Let’s re-imagine the Question of the Week (QoW)! The motivation behind the promotion, which will remain the same, is to generate interest, discussion and ultimately grow the Ask.CI community in size, depth and buzz. On a more targeted level, the QoW aimed to highlight questions still needing answers, and coerce the research computing experts we know are out there whose shared knowledge can benefit many others. This goal is still important, and we wish to continue to encourage this, possibly along with offering ways to introduce some excitement (badges, pizza parties; you name it)! The floor is open…
Okay - thinking from a completely idealistic standpoint here.
- Automated The current question of the week is painfully chosen - we spend oodles of time choosing, discussing, and then it comes down to an email and Twitter post that (for some weeks) doesn’t get great response. Ideally, the question would be chosen not manually, but by way of some automated metrics that indicate “this question is highest interest to users” or “this question could be highest interest but hasn’t been seen yet.” I note that this is idealistic because AskCI doesn’t have the traffic or tooling to make this a reality.
- Targeted Currently, we are sort of all over the place in terms of the questions that we share. While targeting different groups is probably okay to do, we should be asking ourselves every week “Who is this intended for?” because I would suspect a large percentage of our questions we would want to target users and students, but a significant portion are intended for sysadmins and similar.
Now for the re-imagining part. I always approach a QoW and ask myself “Why would I want to answer this?” or for a different question - of the things that I do reply to, what is my incentive? For example, for this question I’m answering right now, I am invested in the community and I want to make it better. That might hint to an issue we have with AskCI - we have category boards (locales) but not a strong sense of community tied to them. If we start with the Groups base, and then have answering questions somehow integrated, that might incentivize someone (that currently doesn’t care) to care about the same questions. There are a few simple ideas that come to mind:
- calculate monthly metrics to award a winning team / group (I implemented this -> https://vsoch.github.io/2019/discourse-rankings/)
- Recruit locales to come up with a question they pose to their users, and then they award some winning answer (and given enough locales, this would ideally be a few times a year per group).
- Turn it into a game. Have a question of the week be a puzzle, a task, or some kind of challenge for groups (or individuals, if appropriate) to submit answers to. This might be more appropriate to give a longer time for (Question of the Month, Query of the Quarter, Task of the Trimester, etc.).
- Target specific experts. Don’t have an agenda, but reach out to each expert and ask them the most interesting thing they learned in the last month / year (or in recent memory) and then to briefly write a paragraph. The content is a bit unpredictable, but I would say it would be easy to frame in a QoW sort of way.
- I’m still gung-ho on some kind of annual / regular competition with a pizza party prize. Like, how can you not want that.
I’ll share more if I think of it!