Set up a forum.

[gvwilson]

At the November lab meeting, we decided to try setting up a forum for Q&A aimed primarily at bootcamp attendees (but possibly open to others as well). http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2013/11/creating-a-forum has some background; please add comments to this issue if you'd like to discuss:

• what features you want
• what other forums you've used that have (or haven't) worked well
• how you'd like it to fit into the rest of what we do

[jkitzes]

I think that this is a great idea and I'd be happy to play a role in stewarding/moderating. (Sorry to miss the lab meeting discussion the first time around.)

[karinlag]

On 17.11.2013 23:06, Justin Kitzes wrote:

I think that this is a great idea and I'd be happy to play a role in
stewarding/moderating. (Sorry to miss the lab meeting discussion the
first time around.)

I would also be happy to moderate, and I am also sorry I missed the lab
meeting - plain fell out of my calendar.

Karin

Karin Lagesen, Ph.D.
Department of Medical Genetics
and Norwegian High-Throughput Sequencing Centre (NSC)
Oslo University Hospital

[lexnederbragt]

What other forums you've used that have (or haven't) worked well
I'm frequently using biostars.org (home-built stack-exchange-clone) and seqanswers.com (forum-based). I like the former better: there is one place of entry, users don't have to pick a forum, often a subject belongs to more than one forum, and in fact some questions get asked in two forums. Heck, some questions get posted identically at both SeqAnswers and Biostars, as their subjects partly overlap. SeqAnswers suggests existing (related) questions once you have given a new thread a title, and always shows related questions above a thread. Googling often leads me to stackexchange sites.

What features you want

• tags
• single entry point
• up/downvoting
• reputation (points)
• moderators
• FAQ to catch returning beginners questions
• suggestions/related questions
• login through twitter etc

How you'd like it to fit into the rest of what we do
The ideal would be a very low-threshold forum, where most 'stupid' questions can be asked. It may require some (a lot of?) patience on the part of moderators and instructors ('answerers'), because you can count on the same question being asked over and over again, people not reading the FAQ, asking questions very unclearly etc. The goal would be to

• help people with the beginners' questions
• make newcomers comfortable enough in using such a forum that they are less hesitant to explore more specialised/advanced forums (stackexchange etc)

[karinlag]

On 11/27/13 2:56 PM, lexnederbragt wrote:

/How you'd like it to fit into the rest of what we do/

The ideal would be a very low-threshold forum, where most 'stupid'
questions can be asked. It may require some (a lot of?) patience on the
part of moderators and instructors ('answerers'), because you can count
on the same question being asked over and over again, people not reading
the FAQ, asking questions very unclearly etc. The goal would be to

• help people with the beginners' questions
• make newcomers comfortable enough in using such a forum that they
  are less hesitant to explore more specialised/advanced forums
  (stackexchange etc)

IME, most people really just need help defining their questions. Once
that's done, there are often sources out there that can give the
specifics. But, beginners often lack the vocabulary and hence don't know
what to google, leading quite often to people giving up before they've
even started. If we could provide what would in many ways be a
translation service between their problem and computational solutions, I
think that in itself would be a boon for many.

Karin

Karin Lagesen, Ph.D.
Department of Medical Genetics
and Norwegian High-Throughput Sequencing Centre (NSC)
Oslo University Hospital

[dpshelio]

I agree with most of the points have already been said, but I like the feature from stackexchange where the question (and the answers) can be edited by the author and by others. That helps to keep it cleaner and more concise. One thing I don't like from standard forums is having to browse hundreds of pages under a thread to get to an answer, they are good for discussions as a mailing list, but I don't think they are good for Qs&As sites.

I've also used astrobabel which is similar to biostars and stackexchange. It's based in vanilla forums which has an active community of developers on github and a lot of addons to customize the site. I'm not sure though if this allows edit other peoples answers as I suggested above. Neither I've found whether it can suggest related questions on the side, or interactively find similar questions when typing one. The rest of the features requested by @lexnederbragt seems fine.

From my experience it seems the astrophysics community in general is "scared" to ask questions in public forums... maybe it's the barrier some of the other sites have imposed... but definitely we have to help to make everyone to feel comfortable (and that's where our job comes in!)

[lexnederbragt]

@dpshelio Agree with possibility to edit questions and answers. The Biostars software can do that.

[gonuke]

I wonder if those answering questions could be encouraged to take more of a "sherpa" role: directing those asking questions to good sources of information in other locations, including stackexchange. This is an extension of the point made by @karinlag about helping (re)define the question. We could certainly provide part of the answer on our own forum, but also provide a gentler on-ramp to other communities like SE. Put another way, should one of our implicit goals be to launch users into other Q&A communities, rather than keep them in the SWC Q&A community forever?

[karinlag]

On 12/2/13 4:01 PM, Paul Wilson wrote:

I wonder if those answering questions could be encouraged to take more
of a "sherpa" role: directing those asking questions to good sources of
information in other locations, including stackexchange. This is an
extension of the point made by @karinlag https://github.com/karinlag
about helping (re)define the question. We could certainly provide part
of the answer on our own forum, but also provide a gentler on-ramp to
other communities like SE. Put another way, should one of our implicit
goals be to launch users into other Q&A communities, rather than keep
them in the SWC Q&A community forever?

I really like this way of thinking about it, and I really like the title
you implicitly gave us! It also nicely dovetails with the fact that we
cannot in any way aim to cover everything, so having as a goal to get
them onto other communities is a good way of thinking, IMO.

Karin

Karin Lagesen, Ph.D.
Department of Medical Genetics
and Norwegian High-Throughput Sequencing Centre (NSC)
Oslo University Hospital

[gvwilson]

I propose we set up the BioStar forum (https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central) on Software Carpentry - any objections?

[ahmadia]

That looks good to me.

[wking]

On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 02:17:02PM -0800, Greg Wilson wrote:

I propose we set up the BioStar forum
(https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central) on Software Carpentry -
any objections?

I find this quote from the biostar-central README.md 1 a bit
concerning:

Note: If database models change you must reset and reinitialize the
database, note that this will remove all existing content!

I suppose that just means Django migrations are going to be carried
out by hand (instead of via South 2 or similar). Not a deal
breaker, but something that our BioStar admin should keep in mind.

[ptone]

6 months ago or so I tried to get some feedback on the discuss list about using something like this, I've been intrigued by the approach taken by the Discourse project. Heroku has chosen it to power their forums.

I've rehydrated the instance I set-up, and have it running again temporarily here:

http://192.81.211.197

At the time I was evaluating options in this category, I was specifically hoping to find one that leveraged persona login, and this does (in addition to Google auth etc).

I also think something like this could replace many of the mailing lists, since you can configure your membership to be behave more like a mail list, or more like a forum depending on your inclinations.

[ahmadia]

@ptone - I like it! I think there are a lot of advantages with handling our team communication and planning on a place like Discourse, as opposed to the Git-centric GitHub, which has mostly minimal features for discussion.

I'm +1 for trying it out as a potential alternative to Discuss.

[gvwilson]

From the Discourse FAQ:

Should I switch to Discourse right now?

Probably not... Discourse is brand new. Discourse is early beta software, and likely to remain so for many months. Please experiment with it, play with it, give us feedback, submit pull requests – but any consideration of fully adopting Discourse is for people and organizations who are eager to live on the bleeding and broken edge.

[wking]

On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 09:41:50PM -0800, Preston Holmes wrote:

I've rehydrated the instance I set-up, and have it running again
temporarily here:

Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 03:38:42PM -0800, Greg Wilson:

Should I switch to Discourse right now?

Probably not... Discourse is brand new.

On the other hand, @ptone has set it up already and seems willing to
maintain it. If it's got Heroku behind it, I'm not particularly
worried about it going away in the near future. I have no particular
Mailman-vs-GitHub-vs-BioStars-vs-Discourse preferences as long as I
have an email interface ;).

[ptone]

A very valid comment on the Discourse is beta caveat. But I'd say they are in late beta, and pretty near production ready.

Truth is, running any OSS forum software takes a certain amount of sysadmin & admin work. There are databases that need regular backup, tables that may need pruning, etc. This is not just a static site in github.

I can't say I'd be able to commit to keeping up operations for something like Discourse, but I'd be happy to get it up and running initially.

As far as Biostars, it would be interesting to see if the author would be willing to help set it up and maintain for SWC given the bioinformatics connection. It is Django based, so of course I'm going to say that is a plus, but it really is a 1 person project, not exactly a community project.

https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central/graphs/contributors

I know budget is not expansive, but a paid option might be worth it if this were to prove valuable to the mission.

I know that I've been impressed with Ning in the past for a "community tool" out of the box.

But I think this category of tool has to prove its value before any funds would be used on it.

Also it is not clear whether the call was for something purely Q&A oriented, or more of a classical forum mode tool?

I know one of the changes over time that warranted this retry was growth in size to a more critical mass - but I'm a little torn between the value and lessons learned through some pilot/limited trial, vs the value of just starting the snowball with more snow, such that it might have a better shot of picking up steam.

[ahmadia]

Also it is not clear whether the call was for something purely Q&A oriented, or more of a classical forum mode tool?

I think they actually serve different functions, so I would be okay with having both. I consider the Q&A tool to be a different project than expanding our forum offerings.

As @wking just noted on discuss, I'm up for trying to move non-essential announcements and discussions over to Discourse. I logged in using my Google account (it also sets up Persona) and created a new test topic here: http://192.81.211.197/t/arons-very-own-test-post/11

[jkitzes]

@gvwilson, can you share the resolution here? Has this been completed successfully, or is it being tabled? The links above to http://192.81.211.197 aren't working for me.

[gvwilson]

The forum has been created; we're waiting on a decision from higher up
about scope.