Features/Social Help

Summary

Social Help adds away for users to post questions on an open fourm for developers or other users to answer.

Owner

• Name: Prasoon Shukla
• Email: <prasoon92.iitr AT gmail DOT com>

Current status

• Targeted release: 0.104
• Last updated: 3/Sep
• Percentage of completion: 75%

Detailed Description

To create an easily accessible, highly usable platform that sugar users can use to discuss, debate and share ideas about everything related to sugar. It is a discourse forum , activity and item in the current activity palette.

Benefit to Sugar

Walter says: People are social and learning is social. Having a forum for sharing ideas and help is invaluable -- especially in light of the decentralized nature of the Sugar community. While the developer community is comfortable with IRC, we have not been successful in getting our user community to use it: they are seeming more comfortable with web tools (e.g. there is a large community of teachers using Facebook to discuss Sugar.) It would of course be better to have a FOSS solution. But also one that didn't require a lot of maintenance and support by the Sugar developer community. Hence, a connection to an existing FOSS platform would be attractive.

Prasoon says: If this project is successfully completed, the users will have instant access to a discussion platform on which they can ask any question related to sugar. Over time, this information will develop itself into a repository of information where most common questions related to the platform would be present. This repository of information will be hugely beneficial for the sugar community.

Sai Vineet says: There is currently no way to get instant help from real people from inside Sugar, except the IRC activity, which sadly is too complicate and distributed(hard to find stuff which one needs, no logs, there are security problems). We really need a way to get children help quickly, and this is what this project will give us. It will, with time, also become a full help repository, and also a way for children to talk and discuss things in a more social manner than it is now. Thus the Social Help project is invaluable to Sugar and it's vision, that learning is a social process.

Scope

It is just an activity and a menu item... not tooo big. Look at the pr: https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/pull/391

We will also need hosting from SL, but Bernie has okayed it... SAMdroid (talk) I will get it up and running once Bernie gives me an account.

UI Design

Adds a thing in the activity palette, but that isn't too big. There will need to be a logo for the social help fourm and activity.

How To Test

1. Download the pr 2. Start an activity 3. Start social help for that activity

User Experience

They will be able to access easy help from the developers and community.

Dependencies

It depends on the social help activity (another browse clone): https://github.com/prasoon2211/sugar-social-help

Contingency Plan

SAMdroid (talk) Why does this even exsist in the template?

• Use IRC
• Ask people IRL
• Just host a fourm and tell everyone the link

Release Notes

The Sugar Release Notes inform end-users about what is new in the release. An Example is 0.84/Notes. The release notes also help users know how to deal with platform changes such as ABIs/APIs, configuration or data file formats, or upgrade concerns. If there are any such changes involved in this feature, indicate them here. You can also link to upstream documentation if it satisfies this need. This information forms the basis of the release notes edited by the release team and shipped with the release.

Comments and Discussion

• See the github pr: https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/pull/391
• See the discussion tab for this feature.