Template for new open problems

[abranczyk]

We should have an issue template for people to use when they are adding new open problems. The template should have different parts that give instructions for how to move through the problem refining process.

The template should live in the projects-overview-workflow repo and reflect the columns on this project board.

[Christophe-pere]

First draft for research idea / open problem, give me your feedback

‼️ Research idea.md

[abranczyk]

Thanks for putting this together @Christophe-pere!

Before I comment on the content (which looks very promising), I have some questions:

1. Where do you imagine this template to live?
   • As a template for a GitHub issue in the projects-overview-workflow repo?
   • As a file inside a larger template repo for a new research project?
   • As a file inside a repo dedicated to research project proposals?
   • Somewhere else?
2. How do I interpret the formatting inside the file? (i.e. the header, the "==" signs throughout the file etc). Is this intended to be part of the template? Or is this how you format your personal files...but it won't be reflected in the final template?

[Christophe-pere]

Excellent questions: i. I think, in a repo where we can store the templates. After that, the person or team can use it through their work to structure the project. It can be submitted to the core team / or to the community. I think it's important to add it inside the repo of the project because it will explain the project to everyone. ii. It's the way I write commentaries in my markdowns, I use == to explain what needs to be in and then delete these lines when I'm working on the section. We can find another way. =- is a bullet list for commentaries.

[abranczyk]

Ok, cool. Just to clarify some more.

In GitHub, there is this idea of a template repository. It's not a repository that contains templates, but rather, the repository itself is the template.

What I had in mind is that we prepare a template repository that contains the skeleton for everything you would need to make a research project (templates for literature review, paper writing, etc). Then, when someone starts a research project, they would create a new repository for their project from the template repository. It's what I meant in issue #10.

I think the file you are proposing would be great inside this kind of template repository. I see it as the first stage of really starting the research project, since now things are getting serious and it will be quite some work for someone to fill this out.

But I also imagine a step before this which, is more like the kind of thing a supervisor would create if they were advertising the project to a student. Something much shorter, equivalent to one paragraph of text contains enough information for someone to decide if they want to start working on the project. I imagine this smaller thing being an issue template, which is what I had in mind here.

What do you think?

[abranczyk]

Actually, I think I want to backtrack on what I said in my previous comment. I think someone should do the work of filling out all of the details in the template file you propose before they can start a repo for the project, since starting a repo is a lot of responsibility.

So I propose the following workflow, as shown in the image of the project board.

So what I was proposing as the shorter paragraph would be a "seed"....an issue in the second column.

And your template @Christophe-pere in https://github.com/DRiP-project/meta/issues/7#issuecomment-1679860290 would be an issue template for the "concrete problem statement""....an issue in the third column.

If a project gets approved to start a repo, then this "concrete problem statement" would also be copied into this repo as it is an important part of the project.

What do you think?