Food Safety Risk Analysis

[Charlie]

In the spirit of experimenting with new ways to work collabortively, I have invited the 21 international members of an online JIFSAN course on food safety risk assessment to visit and sample this space as a potential place to continue collaborating. Others are, of course welcomed, as well.

Perhaps this can provide a place to gather and continue learning from one another. For that to work, visitors are going to have to find value added to their professions by visiting here, so as a visitor, your task is to pose a substantive question and to encourge others to join the group discussion. I look forward to seeing how this experiment works.

[Charlie]

Off the early response, not a terribly succesful experiment!

[William Huber]

Would you like me to create a special food safety forum on this site, Charlie?

[William Huber]

If you mean response by JIFSAN course members, don't be disappointed. I have been using private sites like this for most of the decade to support academic classes (students range from undergrads to post-graduate professionals). They all have forums, blogs, chat rooms, etc. Even with strong encouragement, students rarely use them, even when they offer obvious added value to the course. I have never supposed that this reflected the quality of the sites themselves.

Successful Web forums--there are many--tend to be populated by people who see there is ongoing value to participating. They seem to fall into three distinct camps: people with specific questions, people who (for many reasons) enjoy answering those questions frequently ("gurus"), and the lurkers. The question-askers tend to drive the activity.

Note, too, that even RiskAnal has substantial ups and downs. Days (or longer) will go by with no activity at all. Most of the prolonged interesting discussions were sparked by a good question, occurred over the space of just a few days, and then died out.

Charlie said:

Off the early response, not a terribly succesful experiment!

[Charlie]

William Huber said:

Would you like me to create a special food safety forum on this site, Charlie?

That would be great, Bill. If we cannot get some activity on it in awhile we can always deep six it. That may be easier for people to find. For ESL folks any little bit may help.

[Charlie]

William Huber said:

If you mean response by JIFSAN course members, don't be disappointed. I have been using private sites like this for most of the decade to support academic classes (students range from undergrads to post-graduate professionals). They all have forums, blogs, chat rooms, etc. Even with strong encouragement, students rarely use them, even when they offer obvious added value to the course. I have never supposed that this reflected the quality of the sites themselves.

Successful Web forums--there are many--tend to be populated by people who see there is ongoing value to participating. They seem to fall into three distinct camps: people with specific questions, people who (for many reasons) enjoy answering those questions frequently ("gurus"), and the lurkers. The question-askers tend to drive the activity.

Note, too, that even RiskAnal has substantial ups and downs. Days (or longer) will go by with no activity at all. Most of the prolonged interesting discussions were sparked by a good question, occurred over the space of just a few days, and then died out.

Charlie said:

Off the early response, not a terribly succesful experiment!

I could not agree more, my experience has been the same. To your list of three i might add a fourth, the early adapters-folks who just like to test drive the new tools.

Some time back I created a small international risk communication space in a wiki environment. Would you perhaps consider creating a risk communication forum? Perhaps i could move the few materials we have there over to that space and we'll see what we can make happen. That site suffers the same way, we did not reach the critical mass necessary to provide enough value added for people to visit regularly.

[William Huber]

Charlie,

We now have a forum on risk communication. Thank you for the suggestion. Enjoy!