Moreover, I think asking people who normally idle/assist users in IRC to also idle/assist users in another real-time messaging format might be a tough nut to crack.

As for the comments and such . . . It sounds interesting. I agree with others’ concerns about how to handle comment spam and internationalization issues. As a point of reference for help feedback, it might be worth looking at some sample Gmail help topics: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6593 You’re being all visionary and cool, though, while I’m just saying, “Let’s see what other folks do.”

Now, with that said though, and I don’t know how GNOME is, but I know in KDE it gets annoying when distros patch and it is their fault. There are quite a few bugs like this in KDE Bugzilla, and I am willing to bet the same goes for GNOME. See, this would be a tricky part, because a part of me says yeah, have Ubuntu patch to point to #ubuntu and the other half is no, don’t patch, keep them going to #gnome or whatever.

Figuring this whole thing out will be a blast though How about working with the OpenDesktop social API that they put out and have been having the competitions for? That might be something to keep in the back of your mind too during the planning phase.

The social side is much harder. Rodney, thanks for your input on IRC. A lot of thought would have to go into how we ensure there are regular (and knowledgeable) helpers, and that users actually get responses to their questions.

And I don’t develop Gnome-only solutions. The way I was envisioning it, help pages would need to declare a help channel. So if, for instance, the Gnumeric community wanted to provide live help, they could set up their own channel and point their help pages to that. Or if there were language-specific channels, the translated help pages would point to them.

That said, I think it would be a real shame if Ubuntu patched all our documents to point their users to their own channels. That’s very divisive, and having major distros do that would kill any upstream help-community efforts.

I’m guessing that your thoughts were leaning pretty much in the same direction of implementation (though hopefully you wouldn’t be hacking up xchat, but instead using telepathy). It really didn’t work out all that well in XD2. There were a few people who hang out helped people, but there wasn’t really any incentive to do it. Maybe if GNOME had some paid support staff, and if there was a way for downstreams to integrate it into their systems, and their support staff could use it (so users of Ubuntu would get help from Ubuntu people, etc…).

Maciej, very good question. I was thinking the same thing myself before bed last night. For comments, I don’t think it’s feasible for us to translate all users’ comments. I tend to think of comments as stopgaps. That is, if a comment is worthwhile, it’s worth incorporating that information into future versions of the help. At the least, it’s no worse from a localization perspective than the multitude of support forums one finds on the Internet.

For the chat itself, we could have separate channels for different languages. This only works if a language has enough users to keep a channel alive. The big problem I foresee is that it will be hard for the docs team to incorporate non-English comments back into the main help.

Henri, that looks interesting. I’ll give it a read. Is anybody using Open Collaboration Services right now?

Alex, well yes, yes they did. But AFAIR, it was really just a stripped down IRC client that went to a pre-defined channel. And that’s not bad on its own. It can mean users who otherwise have no idea what IRC is can still find your IRC support channels. But I’m trying to think just a bit bigger. I’d be interested to hear about people’s experiences with Ximians chat thing though.

I filled a related bug for devhelp some time ago: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580246

Also, there are some related work here:

http://live.gnome.org/LiveDocumentationEditing

and here

http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/StatusTracking

Regards

MSDN Live?