Asking Better Questions in Walkthroughs

Today we had a spontaneous meeting in the WhyDRS Discord about GitHub config between different repos. It was exciting to chat amongst top contributors and overall active community members. Everyone is doing such a stellar job working their individual parts into the final advocacy movement.

I asked a few questions as seemed prudent related to expanding the community and ease of code accessibility. But really, I was blown away by Throw's implementation, as frontend is quite out of my wheelhouse right now. It was incredible to see their work interleaving a centralized frontend with a distributed backend embed, which became the native display.

After/during that convo, Bibic joined, and we/I walked him through migrating the broker guides to GitHub. The "I" inclusion there really challenges me because I feel like I was too directive in explaining how to use the new tools. This is why I've needed so greatly to get the DAO site going with simple, concise, and inquisitive platform introductions. Hopefully, the context there will make it so that anyone can permissionlessly learn, reference, and enhance the shared resource.

Anyway, the bigger thing for me was that it seemed like I was talking too much and not asking enough questions about how Bibic's understanding was growing as we walked through things. I'm having a challenge communicating in a very "you"-focused way when it comes to routine/elementary/single-way tasks. Part of the quandary is that it's just so basic to me, but to others, I can see and understand that this is a completely new idea, system, and routine to employ.

So, when the knowledge gap is so large, I just want to rush them/others through exactly how to do things XYZ using steps ABC. But that is not a collaborative, inspirational, or expansive approach. Indeed, I got stuck at how to make the markdown preview work in the IDE, and it was only thanks to the saving comments of James that anything got fixed in the config.

Maybe part of the challenge was that I couldn't "mouse highlight" using remote control software, which I guess I could use through the Syndicate. One of the more interesting implications for me is that everyone in the meeting was learning from the walkthrough, despite the reality that it was not much of a conversation. Maybe I can remedy that in the limited instance of this blog by adding the GitHub comments tool to the final pages. ¹

Even then, I need to treat everyone else like adults who are fully capable of understanding these things, voicing their opinions and responses, and (chiefly) responding to overarching common goals (like "how might you format the first paragraph?") rather than specific directives (like "go to this part of the screen and click this button"). Certainly, a more back-and-forth dialogue would have helped Bibic comprehend the new styles much more adequately than sharing a generic unvetted tutorial. Moreover, it would have given everyone in the meeting a chance to uncover more about their perspective on implementing a shared tool.

This is not an excuse whatsoever, but certainly part of this "rush" was that we'd been talking for some time and I really had to use the restroom. I think I'm worried people will just leave/lose attention if I exit a conversation at any point. Certainly, that's not true, and indeed it ought to give others a needed chance to converse, further the new ideas flowing, and share their specific tips because I am not the smartest guy in the room!