Each user and each expert has incentives to work separately toward theconstruction of such a Garden. The users get to find answers, and expertscan rid themselves of commonly asked questions.

Several important considerations behind Answer Garden include:

ngineerschose not to go to the channel of the highest quality for technical informa-tion, but rather to go to the channel of highest accessibility (i.e., lowestpsychological cost). Allen [1977] argued that the psychological cost was inthe potential lack of reciprocity between giving and obtaining informationand in the status implications of admitting ignorance.

information technology can support organizational memory in twoways, either by making recorded knowledge retrievable or by makingindividuals with knowledge accessible

n other words, wewant to minimize the upstream costs of an organizational memory mecha-nism and make the downstream payoffs clear

Our argument issimply that for working, learning, and innovating to thrive collectively depends onlinking these three, in theory and in practice, more closely, more realistically, andmore reflectively than is generally the case at present.

As to opinions about the shortcomings of the language itself, or the standard run-times, it’s important to realize that every developer has a different background, different experience, different needs, temperament, values, and a slew of other cultural motivations and concerns — individual opinions will always be largely personal and, to some degree, non-technical in nature.