Improving our support for the Open edX community

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Hello Open edX community!

The open source team here at edX has been talking a lot recently about how we can do a better job of making sure community members have access to the resources you need to troubleshoot problems and get your questions answered.  Right now the most common avenues for getting support are our mailing lists and Slack channels, but these tools don’t allow us to easily track frequently asked questions or see how often questions are going unanswered.

We want to find a better tool so we can better help the community.  We’ve brainstormed a list of requirements here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J0P2hNXH7hdyxbqi8OCndNrUoxrOXDAbvIGalG6v7qU/

Here’s where you come in: we can only see one side of the support experience.  We don’t know what, from your perspective, the biggest problems are and the most appealing solutions might be.  So please, feel free to suggest additional requirements, and to let us know which of our existing requirements are most important to you.  You can do so by adding to this thread in the edx-code mailing list.

If you’ve got tool suggestions as well, we’d be happy to hear them!  Once we’ve got our requirements list set, we’re going to evaluate the most promising options.

Looking forward to seeing your feedback!

Best,
Shauna

[Rizky Ariestiyansyah]

Based on the needs from google docs here's my suggestion

1. Answerhub - http://www.dzonesoftware.com/products/answerhub-feature-list (this software upgraded version from open source OSQA)

2. Askbot - https://askbot.com

Hope it help.

[Xavier Antoviaque]

Hi Shauna,

Thank you for doing this!

The list of requirements looks fine, I agree that it would be better - searching the Google ML archives for a given question is definitely not very good.

Given the requirements you list, I imagine you are already considering it, but my vote would go to using StackOverflow for this. It's not free software, but the data is exportable, it is really good at doing this job, and - perhaps most importantly - that's where people (and Google search results) turn to naturally. There is already an "edx" tag, with plenty of questions to answer there already: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/edx

--

Xavier

@OpenCraft

Schedule a meeting

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[Régis Behmo]

+1 for stackoverflow. SO is the go-to platform for all developers. It's a no-brainer for open source projects, just like Github.

[Peter Pinch]

Thanks for asking Shauna. 

I'd add a couple of requirements:

- not only should it be easy to search, it should also be indexed by Google. Any new, authoritative information needs to crowd out old, non-official links in Google search results. 

- all threads (and ideally, all comments) should be addressable by unique URL. This makes it a lot easier to point people to specific answers and conversations

- Peter

Peter Pinch |  Associate Director of Engineering, Office of Digital Learning

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

One Main Street  |  Cambridge MA 02142

E pdp...@mit.edu | T 617-253-6256 | C 617-652-0183

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[Justin Leong]

Hi Shauna,

This is great, I was just thinking of how Slack may not be the ideal medium for support for Open edX issues, as often times conversations can drag on before all necessary information about bugs is ascertained. Also, there is no easy way to track issues being discussed in Slack.

I would personally suggest Bugzilla https://www.bugzilla.org/, a bug/issue tracking system.

It's great for organizing bugs/issues by product or component, and can help resolve issues more quickly by encouraging users to include more information up-front in their bug reports, such as the software version that the bug is occurring in, and replication steps and expected vs actual results (to be entered by the user in the bug summary).

Other important information can be attached to a given logged issue, such as a team member assigned to the bug, status (e.g. open, closed, work-in-progress), and resolution (e.g. fixed).

One can also assign a priority and severity to a bug report.

Bugzilla has extensive searching functionality, so that users can see if their issue has already been logged or addressed. The edX team can also easily search for bugs that are currently open. Notably, searches can be saved/bookmarked within the system for easy access later.

I have not personally used much of Bugzilla's charting or data export functionality, but these features do exist: https://www.bugzilla.org/features/.

Bugzilla also plays well with email, and users/team members can choose to receive email notifications related to issues that they are involved with.

Looking forward to seeing what tool is decided on!

Thanks,

Justin

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Thanks everyone for your feedback so far.  We're going to be investigating options over the next several weeks, so feel free to keep adding input.  Peter, I've added your suggested requirements to the doc, thank you.

re: Stack Overflow, that's definitely on our list to check out. Our main hesitation with SO is that we wouldn't be in charge of question & answer deletion, and I think we're much more tolerant with regards to what kind of stuff we'd like to see stay.  SO does have community-selected moderators though, so it's possible we could get away with a different culture on the edX portion of the site.  Something to look into.

Justin - we do use an issue tracking system already, JIRA: https://openedx.atlassian.net/secure/Dashboard.jspa  It's not an ideal system for managing support requests both because it's somewhat difficult for a newcomer to navigate and because a lot of support requests are not bugs in the system or feature requests.  So we don't see it as a great fit for our needs.

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[Colin Fredericks]

I like Stack Exchange's software fairly well, but if using it means getting their community and moderation norms along with it, I'd rather use someone else.

[Kelly]

+1 for StackOverflow. Also, the idea of any sort of issue tracking / help ticket approach to this is really repellent to me. I really prefer a Community Knowledgebase sort of tool.

One question -- would this tool be intended to replace the mailing list or slack or both? I think replacing some of the mailing list traffic with something more organized makes sense. 

Replacing slack would be a bummer though, because I think slack is the most accessible to new people who don't even really know what to ask yet. It's not a burden to anyone in particular and it's not creating a permanent public record of my dumb question.

-Kelly

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[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Hi Kelly, thanks for your feedback.  As I mentioned upthread, we like StackOverflow too but are not thrilled by the idea of giving up control of content moderation & deletion.  We want our community members to be able to get help even if they have trouble articulating what they need help with, or if their question is mostly-but-not-quite a duplicate of a previous question, and we're worried that won't happen on StackOverflow.  Right now we're leaning towards StackOverflow-like options that allow us the content moderation we want, but we're still evaluating.

The tool would mainly replace the mailing list, but it's also meant to ease the burden on Slack as well.  Slack is definitely a great place to get help in real time, but it also relies on being lucky enough that someone who can answer your question sees it and has the time/energy to answer it.  We're hoping that people will still use Slack to talk through problems, get help, etc but that the new tool becomes the place to get help if informal options like asking on Slack fail.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/CAGZf71BXMeS-zBm9stjehx1QkVxRjcCuZWhT5s-X70ZJCZo_rg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Xavier Antoviaque]

That makes sense for the moderation rules, it's true that StackOverflow isn't the most welcoming in that regard. What other tools have you been evaluating so far?

One option here could be to create a dedicated StackExchange site, via http://area51.stackexchange.com/ - I don't know the exact requirements and constraints they have in terms of activity and moderation, but that would likely give more freedom to define our own if it was reasonable to match them, while preserving most of the advantages.

Btw, when you say that the tool would replace the mailing list, you only refer to the technical questions, the mailing-lists wouldn't disappear altogether, right? They would still be useful and important for other discussions imho - like the current one for example : )

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Xavier

@OpenCraft

Schedule a meeting

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[Joel Barciauskas]

We're definitely not considering getting rid of either the mailing lists or Slack, just shifting things that are more "support"/"question"-oriented to a better tool that let's us figure out if people are actually getting the help they need. Slack is still going to be the place for high-bandwidth discussions and the mailing list will still be useful for more detailed, prolonged conversations.

Regarding StackExchange, the risk of having the rug pulled out from under us is very high, and we wouldn't have a way of getting our data out, necessarily.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/1470722184.2494480.689920209.3F7BFDB7%40webmail.messagingengine.com.

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Joel Barciauskas
edX | Engineering Manager, Open edX
141 Portland Street, 8th floor
Cambridge, MA 02139
jo...@edx.org

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Yes, sorry to be unclear about that!  Slack and the mailing lists will definitely remain active.

The list of tools we're currently checking out includes: AnswerHub, Confluence Questions, Zendesk Community, Lithium Community, Jive Community, and Stack Overflow.  So far all but AnswerHub are missing at least one of our high priority requirements, but we haven't finished evaluating.

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[Adolfo Brandes]

First off, thanks Shauna and edX for this initiative.  Second, the list of requirements for a support tool looks pretty good, and like many of the above, I also give a +1 to Stack Overflow.  Haven't used AnswerHub, but if it meets all requirements on the list, it should also be good for the community. :)

Cheers!

Adolfo

[Xavier Antoviaque]

Understood for StackExchange - I agree this is a concern. More generally, using proprietary software is proprietary definitely makes this more of a risk, generally speaking, as this always empowers an entity to pull the plug at any time.

I have asked around for recommendations, and there is one that came up that could be worth adding to the list: AskBot. It is for example used by the OpenStack project: https://ask.openstack.org/en/questions/ and Fedora https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/questions/

Btw, don't hesitate if you need any help on this - and thanks again for taking care of it.

--

Xavier

@OpenCraft

Schedule a meeting

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[Azizur Rahman]

My vote goes for Stack Overflow. Becuase it has most of what you are asking for. Also from a developer point of view SO is the go-to-place for technical issues.

SO has a good governance process in regards to how people become moderators. API docs (https://api.stackexchange.com/docs) seems comprehensive, even if you do not create a new site via Area51 proposal we can get started with tagging question with tags (say 'open-edx') and questions can be spread over multiple other sites using the same tags. 

I have also seen https://www.discourse.org/ used for community support. Probably does not have everything but it's one shiny forum.

Just my two cents.

---

Azizur

[Nate Aune]

I've also heard good things about Discourse and it's open source (written in Ruby).

It's used as a community discussion forum for popular open source projects like:

Docker (https://forums.docker.com/)
Meteor (https://forums.meteor.com/)

OpenMRS (https://talk.openmrs.org/)

Ubuntu (http://discourse.ubuntu.com/)

And tech companies:

New Relic (https://discuss.newrelic.com/)

Twitter (https://twittercommunity.com/)

There's even a plugin for Slack to post new discussion topics in Discourse to Slack channels:

https://github.com/bernd/discourse-slack-plugin

[Xavier Antoviaque]

I agree that I've heard great things about discourse too. That one might even allow to also replace the MLs althogether, as it's more user-friendly than mailing-lists, but still allow any type of conversation. I'm not sure how well it fits the Q&A tool use-case though, there could still be a case for keeping it separate (Stack Overflow was built on the principle that the discussion should be secondary to the question and its answer, and that is part of what makes it so useful).

--

Xavier

@OpenCraft

Schedule a meeting

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[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

I've set up & moderated a Discourse instance for an open source project before and I had a very good experience with it.  However Xavier's right that it's not a great fit for our use case.  Discourse lets you pin topics in threads but it doesn't led you pin answers in topics, which prevents us from highlighting the best/most correct/most upvoted among multiple answers.  It also doesn't distinguish between "answers" and "accepted answers", which makes it difficult for people to search for unanswered questions to help people with (and makes it difficult for the EdX team to set a goal of "answer x% of questions y days after asked").  Those are just two missing features off the top of my head.  I agree though that it's a great tool, and I hope to see more projects using it.

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