Forum OpenACS Q&A: Mockup of my ideal bboard + FAQ + documentation

1: Mockup of my ideal bboard + FAQ + documentation

Posted by Jade Rubick on 06/01/02 11:37 PM

Please look at this link:

It contains a mockup of a potential FAQ + bboard + documentation system. I guess for lack of a better name, I'd call it the QNA package. Note that all the possible links are marked with a *. Please also make sure you see the alert and navigation pages from the second page.

Rationale:

This is completely unbuilt, and somewhat rough. I've been thinking over this for a long time, but sat down and made the mockups this morning. (Jeez, you know you've become a nerd when you're excited enough about an idea to spend your weekend mornings on programming and design!).

The primary reason I saw for this is that it seems like even with good searching, the Q&A format of the bboard isn't structured in such a way that it is as useful to future users as it could be. What this mockup attempts to show is a slightly modified bboard that also acts as a Q&A system. So if someone asks a question, there's always categorizing it a way similar to the way that Yahoo is categorized.

It also features a sort of "promotion" feature, where important articles can be promoted to "documentation" status, or highlighted status. This is where I would put the documentation, and any other HOWTO articles that are relevant.

There are some fringe benefits of doing it this way. For one, you can set up notifications so that you only have to read about the parts that you're interested in. This reduces email load to only that you're interested in. This could encourage some people to use alerts when they might not otherwise, perhaps because they would feel overwhelmed by participating in the "full-participation or no-partcipation" model of the current bboard.

Because there's been so much talk recently about navigation, I also included my idea of how navigation could work. It's just an idea.

Status

Eventually, I may get around to implementing some of this, but quite honestly, it probably won't be for another six months or so. I still need to learn how to use OACS 4, and there are some other packages that probably will take higher precedence. But I wanted to toss some of these ideas out to yall in case any of you wanted to actually implement this, or in case this might influence anyone else's designs. Please let me know what you think.

Administration

Some thinking would have to go into the admin side of things. For example, I'd like it to be really easy to move messages between forums, and even have a way for users to tag messages they think are in the wrong section so that admins could later clean them up. Other admin necessities would be changing the tree structure of the forum categories, so you could move categories around and so on.

Etc.

It seems like another advantage of this is that it is very easy to see where documentation is lacking, and to add it in yourself.

2: Response to Mockup of my ideal bboard + FAQ + documentation (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 06/02/02 01:20 AM

<blockquote><i>It also features a sort of "promotion" feature, where important articles can be promoted to "documentation" status, or highlighted status. This is where I would put the documentation, and any other HOWTO articles that are relevant. </i></blockquote>
I would classify this as a KM thing, not something that should be private to any kind of content package.
<p>For instance, the general ratings package, when complete, would provide one mechanism for promotion. A general polling/voting type package might be another mechanism. Such general service, attachable to any object, provide ways to promote useful Q&A threads to prominent status. And with special hooks for content editor/admin types, content deemed of special interest by them could be promoted as well.
<p>I'd much rather see a general attack on the problem rather than package-specific approaches. After all the "most valuable information on running AOLserver under Win32" might include forum threads, documents in file storage, and a wimpy point presentation.

3: Response to Mockup of my ideal bboard + FAQ + documentation (response to 1)

Posted by Michael Feldstein on 06/02/02 04:22 AM

It seems to me that you could do something like this pretty easily
with dotLRN + general-ratings + one or two new portlets.
Imagine creating instead of a class, a topic (like OpenACS, for
example). The existing dotLRN portlets would already give you a
unified view into activity on the various OpenACS boards.

Your idea for "featured" and "documentation" status is actually
very similar to an idea I had for pulling out interestng posts in a
large distance learning class with multiple smaller group
discussions happening simultaneously. The idea in that case
was to give the professor the ability to tag posts that he thought
were interesting. (This is essentially the same as allowing a
binary rating scoped to the "Professor" group.) Then you create a
portlet that displays the subject lines for the most recent, say,
half a dozen posts that were tagged by the professor. You could
do the same thing with documentation by giving topic (or, in the
OpenACS case, module) owners the same binary toggle for
"knowledge" and then create a couple of different portlets to offer
views into that tagged base of knowledge.

Now, if you wanted to get *really* funky, then add
general-categories into the mix. Imagine that we have a
dotLRN-style OpenACS "class" and, in parallel, an AOLServer
"class" hosted in the same package instance. Items in the
AOLServer area that are appropriately tagged could also be
pulled across to the OpenACS area.

Cool stuff, and a lot easier now that we have some real
infrastructure.