Forums as Connecting Points

Earlier today I had a few minutes to myself.  As I sat at my computer, I contemplated my life goals, one of which is to build a Convention Center, complete with several Auditoriums wherein I could host music camps for kids.  I have had this goal for several years, but left it on the back-burner because it seemed fiscally ridiculous on my current budget.  Earlier in the day, however, I perused the BYU Career Fair, and found that many companies will pay exorbitant amounts of money to people with my background in Software Design, and it prompted me to again think about my goal of building the "Williams Harmony Hall."

As I sat pondering Auditorium construction, I idly began surfing the web for an approximate cost for such an undertaking.  One of the first sites I found was a forum with a person posting exactly my question to an audience of theater professionals and enthusiasts.  What followed was a two week conversation between 11 people on the goods, bads, warnings, suggestions and estimates regarding theater construction.  It blew me away how much information total strangers were willing to give for free, simply because a new person took the time to register on their forum.  I counted, and collectively the people that posted answers to the question above had also posted over 30,000 other times in the same forum.  These people are definitely connected together through the forum they contribute to.

Another experience I had with forums was while I worked for a company called ImSAR.  They put me to work writing code using a framework called QT (pronounce both letters, some call it cutie, but I could never quite say I was writing cute code).  It was built off of the C++ language which I know and love, but it had several interesting additions that took me quite some time to understand.  As part of my introduction to the language, my boss showed me the QTCentre forum and I joined it.  Over the summer I posted to it about 10 times asking different questions.  The QT community openly shared their knowledge with me, answering my questions and helping me with syntax errors.  The threads in which I posted have been viewed over 5000 times over the last two years.

Reader: "Yeah, great, forums have worked out for you and you've got big numbers to show off with."

I showed my experiences with forums to promote the idea that the Internet forum is a great way to connect people.  The forum keeps track of how active people are, and how much credit people give to their ideas.  Examining why people contribute without compensation shines a great light on human nature.  I think further study of forums, and maybe an index of where to find them would be quite interesting.