[Go-essp-tech] A CMIP5 FAQ Application

Fri Aug 5 03:25:31 MDT 2011

Hi Stephane,

In theory the search, tags and voting systems allow people to find answers.  We tag questions with keywords to categorise them and the more useful questions and answers get voted up.  Of course this requires everyone to get involved and it's difficult to tell whether it will work until there is enough content and users.

I don't think many people know about cmip5-announce.  I can't find any link to it on the CMIP5 homepage at PCMDI.  We need to take a step back and think how we keep users informed but at the moment I'm trying to throw some ideas in the air.

Stephen.

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Stephen Pascoe  +44 (0)1235 445980
Centre of Environmental Data Archival
STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK

From: Stéphane Senesi [mailto:Stephane.Senesi at meteo.fr]
Sent: 04 August 2011 16:30
To: Pascoe, Stephen (STFC,RAL,RALSP)
Cc: go-essp-tech at ucar.edu; esg-gateway-dev at earthsystemgrid.org; esg-node-dev at lists.llnl.gov
Subject: Re: [Go-essp-tech] A CMIP5 FAQ Application

Dear colleagues

The system looks fine, and much useful. I experimented posting a question. The main issue is "how easy will it look when myriads of questions will be asked" . I would like to use it also for datanode users asking questions to ESGF developpers.

Besides this  intiative, but still about communicating with users, I am a bit surprised that the list cmip5-announce at lists.llnl.gov<mailto:cmip5-announce at lists.llnl.gov> is not much known, according to the number of members (they were 12 on July, 17) . Also, the traffic on this list is quite low. So, is this the way for CMIP5 to broadcast news (such as the address of  this fututre interactive FAQ) to users, or is there another media ?

Best regards

S

stephen.pascoe at stfc.ac.uk<mailto:stephen.pascoe at stfc.ac.uk> wrote, On 04/08/2011 16:55:
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.

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Stephen Pascoe  +44 (0)1235 445980
Centre of Environmental Data Archival
STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK

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