notes from the Community Discussion at the 2017 Dataverse Community Meeting

[Philip Durbin]

During the Community Discussion at the 2017 Dataverse Community Meeting we asked[1], "What's working, what’s not working, how can we continue to grow and get better?"

The feedback from everyone in the room was most appreciated, and I took a few notes that I thought I'd share:

* Courtney: You said there are multiple ways to engage with the project. We host for many institutions. What is the best way to deliver feedback?
   * Maybe a Google Doc. The key thing is getting the feedback. Other members in the community would probably like to see it.
* James D: What can you tell us about accessibility and Dataverse?
   * Some initial checks have been run but this has not been prioritized yet. We'd love to partner with those who can help with this effort.
   * Rspace had an accessibility audit and offered to share how that was done and what outside resource they used.
* Sebastian: We're excited about customization. Will the AirTable UX observations database be made public?
   * Maybe in the future. We need to to make sure we don’t give access to research data we’re not allowed to share.
* IFPRI: We host with Harvard Dataverse and would like to know if there can be more customization at the sub-dataverse level.
   * You could use a widget but it may not be user-friendly enough because the screen is cut off.
* Pete M: Is anyone else interested in UX of the APIs?
   * No one in the room expressed interest in this.
* Kevin W.: We're interested in well coordinated design changes.
   * Let's talk early and often. We can add you to a "read only" team in GitHub issues.
* Courtney: What's good feedback? Operating system? Browser version?
   * What is the user's goal? What is the context of the problem? It really depends on if it's a feature request or a bug. For bugs, it's very useful to know what version of Dataverse you are running, maybe the browser being used, time of day, anything that can help us reproduce the bug. For bugs, feedback on UI and feature requests, being able to follow up with the person giving feedback is very helpful.
* Kevin W.: We're still interested in internationalization.
   * We'd like to support multi-lingual rather than bi-lingual.

I'm sure I missed a few things, but I checked http://tinyurl.com/dcm2017notes and was glad to see that Courtney had taken amazingly comprehensive notes. Here's just a small snippet from the same discussion:

* Community discussion - what’s working, what’s not working, how can we continue to grow and get better?
* Github is best way to feedback - search to see if it already exists and then submit
   * Context of user and goal
   * Needs to reproducible
   * IQSS willing to talk to user
   * Time of day/date
   * Steps taken to get to the error
* Accessibility requirements are not currently being met - most have github issues and could be addressed and prioritized based on community
* Stop-gap for customization of dataverses beyond top level is using the widget to embed into the researcher’s or institution’s own website
* Team would like updates on customizations that each adoptee is using
* ? about using the API as front-end
* Contributions
   * Github - outside devs can ask to take tickets

Sorry if that was a little repetitive, but I think it helps round out what people were talking about. Please keep the feedback coming!

Thanks,

Phil

1. Slide 18 of from "Dataverse UX & UI, and Community Discussion" at https://osf.io/pu7yn/ via https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/dcm2017/agenda


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Philip Durbin
Software Developer for http://dataverse.org
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/people/philip-durbin