum based on their content, but as you can surmise, there is no guarantee you will find all information posted about programming to be found in the programming forum.

One of the lines on that choices list is "search subscribed forums". This opens up what I consider to be the next most important feature of CD, and a topic for another post.

[JaneYoung]

I was asked how to give a rep. This is what I said:

In each post on the right hand side are 4 icons. (I'm including the post # in that.) The 2nd one from the left is the scales. Click on that and it will provide a small screen where you can give positive, neutral, or negative. It is automatically set on neutral so you have to move it up for positive or down for negative. For a little while until you make more posts, the color of your reps that you give will be gray (the neutral color). After a few posts, they will turn green and will begin to count. I can explain uses for neutral or negative if you would like for me to.

I also talked about the spotlight feature and the icon used to alert mods:

The spotlight to the right of the scales is to spotlight a section of a post that you approve of and would like to see spotlit.
If you look up at the top of the page in CD, you'll see quotes. Those have been spotlit. If you follow them to the page icon on the left of the quote and click on that page, it will lead you to the post the quote is taken from.

To the right of the spotlight is a triangle. That is for spam, advertising, etc. Use that very sparingly and only if you are comfortable reporting a post. If you click that triangle and send a report, it goes to an e-mail that goes out to all of the moderators in that forum. That is why it must be used sparingly and correctly so we don't spam them with spam.

Jane

[Taylor]

The people found on this page generally know what they're talking about. Especially if you're new to these forums, don't try to spend a lot of time proving them wrong.

About reputation - don't rely on it blindly. Sometimes it's just an indicator of having been around CD for a while; sometimes it just means the user had a particularly popular Unofficial Caption Contest entry.

About disclaimers - no matter how many you make or in what method you make them, you're still a representative of your team, your school, your place of business, yourself. In a few isolated cases, this may be overlooked by the general CD public, but these are reserved only for the most revered individuals.

[2789_DrT]

Originally Posted by Taylor

The people found on this page generally know what they're talking about. Especially if you're new to these forums, don't try to spend a lot of time proving them wrong.

About reputation - don't rely on it blindly. Sometimes it's just an indicator of having been around CD for a while; sometimes it just means the user had a particularly popular Unofficial Caption Contest entry.

Thanks for these tips. I was looking for a short list of strong contributors.

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by Ether

I've found that Google often does a more competent job of searching CD than the search engine built into vBulletin.

vBulletin does not index any words of 3 characters or shorter, so a search on "FRC 111" would yield nothing (or everything?). [EDIT: Tried it and did not get 'bad' results. The default index word length can be changed, and I suppose Brandon did]

Originally Posted by Taylor

Especially if you're new to these forums, don't try to spend a lot of time proving them wrong.

Unless you have reliable, verifiable links to resources that prove us wrong. We love when you can do that!


If you can answer a question and KNOW your are correct, then do so. But if you are not sure, either do the research and prove it, or DON'T POST. Bad information is far more harmful than no information.

If you have a question, search. It is a lot faster, and if you're any good with searching, you'll find what you need 99.9% of the time.

For the other 0.1%, ask a lucid, organized and complete question, using proper language. Provide as much info as you "know", and be sure to label guesses or speculation as that.

Doing this will greatly increase the value of the very wonderful resource here on ChiefDelphi: The people.

Example: If I needed really detailed info that a good search revealed doesn't exist on, say, space exploration, I can go ask THE "Program Executive for Solar System Exploration" at NASA. Himself. And he will actually read my question and formulate an intelligent, well-thought-out answer for me, including references to more info.

Where else can you do that?

I am still in awe of the massed brainpower here.

Nice thread Jane, thanks.