Re: Blog post for taking the Q&A system offline.

After a quick glance over it, I am fine with the draft except for one
little thing.  "  One of our most active contributors, Garbee, researched
alternative, " I really don't like this. I'd rather not be called out as
one of the most active contributors (especially since I have done barely
any actual documentation editing like I really want to.) If we could drop
the opening entirely or find someway to reword it so it doesn't seem so
strong I would appreciate it very much.


On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Janet Swisher <jswisher@mozilla.com> wrote:

>  There's some ambiguity around the pronoun 'we' in this post. In the
> context of launching the site, it refers to the Stewards. In the context of
> decisions being made currently, it refers to the most active participants
> in the project, which includes both Steward staff members and volunteers,
> i.e., "the community" as it exists today.
>
> Along similar lines, the phrase "ways for the community to talk back to us
> about how to improve the site" sets up an unnecessary division. Something
> like "ways for visitors to interact and become part of the community
> improving the site" would be more inclusive and inviting.
>
> --Janet
>
>
>
> On 4/10/13 2:50 PM, Doug Schepers wrote:
>
> Hi, folks-
>
> Here's the rough first draft, without the links to resources. Feedback
> welcome!
>
>  http://blog.webplatform.org/?p=318&preview=true
>
> [[
> Suspending Q&A Forums
> Apr 10 2013 by Shepazu
>
> When we launched WebPlatform.org, we wanted to have plenty of ways for the
> community to talk back to us about how to improve the site, and how to
> pitch in. IRC was a familiar option for many of us. Email lists were
> another, for long-term asynchronous discussions. An issue tracker was
> important to make sure we knew what needed to be done, and how it was
> progressing. An inline comments extension for Mediawiki was developed as an
> improvement on Talk pages. Community teleconferences to talk about tasks
> and progress. Doc Sprints to onramp new people into the community, and get
> work done. And a Q&A forum, like the popular and useful StackOverflow.
>
> After evaluating the most productive ways that our community has used each
> of these channels, we are closing down the Q&A forum, and refining some of
> our other communication processes.
>
> The software we used for the Q&A forum, Question2Answer, seemed to perform
> the task well. Our problem was communicating how to use the forums, and
> integrating feedback into our workflow. People tended to use the Q&A much
> as they would StackOverflow, to ask technical, pragmatic questions about
> doing Web development. Though our intent for it was more to act as a living
> FAQ and suggestion board for content on Web Platform Docs, questions about
> Web development were natural, and we did try to use these questions to help
> guide us in what content we would create for WPD. But the Q&A forums were
> never as focused as other channels, and ultimately there was not enough
> energy in our fledgling community to mine the Q&A forums for gems while
> keeping our eyes and hands on the tasks ahead of us. So, we’ve decided to
> close down the Q&A forums to refocus on what is working well: IRC, email,
> telcons, doc sprints, and our issue tracker.
>
> We’re also looking at refining those communication channels we are keeping
> around. We started out with W3C’s go-to issue tracker, Bugzilla, but found
> it lacking. One of our most active contributors, Garbee, researched
> alternative, and convinced us that The Bug Genie has the feature set we
> wanted for not only filing and managing issues, but overall project
> management as well; he is taking the initiative to configure our new
> instance at project.webplatform.org, and port over old issues. Another
> active contributor, Frozenice, has been researching The Bug Genie’s API, so
> we can push issues directly in via the inline comment system in the wiki.
> Two W3C staff, Denis Ah-Kang and Lea Verou, have also helped by
> respectively installing the system and skinning it to match our site’s
> look-and-feel.
>
> We are also strengthening one communications channel that we initially
> undervalued: Github. We are putting infrastructure into place to make all
> the code for WebPlatform.org available through Github, including our
> MediaWiki extensions, templates, skins, and stylesheets.
>
> We don’t know yet if we are retiring the Q&A forums forever. We are
> keeping the software installed, with all the questions and answers intact,
> but are not allowing any new questions or answers. Once our primary and
> immediate goal of documenting the Open Web Platform is more mature, we may
> decide to reopen the Q&A forums to allow people to discuss Web development,
> if that’s what the community wants. But for now, we encourage people to get
> involved through email, IRC, our issue tracker, or by just diving in and
> helping create and edit content.
> ]]
>
> Regards-
> -Doug
>
> On 4/10/13 3:05 PM, Doug Schepers wrote:
>
> Hi, Garbee-
>
> I'll write this today.
>
> Regards-
> -Doug
>
> On 4/10/13 3:03 PM, Jonathan Garbee wrote:
>
> We should try to get a blog post written for the Q&A system being taken
> down. This way we can post it and finally take the software and put it
> out of commission for the time being.
>
> If I recall the email thread on taking it down correctly we had decided
> that it currently doesn't have a solid use-case with the current state
> of things. Further it hasn't had much use since the initial launch.
> Although we are taking it offline for now, it may come back later once
> the documentation is worked on more and we see a valid use for it.
>
> Did I miss anything major from our conversation (probably did)? Is
> anyone up to writing this post?
>
> Thanks,
> -Garbee
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>  Janet Swisher <jREMOVEswisher@mozilla.com>
> Mozilla Developer Network <https://developer.mozilla.org>
> Technical Writer/Community Steward
>