Forum OpenACS Q&A: askme.com style modules?

We have enhanced general-comments with this kind of feature, though. We basically used the rating system of general-links and copied it to general-comments.

This is supposingly close to the solution that the ACES is using for Slashdot.org style bboards...

I'd be very interested in seeing an askme-style system built into
OpenACS. This is essentially a knowledge management feature,
and I believe it would be very marketable. Ideally, I'd like to be
able to attach ratings to any item in the content repository.

Basically, users can rate every comment and every uploaded file.

Like in general-links a trigger calculates the average rating and n-ratings out of a mapping table and stores it inside the altered general_comments and fs_files (avg_rating, n_ratings)

He's also right that bboards in the ACES (which have a horrible threaded UI, about as bad as it gets) don't have a rating system of this sort.

The stuff you guys did for 3.2.x was based on the general links rating stuff, which I've worked with a little bit. It does seem that this might be a good place to begin.

"general-ratings" - any chance you'd be interesting on working on such a thing?

14:44:17 <djg> well, some basic stuff will be added:
page rating
feedback options
gc will be parametrized
comments will be indexed

If you would like unregistered users do some ranking, you will run into problems with repeated rankings, I suppose.

Don, the general-ranking module would be for openacs 4.x. I have not yet touched any of 4.x as we are still working with 3.2.5. But basically, yes...

Generalizing this as David's talking about shouldn't be difficult.

Of course the Content Management System needs to allow ratings, too - I have *no* idea if there's already something in there that does this.  Does anyone else?

Michael - your last post raises an excellent idea and makes an excellent point.  Thinking about categorization in this context makes sense, too - ratings are in a sense just a particular way to categorize things.

They have cat_object_category_map to map obejcts to a certain categories. 3.2.x is missing that...

Now, you have a lot of stuff here to look at--probably too much, in
fact. So next, you sort your results list by ratings to see which of
these content items seem to be the most highly rated. Perhaps
there are other ratings sorts you could use, too. For example,
maybe you want to sort by those items that have been highly
rated by the core development team. Or maybe you want to see
which ones have been rated (or written by) the community's XML
guru.

Or maybe somebody new to the community wants to find out
who to ask about an XML question. It would be great to search
on community members and sort them by the number of highly
rated content items they have submitted in a given category. They
could find out that, say, Dan's postings on XML are very highly
regarded.

For those proponents of self-organizing systems (like Wikki, for
example), I think categories + ratings gives the community much
more powerful, interesting, and orderly ways to evolve the
semantic connections on the site than does an "edit this page"
feature. If you add general comments, bboard, FAQ, file storage,
and wimpypoint into the mix, you have plenty of ways for
community members to contribute and, perhaps even more
importantly, plenty of ways for the community to self-organize.
Rating a content item is, in fact, making a significant contribution
to the community's knowledge by helping other community
members place relative values on the various pieces of content
that grow on the site.

Another, alternative way one may want to sort through content would be based on how many times a particular paper, FAQ or similar thing has been read...

Yup. That would be useful both to people searching for valuable information but also for site managers who want to see if important information is actually being found by the users.

The general idea with KM is to try and squeeze as much knowledge as you can from each individual while demanding as little from them as possible. Ratings and categorization are generally one-click operations, but it still can be a challenge to get users to do their part. Gathering knowledge based on user behaviors like pageviews is even better, because the users don't have to do anything they weren't going to do anyway.

There are a gazillion things we could do in this area, but I think general ratings and categorization are nice, low-hanging fruit.

Michael and David, would you be interested in helping to build it for openacs.org, with the view towards releasing it for general upon full implementation or maturity?

talli

I think that starting some non-tech specs on those modules (keep it short and simple) would be a good start.

Then we could ask for some more volunteers to work out something for

"Ratings, rankings, categories and pageview tracking coupled with profile/preference matching"

and additionally Don mentioned to capture skills and willingness to contribute, which would also fit nicely into this concept...

Note that in order to make useful matching, we need a high degree of categorization concerning member skills. This is the basis of the so called "yellow pages" in KM.

I know that this is over the hill, but as some people remember we had some discussion of how "hard" it is to contribute other than on bboard. We should maybe also work out a module called projects where community members can open up a colaborative space like http://www.groove.net where they can work with others (flexible permissions) on a certain project. I was working a little bit with Lotus Quickplace recently, and I thought it wasn't too bad either, although groove is a lot more mature, but therefore you have to download an application, while Quickplace is completely webbased. I always prefer completely webbased...

To check out more about Quickplace, you can get yourself registered and build one of your own. Webbased of course.

At http://www.lotus.com/quickplace

IMO, programming this functionality is the easiest part of the project. Writing up good specs, doing the debugging, maintenance, that's the problem, as is often the case.

I think really good, powerful requirements, specs and features would be a big step in the right direction. Michael, I look forward to what you put together!

talli

I like the askme.com style of usenet/discussion with email notification. The ranking and email drive participation.

Data is classified according to the forum and the creation and classification of "experts" allows for better information sharing.

Does anyone have a list of knowledge types/categories? I grabbed a list a while back from a head hunter's website. But that was only valid for IT skills or knowledge. More usefull would be a listing of all types of cascading skillsets and knowledgetypes.

quickplace is more for document management. I have found more typical corporate users take to Lotus' "Teamroom" application faster than Quickplace. Teamroom was development based on some very high level research at mit.

Most knowledge is currently transfered by email. Making a system that is as easy as email can be a challenge. Grove is cool, but is simply too difficult for your average computer user.

The average askme.com user has about the skillset of an AOL user. Not much - but that is the target.

Another challege is Word document to html on the fly. I have used some of the opensource tools (wvWare) but it isn't always the highest fidelity.

Another way of saying it is in various threads and e-mail discussions folks have mentioned a set of easy stuff that could be done that would  make the site tremendously more useful, so my thinking is "let's pick  the low fruit for this first round of openacs.org-the-web-site and get it out quickly".

I'm not trying to slow down the pace of this thread - this is all exciting stuff.  It's just not stuff that's going to get done in time to roll into our community's website in the next handful of weeks.

Obviously when thinking has matured and implementation has been completed we'll want it right here real quick.

I don't think that Talli wants to create a KM or a project module before he launches the new openacs.org... This would *really* be of the hill.

The starting question by Anthony was pointing to a KM tool (askme.com) so I abused the thread to get a discussion going on KM improvements inside openacs.

Another nice article is:

ftp://ftp.lotus.com/pub/lotusweb/product/kstation/115596.pdf

Anthony, I suppose that the teamroom has been merged into quickplace, because nobody is talking about it at Lotus anymore. The articles that I found on it were dated back to 1998!!!

K-station by Lotus is basically a combination of:

Sametime (could be Jabber), Quickplace (could be openacs projects based on OpenACES), Lotus Discovery Server (we have no pendant for a Knowledge Miner in openacs, could be a project for our search gurus) and IBM's Enterprise Information Portal (could be openacs portals)...

There we go... All we need is some nice skin and a out-of-the-box ability and we could charge $120 per user as Lotus does 😉

It might be helpful for our upcoming KM-specs:

http://www.lotus.com/products/discserver.nsf/b667c9fb8a8f59a0852569530049ce60/9a67d0ba64db9fb9852569ea006cb863?OpenDocument