Collab: I'd love to use it but


#1

I built a tool for HBP; it has its own collab but is also listed under tools when you visit the neuroinformatics collab.
Someone was using my tool and wanted to leave feedback. The big win was that he found, immediately to the right of the tool, a place where he could type text in a balloon and send it off. This saved him a search for my contact details, and also makes his feedback public. So far so good.
But now the but…
I wasn’t notified of the feedback, so I stumbled upon it a week later.
The feedback was placed next to my tool, but since it was invoked from within the neuroinformatics platform, the feedback was not placed in my tools collab but in the neuroinformatics platform collab, so even if email notification had been setup, a lot of people would be notified and it would not be clear to them (or even me) that the feedback pertains to my tool. So in replying to the feedback, I decided to use email rather than the collab, although I’d rather use the new collab functionalities. Are improvements under way that will make this workflow smooth?


#2

As a “heavy” collaboratory user I’ve noticed the same problem and I thought it could be fixed with something like this:

If you were a member of a collab which had one or more notifications per X time period, you would receive a digest email with the notifications (and any links included in the notification).

Is this roughly what you’re looking for?


#3

Rambrandt, Thank for the feedback, it is appreciated.

Jeff, your proposal will solve the first part of the problem. The second half is that the user who writes the feedback is not part of the collab and so he will never receive the notification.

There will be improvement on the chat part, because we know it is not working at this point. We are thinking about the various way we can make it works better (notification, contextualisation, thread VS flat,…). We are not working on it right now because of the next release but it is part of the things that make me sleep less :smiley:


#4

There’s potentially an simpler way to solve this.

We could add the concept of watchers for public collabs. If you comment in the chat you’re automatically a watcher. Then the return path would be closed. We would have to add a UI to remove watchers, but it would be a pretty clean and simple way to go, I think.

We can discuss in the next rev of chat, after March 30th.