New Information Sources For F@H

[Bleeder]

Bleeder, proteneer basically answered that question on the Reddit AMA.

Great... so now we have 3 separate places to read to get news and info on FAH? That helps. And reading Reddit is like reading a National Enquirer style forum. I'll pass.

Mod Edit: Split From -> viewtopic.php?f=21&t=24020 - PantherX

[7im]

Bleeder, proteneer basically answered that question on the Reddit AMA.

Great... so now we have 3 separate places to read to get news and info on FAH? That helps. And reading Reddit is like reading a National Enquirer style forum. I'll pass.

I like the all access, but I have to agree with you on disliking how PG is expanding in to a new V7 WIKI, IRC, and now Reddit. The Forum, Blog, and Web site were disparate enough resources as it is.

[Jesse_V]

It's an Ask Me Anything, and it helps to have nesting of comments for that type of thing. The use of Reddit was proteneer's call, as was IRC.

I understand what you're saying. I asked a bunch of questions that I haven't been able to answer from referencable sources elsewhere. I plan on summarizing the answers in places that are more readable.

Sorry that I wasn't able to quote proteneer's answer on Reddit and reference it for you, that's sometimes difficult to do on a mobile browser.

[VijayPande]

I often hear that donors want to get more information about what's going on at Stanford. I personally feel that proteneer deserves a lot of credit, rather than criticism, for all the work he's been doing to try to improve communication about what's going on here. He's spent a lot of personal time on all of these activities, and I don't think that the blog, forum, or web site would have worked as well for disseminating the type of information that's been discussed on the other channels.

[EXT64]

I'd rather have some hard to find information than the very limited interaction we got before this.

But I agree - an organized summary afterward would be awesome

[Bleeder]

I often hear that donors want to get more information about what's going on at Stanford. I personally feel that proteneer deserves a lot of credit, rather than criticism, for all the work he's been doing to try to improve communication about what's going on here. He's spent a lot of personal time on all of these activities, and I don't think that the blog, forum, or web site would have worked as well for disseminating the type of information that's been discussed on the other channels.

Well this topic has taken a left turn. No criticism of Proteneer stated or implied from me. Just stating that having 3 unofficial outlets (and 2 of them not even advertised as a place to go) to disseminate important information is counter productive.

As far as I know the only official location for info is the main folding page and the blog run by Stanford. This forum, IRC and Reddit are not official, correct? How am I (someone that has been folding and paying attention for some time now) supposed to know where to go for info when the main page only links me to this forum?

If donors want and need more information about folding then ad hoc solutions that only a hand full of people know about is not the correct way to go about it.

Also hoping a Mod can move these off topic posts to another thread (or delete them entirely if needed).

[Jesse_V]

As far as I know the only official location for info is the main folding page and the blog run by Stanford. This forum, IRC and Reddit are not official, correct? How am I (someone that has been folding and paying attention for some time now) supposed to know where to go for info when the main page only links me to this forum?

If donors want and need more information about folding then ad hoc solutions that only a hand full of people know about is not the correct way to go about it.

I too agree that those other sources are not good places for general-purpose info. I've always held that documentation (FAQs, guides, etc) should be on the website, news comes from the blog, and this forum is for help. This keeps a pattern of focused responsibility. All those places are the official places for F@h. Everything else (including team forums, etc) are third-party and useful in certain ways in their own right.

IRC and Reddit have both been recently utilized for specific purposes, and in my opinion both platforms have excelled at it. As far as I'm aware no one suggested that either place become the official places for F@h. The /Folding subreddit has been there for a good while now, long before proteneer opened his AMA thread in it. I don't anticipate that either IRC or Reddit will be used like this long-term, but that remains to be seen. Sometimes some information will come up in either IRC or Reddit that is useful to the general folding community, and when that happens, often times various volunteers will consolidate it and place it somewhere that's more visible. This has been happening, and likely will continue to happen, so I would not be worried. If you'd like to follow the bleeding-edge developments on IRC or if you'd like to participate in Reddit, you're welcome to, but there's no NEED to, so it's your call.

[k1wi]

The other thing to note about the #fah IRC channel is that for wider F@H its an and/or option.

If you haven't gotten a WU in a long time despite the flags it can be asked here or in IRC. It was asked here, and was answered.

Personally, I think the IRC channel has been massively successful for core17, so I hope it continues to be used. Maybe sporadically depending on dev schedules, but it is a really useful too. That's not to say that it doesn't have areas where it can be improved (there has always been friction between forums and channels) but I've been thinking about improvements that can be made and welcome anyone else that's been in the channel and has suggestions about how we can streamline things.

[7im]

I often hear that donors want to get more information about what's going on at Stanford. I personally feel that proteneer deserves a lot of credit, rather than criticism, for all the work he's been doing to try to improve communication about what's going on here. He's spent a lot of personal time on all of these activities, and I don't think that the blog, forum, or web site would have worked as well for disseminating the type of information that's been discussed on the other channels.

Proteneer gets an A+ for effort, A+ for information release and accessability, not a passing grade for consistency/visibility.

As Jesse said, unless the information shared "all over the place" makes it's way back to the traditional places of info storage and dissemination for fah, it becomes a problem for everyone.

Yes, more sharing is better. But it has to be from a location that people can find, or the effort is wasted on all but a few select elite folders.

[PantherX]

Please note that there was a mention of the Reddit AMA here in the Forum -> viewtopic.php?f=16&t=24208

I specifically set it up with Proteneer's permission so that all Forum Members can view it.

[7im]

Thanks for the link.

How is any of that information brought back and put in the forum or on the fah web page!? Proteneer didn't plan for any of that before starting an IRC chat or a Reddit topic.

[Napoleon]

On my behalf,
proteneer made a whole lot of long-awaited things happen. Like the sorcerer said:

Getting the job done score: A+
Methods score: D-

... for forcing an old dog like me to resort to IRC to see what's going on. (Too) chaotic.

[Jesse_V]

I'm still with Dr. Pande in this one.

No one has forced anyone to use Reddit or IRC, it's entirely optional if you want to go over there. The more recent conversations from #fah are logged at http://sodaant.com/fah.log and the older archive is at http://sodaant.com/earlyfah.log (which is quite lengthy). One of the advantages of Reddit is that you can quickly scroll down and see at a glance all the questions that have been asked. Comments and off-topic conversations are nested, so you can ignore them if you like. This is in contrast to this forum, where sometimes have to wade through page after page of other conversations (such as this one atm) to find what you're looking for.

Looking at the bigger picture, I'm really pleased that both channels were utilized. I remember when some of the staff at Mojang held an AMA about Minecraft, and it was pretty successful. These kind of things are helpful in reaching out the community which helps boost enthusiasm and participation. To my knowledge, this marks the first time that a PG member has held an AMA, and it's a great opportunity to ask questions about things. It doesn't matter to me what channels he picked to host his internal testing or AMA. He's spending a lot of free time running both, and I'm appreciative of that. Rather than criticize and ask him to do more, perhaps we should help volunteer to help organize the information for him.

[7im]

If PG had to depend on volunteers for everything, nothing would get done. PG still has the resposibility of communicating vital info from whatever source is used back to a standard source like the fah FAQs. And there was no plan in place to do that. Still don't if there is...

[mdk777]

Well, just anecdotal;

I saw a positive post in response to it(the other forms of communication) on our team forum before I even knew it (the other forms of communication) existed.

So official outlet or not...highest marks for transparency and openness.