New category system

[unteem]

Hey @cameralibre @Lars2i @TechnicalNature

About the new organization on the forum, I’m not sure I agree. I don’t see anymore what is the Challenge category for. What kind of topics will be in it if we don’t put any challenges in it anymore but use tags for it?

Why some challenges will be in inspiration/resource category and others in a city? I think it is not really relevant and not flexible at all to categorize challenges according to the cities.
And what is the inspiration/resource category for if we also put challenges in it?

1. A challenge can happen in different cities
   For instance, the micro methanization challenge is set by people in Lyon. But we will work on it in Paris (or Loos en Gohelle). I also now some people in London that might be interested to work on it. So where do I put it?
   Maybe each city working on that challenge will have a different topic according to the advancement of their project and the way they are doing it, maybe not. In the first case, the new system works, on the second one we make it very difficult to follow, how can they collaborate between cities?

2. A challenge does not have border and can be solved by a team of people that are not working in the same city
   For instance, the Jerry DIT challenge is about creating a web platform. For this kind of challenge people don’t have to seat next to each other to work on it. Maybe 2 people in Berlin, 3 in Paris, 1 in London will be working on it.
   And Jerry is an international project which is not in a city more than another. It will be like saying the OSCEdays are based in Berlin.

3. Having a cities and organization category makes it confusing. From what I understood in the category cities we also speak about organization and everything linked to the event. On top of that you also have the challenges. Which means pretty much everything happen in this category. I’m scared it is going to be very messy at one point, probably not now but in the long run…

All those arguments can be resumed by one: A challenge does not have border. As a good friend of us would say, I don’t believe in borders

I guess it raises again the question of what are the OSCEdays and the forum in the long run… An event (that happens once/twice… a year) with a platform as a support or a challenge solving community.

Now if i have to go against my arguments. Maybe the fact that we can link topics together, solves the intercities collaboration part that I think we are making difficult with this new system. I need to think more about it and my brain need to go to sleep now.

I think I get why you are doing it this way, but I think the way we can solve it is to hack the tags plugin, and have different “categories of tag” or organize the tags in a way that it is easily readible: tags for dates, tags for type of challenges, tags for cities…

[cameralibre]

First, I think we should have raised an issue with the category system here on the forum first before just changing it. Sorry about that, it wasn’t the right way to go about it.

I actually agree with your points 1 & 2, that challenges don’t have borders and they should be able to be worked on from different cities. What we were trying to achieve (I don’t think we did achieve it, a better solution is probably required) was that people would be drawn to activities happening in their city, rather than seeing the list of challenges and not feeling any connection to them / not knowing where to start.

The other issue that we have to resolve is the development of challenges. We may be able to find the perfect place for fully-formed challenges, but as a vague idea develops into a challenge, where should it be in the forum at each stage?

On your 3rd point, that Organization and Cities cover the same ground, I strongly disagree.
Lars and I also talked about this - I feel that, as somebody particularly interested in documentation, I want to be involved in the international process of discussing and developing documentation processes and templates. I want to collect documentation resources and make them available for all cities, not just my own.
There are also many people who aren’t interested or able to join a local event, but whose input to a particular organization topic would be invaluable.
I feel that without the international organization categories, important information which is relevant to many different people and locations will either be missed, due to poor tagging, fragmented conversations or use of local languages, or conversations will double up and repeat themselves over and over in different locations, for the same reasons.

Of course organization issues will happen in local groups, but the idea should be that when a discussion produces information useful or relevant to OSCEdays as a whole, the conversation can be linked or the info can be used to start an international topic in the relevant global organization category.

Why, why did I decide to start writing this on mobile?

[unteem]

So how do we process for the categories? Personnaly I prefer how it was before and still don’t understand what will be in the challenges cateogry if we keep it this way.

For the 3rd point I do agree with you. For me in the organization category there are sub-categories for all the cities + a subcategory for the global organization where you could find all the information on documentation as you said. But maybe it will be too much as there are more and more cities joining. Keeping a category for cities and a category for organization is fine with me.

Just the challenge part that I’m still not conviced by this new system…

@Lars2i @cameralibre any thoughts?

[Lars2i]

I like the system as it is now. It is not perfect but the best we can get right now I think.

What is the Challenge Category now ?
To meta-discuss challenges. How to post them? What kinds of challenges do exist /doc jams/ discussions – the meta-information you mentioned. How to moderate a challenge. How can people collaborate on them. Etc.

Why the Challenge Category still on top ?
(1) to have the guide “How to post a challenge” + other challenge tutorials prominently on top
(2) to have clear signal: this forum is about challenges

Why to post a challenge in all categories except the challenge category?
When I tested the forum, and I clicked on the challenge category – I was immediately lost, completely! All this lines of text, without context. Why should I read them, why should I care? I need a bit of meta-information to pull me in. The city is the perfect meta-information. “Ah, what are they doing in Shenzhen”… This would made me curious and help me to play and see how everything is connected in the world.
And often you care for stuff, that is close to you. Because you can do more with it.

In my test-run I had also this problem: Where to post my challenge/thing? Organizing a local event could be like a challenge or some parts of it. An idea or question could turn into a challenge. I never knew, where to post this. Now I know. I post it in the right category – my city, global documentation or whatever and add the challenge tag. I invite people to help me.

Yes, we saw the problem too – a challenge is about to be worked on in several cities across the globe. Isn’t this the main point of the OSCEdays? So why put it in a city? Exactly to make the global collaboration possible. What!? …What I like about the OSCEdays is the challenges. This means a real person raises a real question and is willing to work on it – there is already someone there. This someone is the initial and most important resource for that challenge. And a person has a location. And this location is almost the most important thing about this person. The best starting point – for international collaboration! I don’t recall if it was Hitchcock or Orson Welles who said something like: “You can’t let the story of a movie happen in an abstract time and place – it has to fail/suck.” Context is key.

Yes, yes. But what happens, if a challenge is started between different cities. Then I guess, let the people find a hack. For example they could post the challenge in “Other” or we could have a category “Global Collaboration” or they could use “Resources” or they could post it in “Brussels” and do all the work there and have just a topic in “Kuala Lumpur” too that links to the “Brussels” topic. - It’s a hack, it is not perfect. But all in all the best we can get at this point. Their decision what hack they will use, might be the first important meta-information you will get about this challenge.

btw. in the old system we had City-Categories and City-Tags. That was ultra-confusing. We don’t need this anymore.

[unteem]

Still not totally conviced but in both cases its not ideal so… Your way makes sense and seems to be better in some way as it is and until we find a better way so I’m ok with it. Hopefully someone will find a hack to improve it.
We need to explain better what is the challenge category for. Copy paste what you just wrote, its quite clear the way you explained it.

[Lars2i]

jeap, i thought through several other options again earlier, but te one we have, seems to be the best. Although it is not perfect. Lets hope for the hackers.

good idea. i changed the description of the challenge category as you suggested.