Rethinking the Q&A forum concept 2.0 (combined with chat discussions)

[StevenPuttemans]

CHAT --> the place for discussing on this is: https://gitter.im/opencv-infrastructure/answers.opencv.org

Since the Q&A hardware and thus system went down, some of the core users of the Q&A forum came together with @alekcac to discuss the future of our Q&A website and how stuff should be handled. I will use this issue to combine every piece of information I can find out there, related to this. If you have more stuff to add, please do so, but try to keep your suggestions to a single response to keep this clear!

Thanks in advance!

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Suggestion 1: the AskBot forum software: keep or switch?

It might not enable all the possibilities that we might want for a forum related to a software package. Here are suggestions to improve the current software or to keep in mind when switching to a new package.

• Better integration with the current Github repository software, like linking issues, questions, code lines, ...
• Missing the ability to subdivide the forum into topic, related to different modules available.
• Sticky powers might come in handy, specifically to special topics which needs guidance
  • How to post a decent question - to replace the current FAQ page so that it can be updated regularly.
  • Search before you ask new question - guidelines on how to use resources out there.
  • Moderators - an overview and contact details.
• Allow moderators to instantly accept answers instead of waiting 48 hours.
• Allow two answers to be accepted as good answers, and give all people the correct credits for their inputs.
• Give moderators more points to spend each day, the 30 day limit is useless if you start putting in some effort!
• Fix the tags
  • Remove undesired tags
  • Remove tags with hashtags (now illegal character)
  • Remove OpenCV tags
• Put a header at the top of the Q&A page before the askbot-managed main section. It should have a search box that hits the tutorials and reference documentation as well as the questions and answers, and any other source that that's sufficiently relevant.

Stuff that a knowledge system in general should contain

• A "scope of work" to define needed functions
• A team of people available for implementation, administration and maintenance
• A set of ICT tools selected to achieve the scope of work and based on Admin resource
• Ongoing maintenance

Suggestion 2: Important things to keep in mind while using forum software, related to the OpenCV Q&A community

• Enough back-end editing powers for moderators. Sometimes I get the feeling that simply closing and changing topics is not enough to keep a clean forum.
  • Maybe access to the backend database for some of us?
  • Would take of some pressure of @alekcac who needs to do everything himself now.
• Make the FAQ an actual FAQ and move to current FAQ into a sort of user guidelines. The current form is not what the name states and thus not what people might be looking for.

We should be sure that people are actually getting what they want. @LorenaGdL created a survey for investigating this: http://fluidsurveys.com/surveys/lorena-gdelucas/opencv-q-a-features/

Suggestion 3: Information collection from the Q&A

We should somehow try to avoid that all the good centralized information of the forum gets lost in the world wide web or in the forum itself. Therefore I would like to raise a group of users that systematically helps converting good content into wiki pages or tutorials for other users.

There even might be a possibility to wrap up some of the content of the Q&A into an OpenCV based book. I have contacts at Packt Publishing that are sure willing to get us started on that!

We should be aware that the MATLAB API has for example quite exhaustive docs embedded in the forum. Stuff like this should be logged somewhere better then the forum.

Extra suggestions

• Mine the askbot content for documentation areas that need updating first
• Auto check on whether the documentation is complete when someone is answering Q&A and making a workflow to integrate the extra information

Suggestion 4: a more centralized discussion area integrated with the forum itself

For now, people either start giant discussions in comments, leading to a loss of valuable information. We might need to integrate something like the gitter chat we have for these issues now, in order to have a first hands on help.

Linking to our freenode server [acces via #opencv channel] might be a good idea also, tough people dont really like the very basic look of it. I guess gitter has a more cleaner interface.

Consider integrating the active chatroom inside the forum software so that it is directly accessible.

Suggestion 5: make the wiki more attractive and stimulate users to the community concept of open source packages

We actually have a wiki at the github repository of OpenCV but it is mainly used by developers to centralize information. We could expand it to contain easy accessible information. For now not everyone has access rights, but we might be able to cook something up and I can then add it to the wiki itself.

Combined with this we could launch like these documentation hackatlons! Or some sort of challenge where people can win some recognition when submitting documentation. The crazier the better.

Suggestion 6: get the core developers more actively involved in the Q&A

A more active presence of the developers inside the Q&A community might stimulate users to engage into PRs, solutions, bugfixes, ... though we know that this might be to much to ask, since most of them are already doing this in their spare time.

Suggestion 7: how about handling the new documentation structure of doxygen

People still have a counter intuitive feeling with this way of documentation. We should bridge the missing gaps to make it more user friendly. This can be done by adding more examples and linking them based on the function content throughout the documentation.

Suggestion 8: the giant OpenCV mindmap

How can we integrate knowledge of the forum with samples, keywords, ... as stated by @PkLab, we need to find a chain that links API doc<->Tutorials<->Forum to preserve as much content as possible. Maybe a mindmap setting could be the solution here.

Suggestion 9: getting experts to the Q&A forum

High quality forum with expertise degree ranking could become an expertise location tool also for the companies who are looking for experts. This might motivate people to share their knowledge. Karma could be one of the expertise degree ranking tool.

SOURCES of this above compilation

1. The issues on this repository
2. http://answers.opencv.org/question/10271/no-question-suggestions-concerning-this-question-answer-area/
3. http://answers.opencv.org/question/22933/question-number-6000-your-hopes-and-dreams-about-opencv/
4. http://answers.opencv.org/question/9487/matlab-api-for-opencv/
5. http://answers.opencv.org/question/94171/qa-change-or-improve-who-how-what/

[StevenPuttemans]

@LorenaGdL I just tested your survey, seems nice. Could you add a link to this suggestions page + try to update it accordingly to the content described here?

[berak]

wrt suggestion 3: aksbot has a web api, http://askbot.org/doc/api.html , so you could e.g. retrieve highly voted questions / answers from a script.