Answer Garden to Balance Needs of Experts and Need for Expert Knowledge
Forces:
Experts tend to be very busy and do not want to answer the same questions over and over.
FAQ's help but do not deal with novel and unanticipated questions.>BR>
Any given expert may have some periods in which they are happy to answer novel questions, but these may not coincide with the novice's need for information.
Novices need to learn from experts in order to become more expert themselves.
Sometimes, a few minutes of an expert's time may save many hours of needless work on the part of a novice.
Solution:
Provide an "answer garden" (Mark Ackerman) in which a pool of experts agrees to answer questions asynchronously put by less expert people. The question trees "grow" incrementally and provide a knowledge repository. The expert provides answers only to novel questions and only at their convenience.