[Go-essp-tech] A CMIP5 FAQ Application

[Karl Taylor]

Hi all,

I agree with Stephen that our ability to quickly respond to the 
increasing number of requests seems likely to become overwhelmed.  My 
cursory impression is, however, that the most common problems reported 
will be difficult for the user community to respond to; they seem to be 
associated with flaws in ESG and/or gateway hardware.  Am I correct that 
most frequent queries to the help desk are related to:

1.  getting error messages, no response, or incorrect notice that a user 
doesn't have the proper permission to successfully download data

2. having problems finding data using the search capability (because 
sometimes this fails to return all datasets that it should).

I think NCAR is making progress on the search problems (2 above), but 
I'm not sure anyone understands whether there are bugs or just confusion 
that's causing all the problems listed in 1 above.  Perhaps along with 
thinking about alternatives to the current help desk, immediate 
attention needs to be paid to reducing the real problems encountered by 
the user by modifying the ESG software, possibly modifying the ESG user 
interface, so users won't be so easily confused.

The first step might be to try to confirm that 1 above is causing most 
of the problems and to pin down exactly why the problems are being 
encountered.  I think someone with a bit more complete technical 
understanding of ESG should be able to find the common issues that are 
being raised and suggest ways they might be addressed.

Best regards,
Karl


On 8/4/11 7:55 AM, stephen.pascoe at stfc.ac.uk wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I am increasingly convinced that the CMIP5 HelpDesk isn't scaling to 
> the number of queries we are getting and definitely won't scale as 
> CMIP5 gets more use.  This is partly our fault at BADC for not 
> managing to open up the HelpDesk sufficiently to make it easy for ESGF 
> developers to contribute.  This will improve in the near future 
> (honest!) but I still think we need a more agile way to communicate 
> with CMIP5 users.
>
> Therefore I want to float an alternative solution.  A 
> community-driven, interactive FAQ in the style of stackoverflow.com.  
> The idea is that users, administrators and developers can collaborate 
> on asking and answering questions in an open forum.  There is a 
> reputation system and a mechanism for voting for answers/questions 
> which enables common questions and good answers to be highlighted.  
> There is also a tagging system for classification.
>
> I have created a prototype service with a few questions in it at 
> http://esg-dev1.badc.rl.ac.uk/.  Please take a look and give me some 
> feedback.  Even better create an account and start asking and 
> answering questions.  I have deliberately answered only some of the 
> questions to encourage people to get involved.  If you don't like my 
> answer add another one or comment on mine.
>
> If this appears to work for us the site can be moved to a production 
> server easily without losing the questions.  We could then link to it 
> from the "Contact Us" page in the gateways and ask people to email 
> cmip5-helpdesk only for questions they don't want to share with the 
> community.  I would like to discuss this at the ESGF telco on Tuesday.
>
> One note.  You can use ESGF OpenIDs to create an account but CEDA 
> OpenIDs don't work right now.  I need to get Phil to fix that.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Stephen.
>
> ---
>
> Stephen Pascoe  +44 (0)1235 445980
>
> Centre of Environmental Data Archival
>
> STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK
>
>
> -- 
> Scanned by iCritical.
>
>
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