Hi Steve - I'm the lead product marketing guy for Confluence Questions, so I've been heavily involved with rolling it out internally at Atlassian. I gave some tips based on that experience in a presentation at Summit this past fall. You can see it on Youtube.
Overall, the main takeaways were:
- Seed it with content: Before doing a major roll out, get some questions and answers in there so people have some content to start with.
- Enlist help: Identify a few internal "experts" on various topics of interest to ask and answer a few questions and watch topics, so they are ready to answer questions as they come in.
- Work with existing incentives: I generally believe most people want to help others and this tendency helps encourage adoption. You can also incent people - a prize for the person on top of the leaderboard after the first month perhaps - or simply by explaining how this will help people do their jobs faster, interrupt others less, and waste less time answering the same questions over and over again.
- Think longterm: it takes time to get people to adopt something new and build a community. Don't worry if the questions and answers trickle in at first - we continue to see adoption increasing.
I give some specific use cases in the presentation and examples of how it played out and what worked well.
I'd love to hear what you end up doing, how it works out, and any product feedback you have. Drop me a note at jwetenhall at atlassian.comif you have a chance!
John
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