What kind of help Community should provide to each other

[suvro]

Hi All,

I feel the ServiceNow Developer community is a great community for the developers where we help each other when we need some direction.

 I have started contributing to the community again few days ago, and as per my observation I found that it has become a race. 

The intent is not to help the person seeking answers but to get that person mark their response as correct.

Even I noticed most of the seekers are also not bothered to learn but are here for ready-made scripts, where instead of understanding what the code does or how it works, people are only interested in codes that should run without errors.

These above observations made me wonder what is this community all about? 

Guiding the seekers in the correct direction should be encouraged rather than spoon feeding the seekers just for scoring points where they are not learning at all.

We are losing the plot here.

What do you guys think?

[John Dahl]

Great observation. There are several reasons I can think of for what you are seeing.

• Some people in this community are simply here to help in their extra time.
• Some people are here because a presence is part of their job. ServiceNow has an entire department for managing relationships, including helping the developer community. The developer site and free PDIs are part of that commitment to helping the developer community.
• Some people are here to earn points and make a game out of it.
• Some people are here because they learn by digging into issues and helping other people out.

Whatever the reasons, I suspect there are a lot of people who receive the benefit of the time put in by everyone described above... otherwise they would not be here. This is still a great place to offer your technical expertise.

Having said that, the sndevs slack workspace is another place for help and one that is geared more to technical developers who really do want to learn... as opposed to the general community that includes business users and other non-technical people. The sndevs community will push back when people ask for complete solutions with statements like "what have you tried so far" or "please post the code you have created so far" so that we are driving a learning experience in addition to solving the issues at hand. Slack is also a real-time solution so you get more responsive guidance. One caveat I should point out is that, while this community is controlled by ServiceNow, the sndevs slack workspace is not. The community self-governs the slack workspace with several community members (who are not ServiceNow employees) are setup as admins.

Wherever you choose to spend your time contributing and whatever your reasons are, it's great that you contribute... thank you!

[suvro]

Thanks John that makes sense

[Anil Lande]

First of all welcome back to the Community!

Yes, that is true!

This is everywhere, you will find all type of people in every community. Everyone has their own purpose and we need to decide what I want out of it.

The trend of asking people to Mark answer correct was set by old community leaders to encourage people now ServiceNow also added gamification model by showing Leaderboard (Monthly/Overall).

As a community community contributor you can choose your way and set new trend 🙂

Lets start asking more questions to the user what they did/tried and help them to learn and grow!

Wish you all the best and hope you will set new trend of not only resolving issues but also to learn things here on Community.

Regards,

Anil Lande

[Mark Roethof]

Hi there,

Yeah recognizable. And sometimes, I am part of this behavior also, though I try to limit it... if you do notice it, just let me know.

I think it's multiple things. Like the Community is hardly moderated, at least visually zero moderation. If you report something, zero feedback. If you report some persons, zero feedback (although I did notice sometimes action actually was taken). Etc.. Or community etiquette, there's zero attention for this. Or the recent changes in the points system and the change in showing the monthly leaderboard does not help in my opinion.
At least one certain company looks like almost has left the Now Community. Their behavior was really insane, bad, annoying, etc.. A few good exceptions of course.

It's also the people posting questions themselves. A lot of good questions for sure, though also a lot... did they even use google? Did they even use the search on the Now Community? Did they even try something on a PDI? So yeah, sometimes I just respond "Can you share what you tried and what's not working".

Personally I do continue sharing articles, answering questions, etc. in my own time. Because it learns me a lot too. Sharing your knowledge, writing stuff in a non-native language, writing something and noticing new stuff, digging into new territory which ServiceNow hardly documented, reading interesting articles from others and gaining knowledge for free, etc.. It learns me more than following official ServiceNow courses!

Kind regards,
Mark