Feature Request: Better Community Involvement

Scriptcase 8 Discussion
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#1

Hi Guys,

I’m a fairly active user on Microsoft’s Technet (especially where scripting or PowerShell are concerned) and since I recently had quite a bit to work with scriptcase I was thinking of how nice it would be to have a similar ability for individuals to contribute to documentation and knowledge of the entire community.
Because frankly, the official scriptcase documentation could be improved upon. <irony>A bit</irony>.
That however takes time and resources, which management obviously doesn’t wish to invest. So how about creating a self-running system where for little additional effort on NetMake’s side the community can better help itself. Here’s what I have in mind:

  • A wiki where Forum users can add documentation
  • A script repository where Forum users can share scripts and snippets they use
  • Update the forum to include two different kinds of threads: Questions and Discussions
  • Introduce a scoring system for users that works across the systems and rewards contributions in he wiki, helping users by answering questions and sharing especially useful scripts.
  • Add an achievement system and other cosmetic rewards for participating in the community
  • Consider other incentives to motivate active participation (for example a twice-a-year online round table where developers and the top community contributors meet).
  • Open the official handbook for community contribution, by introducing a simple way to propose changes (god, how many misspellings I'd have fixed by now in the English documentation if there had been an easy-to-use reporting function).
Setting this up once would be a major effort, but I believe that once it is available it would leverage a lot of untapped resources from the community. It may be too much to introduce it all at once, but a phased approach may well prove practical.

Any comments, opinions, ideas?

Cheers,
FWN

#2

No, not more idea’s. But the community here is limited to a handful of people willing to do the ‘hard-work’. I tried to setup something similar on scriptcase.eu, but I got second to none response. I will be honest, I spent rather a lot of time on this forum. If a community likethis would start I would have to split my time between helping people and setting up docs. I don’t think I would start filling wiki’s and other stuff. In fact, I think it would be a task for scriptcase themselves. But for them, this would be a big hurdle. Don’t forget that most of the technicians of Scriptcase are Portuguese only, and that is a major hurdle.

#3

Good initiative. I support it.!

#4

I have tried to get such an effort going, but it did not meet with much interest from SC or the community: See this thread:

http://www.scriptcase.net/forum/foru…-of-scriptcase

I think that if there was a place where documentation could be build up, time needed to answer simple questions in the forum could be reduced to referring to the articles, and when something new and important came up, it could be included in the documentation site, which should include category/subject trees and search.

#5

Well, I agree with you that it won’t be instantly filled with high quality articles. However, consider this: Right now there is no meaningful way for the community to aid in creating the documentation. We simply can’t do more than post in the forums or create our own site (which won’t even be found by most people). No offense to your efforts, but unless the developer raises such a platform themselves, this will be highly unlikely to work, as any non-official side will only be able to attract a fraction of the visitors.

So the current situation is this:

  • All documentation must be written by the ScriptCase Team
  • They are fairly busy and non-too fluent in English
Ergo: The English Documentation is spotty, to say the least. How can creating a wiki for us to contribute in be any worse than the current state? Ok, it's a bit of a gamble whether the benefit will make up for the setting-up effort, but I'd be surprised if it wouldn't make up for it in no time. I'd be perfectly happy to simply post a few snippets on Macros I had trouble to make work for example - wouldn't be the neatest documentation I have ever produced, but a few working examples can do wonders for someone else, faced with the same trouble. Currently, contributing [I]at all[/I] is as far as I can see not even possible beyond writing a recommendation to ScriptCase - too troublesome to bother. I could think of 4-5 articles I surely would have written by now, if that wiki had been available, and I'm none of the "handful of people wolling to do the 'hard-work'" - I rarely check the site at all, unless I'm looking for some specific piece of know-how - and most of the times I leave without having found anything. One of the great benefits of wikis is that it lowers the entry-barrier for someone to contribute, so that even casual people who usually don't step forward to help may do so.

So yes, I still believe it would be a good idea. Not the full course I listed in the original post - that’d be overkill obviously - but slowly introduce some way for the community to contribute to documentation.

Cheers,
FWN

#6

I didn’t write that it would be a bad idea. I think it’s a good idea. I wrote that the success factor would be the contributors. There I’m not (very) optimistic.

#7

im with Albert. Right now, Is not worth the time spent IMHO. This should be community driven, and could be cool if NetMake helps and host this initiative, but there are a lot of improvements that Albert, me and others offered for free, without success.

Maybe in the future, but right now, I have my doubts

#8

Giu and Auducom - this is something for you to consider and discuss with NetMake, because you guys are resellers and it is in your interest as well. My idea is very simple. If NetMake would reward people who contribute to SC documentation, Wiki etc with some reward points which can be used towards future upgrades - then this whole idea would work. Users will see the benefits and reason to make more resources. So far however I did not see much involvement from NetMake in any type of cummunity activity or projects.

Talk to NetMake please and see if this sounds appealing to them ?

ARTHUR