Real-Life Examples of Digital Mentorship

We ran one and it did not work, so here is the honest account rather than the glowing one.

This project set up a discussion forum on standard forum software, open to registration, with the ten categories and forty questions you are reading now as its structure. It was set up after the project activities had finished. Over the following twelve months it received no genuine replies at all. What it did receive was automated spam, which in the end made up the overwhelming majority of everything posted on it. The questions had been created in a single sitting and none of them had any text under them, so a visitor arriving at the site found headings and spam.

Three things went wrong and they are all repeatable. The space opened empty, so the first person to arrive had nothing to read and no reason to return. It opened after the work had ended, when the people who might have used it had already dispersed. And open registration with no moderation is an invitation that spam software accepts within days.

What we would do differently is what you are reading. The material is written before anyone is asked to contribute, so the space is worth visiting on its first day. There is no registration. Links cannot be posted at all, which removes the entire point of spamming it. Nothing appears without a person reading it first.

That is more useful than anything else I have read on this. Would you say do not build one at all?

Not quite. We would say do not build a space and expect the community to supply the content, and be honest with yourself about who is going to maintain it after the funding stops.

Two questions worth answering before you start. Who writes the first thirty pieces of content, by name, and when. And who reads and approves contributions in month fourteen, when the project is closed and nobody is being paid. If the answer to either is that it will sort itself out, the outcome is already known: an empty space, then a spam-filled one, then a site that quietly makes the project look abandoned.

The smaller version usually works better. A moderated mailing list, or a page that is updated when there is something to say, costs a fraction of the attention and does not decay into something embarrassing.