[Sugar-devel] Social Help proposal

[Ana Balica]

> 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.

@Sam, that's a brilliant idea. I will make the appropriate changes to have
static Help and Social Help all in one window.

> 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

Yep, unfortunately that's the deal. Nevertheless discussions, collaboration
and bringing up different ideas will help create a better product in the
end :)

> 2. I however do not know whether the addition of IRC is necessarily a
> good idea. IRC is, well, stateless.

I agree with everything you said about IRC and have suggested that IRC
might be left as an option along with the discussion platform because of
rather small advantages. It is faster - unfortunately some people will not
want to read previous posts or try to figure out the category they set up
their question. Posting in this case results in duplicates (behavior often
seen on stack exchange websites). If one has a short clear question, IRC is
still a valid solution. The problem here arises when the same questions are
asked all over again (of course a forum wins it all in this case) and it
become a nuisance to those who answer it.
About channels: imho one channel specifically dedicated to social help
should be enough.

> 3. It appears to me that Ana hasn't finalized whether she is going to
> use Discourse.

Indeed i didn't make a decision. All I wanted is to provide a diff between
one other option, which seems plausible to me. Naturally I didn't dig too
deeply into other forum platforms, since most of the solutions look
obsolete, just like Discourse says it <http://www.discourse.org/about/> :)

I will try to explain why Sugar Network seems a rather good idea to me:
* it perfectly covers the scope of the Social Help project in its Declaration
of Purpose<http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Network/Declaration_of_purpose>
* it is a unified platform, a whole ecosystem for discussions and sharing
specifically designed for Sugar. It contains a categorization skeleton
based on Sugar activities. Each activity offers discussions on problems,
ideas, question and others.
* it can be used in offline
environments<http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Network/Concept#Infrastructure_overview>,
there is a synchronization mechanism between nodes with master server

Discourse has a very friendly environment as well (I will set up one for
our university group discussions for sure). If we choose to use Discourse,
then considering that Sugar Network is also being used by some users, then
we will have *information fragmentation*. That is definitely not a good
idea.

@Prasoon, I will take a look at your proposal asap :) And thanks for the
feedback!
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