SC18 Contest! SC18 Contest! SC18 Contest! SC18 Contest!

Meta Discussion
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Here are two fun ways to join the community working to build this site. If you act now through the end of day on Monday, November 19, 2018, you can earn a limited edition SC18 badge!

First, a bit of nomenclature. Two mechanisms that are key to the operation of this site are voting and badges.

Voting allows the community to keep content current. When you see a question that seems particularly well written, relevant, important or otherwise exemplary for the research computing audience, vote for it. Topics in any category are listed in order of votes, and answers to a particular question are also shown in order of votes so the best questions and answers always rise to the top.

Badges are a way to show your activity and support for this site. There are quite a few badges that are created by default by the discourse platform, which is the basis of our site, but we also create special badges from time to time!

So now, back to the contest. Here are the two ways to win a limited edition SC18 badge:

  1. Submit a new question or post an answer an existing one. If your questions or answers cumulatively receive 10 votes, you will win the SC18 gold badge; 5 votes, the SC18 silver badge, 2 votes, the SC18 bronze badge.

  2. Create an account OR login OR vote on a question or answer OR submit a question OR post an answer and you will receive the SC18 participant badge.

Individuals who joined the community prior to November 1 will receive “Early Adopter” badges.

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This is such an exciting initiative! I wish I had joined prior to November 1st, but was just told about you today. Better late than never!

This simple platform could have huge benefit in being able to unite our (rather disparate) communities. I’m wondering if for the above:

  • for posts / answers, in that there is only one metric of goodness (up or down vote) how do we account for being able to support answers to the same question (for possibly different environments / institutions?) For example, if I want to load a module on cluster A that might look different than cluster B, there arguablyisn’t a right answer, but there are multiple, and it’s context dependent. Do we make different questions entirely? use tags in answers? If a participant represent a group or institution, should his or her comment be branded in some way so that a user (from the same institution) finds / can filter to it more quickly?
  • Again for different types of users and institutions, how might we think about (down the line) integration with places that ueres frequent (e.g., Github issues?) and our own institution resources? For example, neurostars.org has a Twitter feed. This is how I keep up! Does this group have one too?

I’m wicked excited! This is so cool and I want to help however I can see to see it successful.