[Sugar-devel] Social Help proposal

[Prasoon Shukla]

On 3/17/14, Sam Parkinson <sam.parkinson3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Sugar currently has static activity help. You get there by frame > activity
> icon > help. I think it would be nice to have them all in one dialog, maybe
> a bit like the view source with 2 icons at the top.
>
> Also I really like the idea of it being self contained instead of lunching
> into an activity - as a user can uninstall browse.
>
> Most importantly, wasn't someone else doing this?
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2014/Prasoon2211/Social_HelpYou
> guys should chat and try to work together!

Hi. And yes, that would be me. Also, as much as I would like to work
together, I don't think Google allows this :)

Anyway, this means that if the social help project is selected, either
one of our proposals will be selected and the other will be rejected
:(

Since I've explored the ideas a bit as well, here are a few comments
on the proposal.

1. +1 to making the discussion platform independent of the browse
activity. I'll need to explore this more.

2. I however do not know whether the addition of IRC is necessarily a
good idea. IRC is, well, stateless. And thus, all the discussions that
happen on the IRC would be essentially lost. Oh I know that we can
make a bot that would keep the logs - it doesn't matter. At the end,
we'll just end up with a jumbled mess of topics - the information will
be hard to separate from the idle IRC talk (that I know would become
very common if launching to IRC is made this easy). Furthermore, how
will we make topicwise discussions? By making channels? This will mean
a lot of channels - and, we do not know the normal users will be
willing to idle at IRC all day.

Discourse however, takes care of it all. And the best part is, we're
actually developing a huge repository of information, much like
StackOverflow, just for sugar. This, I think, is the true power of
this project. As this repository grows, we can use DB migration
scripts (see my proposal) to set up *all of this* data on local setups
of Discourse as well. This means even places isolated from internet
will have access to all of this information. And, to top it all of,
Discourse is a realtime communications framework. *That's why it was
built - for seamless discussions*. IRC just does not make sense if we
use Discourse, IMHO.

3. It appears to me that Ana hasn't finalized whether she is going to
use Discourse. Now, I had a little chat with walterbender on IRC and
he said that he'd discussed the problem with tch. They'd both arrived
at  similar conclusions regarding Discourse as me. If you take a look
at the mailing list from a few days back, you'll find a thread in
which I've discussed the areas where Discourse wins over all other
traditional forums. I think Sam also agrees that Discourse would be a
great option. So, I think we're pretty much set to use Discourse for
social help.

Anyway, those were my opinions on the proposal. Now, can I please
request a review of mine? :)
It's here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2014/Prasoon2211/Social_Help

One more thing - the GUI mockups look nice. I *could* make them as
well though I don't really see the point in my case -  I've decided to
go ahead with Discourse and the GUI will look just like a browse
activity. So...

Again, please review, my proposal too and post the relevant comments
on the discussion page or the mailing list
(http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2014-March/047498.html)

Thanks
Prasoon

>
> Sam
> On Mar 17, 2014 4:08 AM, "Ana Balica" <ana.balica at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello everybody,
>>
>> I have sketched my GSoC2014 proposal for Social Help project. It would
>> really nice to receive some feedback.
>>
>> Proposal on wiki:
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2014/AnaBalica/Social_Help
>> Prototype: https://github.com/ana-balica/sugar/tree/prototype-social-help
>> Prototype showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x316a6JX84Q
>>
>> Thank you,
>> Ana Balica
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>