[Go-essp-tech] [esg-node-dev] Re: A CMIP5 FAQ Application
Nathan Wilhelmi
wilhelmi at ucar.edu
Wed Aug 17 10:33:28 MDT 2011
Hi Stephen,
Logged in JIRA for the gateway, patch is included.
https://vets.development.ucar.edu/jira/browse/GTWY-2666
Thanks!
-Nate
stephen.pascoe at stfc.ac.uk wrote:
> I have been evaluating how to moving forward as quickly as possible on
> this. In my view creating a web-form in the gateways will take
> resources from NCAR code emailing the form content to cmip5-helpdesk.
> It will require server-side code so is likely to be part of NCAR's
> Gateway release schedule.
>
>
>
> In the mean time we need to get to a stage where users directly email
> cmip5-helpdesk and provide a few vital pieces of information as quickly
> as possible. Therefore I suggest patching the "contactus.jsp" file in
> operational gateways so that they show something like what is live at
> http://cmip-gw.badc.rl.ac.uk/contactus/contact-us.htm
>
>
>
> I have attached a patch file for Gateway Administrators. Just
> implementing this alone will greatly reduce the time taken processing
> CMIP5-helpdesk.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Stephen
>
>
>
> ---
>
> Stephen Pascoe +44 (0)1235 445980
>
> Centre of Environmental Data Archival
>
> STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK
>
>
>
> *From:* Juckes, Martin (STFC,RAL,RALSP)
> *Sent:* 17 August 2011 16:56
> *To:* 'Estanislao Gonzalez'; Pascoe, Stephen (STFC,RAL,RALSP);
> don at ucar.edu; taylor13 at llnl.gov
> *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] [esg-node-dev] Re: A CMIP5 FAQ Application
>
>
>
> Hi Estani, Stephen, Don, Karl,
>
>
>
> Relevant views, but I’m afraid I’m not convinced by the need for or
> usefulness of an open system.
>
>
>
> Our CMIP5 footprints site shows 7 queries waiting for a response, which
> is not bad. I understand from Stephen that there may be a back-log of
> getting queries into the system and we clearly need to improve that part
> of the process. We need to use the human resources we have more
> effectively, and using the query management to distribute responsibility
> for answering queries is part of that.
>
>
>
> One thing that will greatly help is ensuring that we know where users
> are coming from when they submit a queries referring to “your web site”
> – the only way we can do this is with a form which automatically
> includes the gateway in use and the URL of the referring page (i.e. the
> page from which the users accessed the query submission form). This
> should be a fairly minor piece of work. The form should submit queries
> straight into the query tracking system.
>
>
>
> The advantage of footprints over stackoverflow is that we have it
> configured to track queries and ensure that all queries are promptly
> answered. It can also provide a FAQ site (see
> https://footprints.badc.rl.ac.uk/cmip5_FAQ.html ), with a nice facility
> to copy FAQ into responses to users and create FAQ solutions from
> responses to users. The system also allows you to specify templates and
> standard explanatory texts to save repeatedly creating background
> information for common topics.
>
>
>
> We need to turn this into an operational system – and that requires an
> agreement on how to staff the system. I think we should be putting all
> queries directly into the footprints system by providing users with the
> cmip5-helpdesk at stfc.ac.uk <mailto:cmip5-helpdesk at stfc.ac.uk> address and
> then improve on this by providing a form for them to submit queries with.
>
>
>
> Karl, Don: if we do this, will you be able to allocate staff to work
> through a suitable portion of the queries? I imagine we will have to
> provide some more guidance on how to use the system to make this work
> smoothly.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Estanislao Gonzalez [mailto:gonzalez at dkrz.de]
> *Sent:* 16 August 2011 12:44
> *To:* Pascoe, Stephen (STFC,RAL,RALSP)
> *Cc:* Juckes, Martin (STFC,RAL,RALSP); don at ucar.edu; taylor13 at llnl.gov;
> go-essp-tech at ucar.edu; esg-gateway-dev at earthsystemgrid.org;
> esg-node-dev at lists.llnl.gov
> *Subject:* Re: [Go-essp-tech] [esg-node-dev] Re: A CMIP5 FAQ Application
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> It's probably not relevant to cast my vote here, but I completely agree
> with Stephen.
>
> To put it short, I just can't do much more than what I'm doing now, and
> that's far from what's required. I'm pretty sure that's the case for all
> of you too. So we are suffering from human resources shortage, and the
> help desk will be suffering the most.
> I think the open FAQ system is a valid try, we can always shut it down
> if it proves to cause more pain that what's solving. But the truth is,
> we are lagging behind in terms of usage, especially in user help, and we
> just don't have the required men power to catch up.
> Either we count on some tools and people (even the users) to help us
> along, or we start thinking in a Plan B ASAP. This won't get solved by
> itself, and we are just barely starting.
>
> My 2c anyways,
> Estani
>
> Am 16.08.2011 11:43, schrieb stephen.pascoe at stfc.ac.uk:
> <mailto:stephen.pascoe at stfc.ac.uk:>
>
> Hi Martin,
>
>
>
>> The problem with tagging users or labelling their contributions as
> spam is that you may get letters from their lawyers, so I would start
> out with a
>
>> system we know how to control – there will be enough chaos if we just
> open it to contributions from the 40 or so groups who are running
>
>> models or data nodes.
>
>
>
> My fear is that the alternative to not having a system like this is that
> communication within the CMIP5 science and data management community
> will remain poor. I understand where you are coming from, because I
> occasionally follow the climate-debate blogosphere, but I think we
> should run with this system and see where it works for us where it
> doesn't. I think we have no hope of designing a system up-front that
> does the job nearly as well.
>
> I believe the application has the power to control what content is
> placed on it. At the moment it's configured to be very open but
> cmip5-help can give permissions to users based on their reputation
> score. For instance your post is moderated if your score is below a
> certain value. Similarly we can set the reputation required to
> answer/comment/vote/flag/etc. Once a question is accepted it can be
> flagged as "misleading", "not-relevant", "inappropriate" or anything you
> want to configure. Questions can be closed as "Duplicate", "off-topic",
> "too subjective and argumentative", "outdated". Anything that we need
> that it can't do could be developed (we have the code) but we won't know
> we need it until we have used it for a while.
>
>
>
>> We want to have some system for keeping the content up to date --
> perhaps this could be done by tagging answers which are specific to a
>
>> current software version with that version (e.g. “Gateway 1.2.x”) and
> then reviewing them as older versions are, hopefully, eliminated from the
>
>> operational federation,
>
>
>
> In the end this tool would be **part of** our procedures for
> communication and issue tracking. Someone would have to make sure
> answers are accurately tagged (maybe with software versions) and
> answered if relevant. Closing questions that are out of date, flagging
> them, etc. etc.
>
>
>
> Stephen.
>
>
>
> ---
>
> Stephen Pascoe +44 (0)1235 445980
>
> Centre of Environmental Data Archival
>
> STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK
>
>
>
> *From:* Juckes, Martin (STFC,RAL,RALSP)
> *Sent:* 16 August 2011 10:01
> *To:* Pascoe, Stephen (STFC,RAL,RALSP); 'Don Middleton'; Karl Taylor
> *Cc:* go-essp-tech at ucar.edu <mailto:go-essp-tech at ucar.edu>;
> esg-gateway-dev at earthsystemgrid.org
> <mailto:esg-gateway-dev at earthsystemgrid.org>;
> esg-node-dev at lists.llnl.gov <mailto:esg-node-dev at lists.llnl.gov>
> *Subject:* RE: [Go-essp-tech] [esg-node-dev] Re: A CMIP5 FAQ Application
>
>
>
> Hi Stephen,
>
>
>
> The problem with tagging users or labelling their contributions as spam
> is that you may get letters from their lawyers, so I would start out
> with a system we know how to control – there will be enough chaos if we
> just open it to contributions from the 40 or so groups who are running
> models or data nodes.
>
>
>
> We want to have some system for keeping the content up to date --
> perhaps this could be done by tagging answers which are specific to a
> current software version with that version (e.g. “Gateway 1.2.x”) and
> then reviewing them as older versions are, hopefully, eliminated from
> the operational federation,
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Martin
>
>
>
> *From:* Pascoe, Stephen (STFC,RAL,RALSP)
> *Sent:* 16 August 2011 09:49
> *To:* Juckes, Martin (STFC,RAL,RALSP); 'Don Middleton'; Karl Taylor
> *Cc:* go-essp-tech at ucar.edu <mailto:go-essp-tech at ucar.edu>;
> esg-gateway-dev at earthsystemgrid.org
> <mailto:esg-gateway-dev at earthsystemgrid.org>;
> esg-node-dev at lists.llnl.gov <mailto:esg-node-dev at lists.llnl.gov>
> *Subject:* RE: [Go-essp-tech] [esg-node-dev] Re: A CMIP5 FAQ Application
>
>
>
> I'm confident the software could be configured to require a login to ask
> a question and we could constrain logins to those with ESGF OpenIDs.
> However I would put this in the category of "premature optimisation".
> If we get spurious questions we can tag them as "spam" down-vote them or
> even delete them. Users can be given a bad reputation score or you can
> even ban users.
>
>
>
> The system is designed to be open and, to some extent, chaotic. This
> encourages people to get involved whilst allowing the community to
> assign value to users, questions and answers. Therefore there isn't a
> workflow as such like you get in a bug tracker. If we want that we
> should link questions to bug tracker tickets so that closing a ticket
> triggers updating the question. However, I believe too much process
> could get in the way here.
>
>
>
> I'm not thinking the questions I bootstrapped the system with will be
> typical -- they are just what was in my mind at the time.
>
>
>
> Stephen.
>
>
>
> ---
>
> Stephen Pascoe +44 (0)1235 445980
>
> Centre of Environmental Data Archival
>
> STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK
>
>
>
> *From:* Juckes, Martin (STFC,RAL,RALSP)
> *Sent:* 16 August 2011 09:33
> *To:* 'Don Middleton'; Karl Taylor; Pascoe, Stephen (STFC,RAL,RALSP)
> *Cc:* go-essp-tech at ucar.edu <mailto:go-essp-tech at ucar.edu>;
> esg-gateway-dev at earthsystemgrid.org
> <mailto:esg-gateway-dev at earthsystemgrid.org>;
> esg-node-dev at lists.llnl.gov <mailto:esg-node-dev at lists.llnl.gov>
> *Subject:* RE: [Go-essp-tech] [esg-node-dev] Re: A CMIP5 FAQ Application
>
>
>
> Hello All,
>
>
>
> On the FAQ issue – I think we do need an FAQ system that many people can
> contribute to, but I’d be worried about using an open one. At the moment
> we are dealing with a handful of developers, but we will have thousands
> of people looking at the data soon. One web sites work well in
> co-operative communities, but I think we would be flooded with
> superficial comments claiming to show that the data is worthless. On the
> other hand, as Stephen says, there is a clear need for something of this
> kind to allow us to gather the answers which we are all providing to users.
>
>
>
> As Karl says, there is also a need to make the system work better. I
> notice that some of the answers in the mock-up Stephen has created refer
> to known bugs which are being worked on – and will presumably be fixed
> at some point. When we have thousands of questions and answers referring
> to known bugs, will there be a way of systematically ensuring that
> answers are updated when bugs are fixed?
>
>
>
> Can we use the “stackoverflow” system and configure it so that only a
> restricted (but large) group of people can contribute?
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Martin
>
>
>
> *From:* go-essp-tech-bounces at ucar.edu
> <mailto:go-essp-tech-bounces at ucar.edu>
> [mailto:go-essp-tech-bounces at ucar.edu]
> <mailto:[mailto:go-essp-tech-bounces at ucar.edu]> *On Behalf Of *Don Middleton
> *Sent:* 16 August 2011 00:27
> *To:* Karl Taylor
> *Cc:* go-essp-tech at ucar.edu <mailto:go-essp-tech at ucar.edu>;
> esg-gateway-dev at earthsystemgrid.org
> <mailto:esg-gateway-dev at earthsystemgrid.org>;
> esg-node-dev at lists.llnl.gov <mailto:esg-node-dev at lists.llnl.gov>
> *Subject:* Re: [Go-essp-tech] [esg-node-dev] Re: A CMIP5 FAQ Application
>
>
>
> Hi again, Karl - catching up on email pileup after a bit of vacation.
> First of all, I really like what Stephen has put together for
> collaboratively addressing user problems, and think this could help us
> quite a lot. I personally like using environments like this when dealing
> with app software problems.
>
>
>
> I think there's pretty good agreement that #1 below is a primary problem
> area. Getting consistent deployments is expected to help some, so the
> sooner you can upgrade to 1.3.1, the better. The attribute service being
> down may have been another issue here. Site configuration can be a
> problem as well. The problem with users hitting something that looked
> like dual registration interfaces involved several issues. The work is
> pretty much done on improving that a lot, and that's in 1.3.2 which
> we'll post more on shortly.
>
>
>
> Regarding #2, the community SOLR-search preview and now the 2.0 alpha
> are expected to solve many problems that have plagued us for quite some
> time. The sooner that folks can deploy that, the better for testing and
> soon making things better for our users.
>
>
>
> cheers - don
>
>
>
> On Aug 4, 2011, at 10:11 AM, Karl Taylor wrote:
>
>
>
> 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
> <mailto: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
> <http://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
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Estanislao Gonzalez
>
>
>
> Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie (MPI-M)
>
> Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ) - German Climate Computing Centre
>
> Room 108 - Bundesstrasse 45a, D-20146 Hamburg, Germany
>
>
>
> Phone: +49 (40) 46 00 94-126
>
> E-Mail: gonzalez at dkrz.de <mailto:gonzalez at dkrz.de>
>
>
> --
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