Drop Social column from obofoundry.org home page tabular display

[ddooley]

This information remains on an ontology's detail page. It was noted that the "Stars" (the number of people who have pressed star on an ontology's github page) aren't helpful in terms of deciding if an ontology is pertinent for some reuse. Also most new ontologies don't start out with many stars.

If anyone has a counterargument for keeping them, provide it here!

[matentzn]

My guess is there will be a bimodal distribution for addressing this issue:

Ontologies with many users on GitHub and many stars will like this feature, and ontologies with not many GitHub users will not like this feature. I am afraid it will have to be turned into a vote.

Here is my opinion:

The column is called "social", and the metric is intended to measure transparent open social engagement, not re-use or quality (if the column was called "re-use" I would back an effort to rename it). Rather than dropping the column, I would prefer if we find other meaningful transparent metrics that measure transparent, open, social engagement that we can add there (e.g. number of issues closed, number of likes on some all-pervading social platform - not proposing any just giving examples).

[nataled]

So far as I can recall, these badges were added without vote and thus should never have appeared in the first place. In fact, after searching through the meeting minutes from the past few years, there didn't even seem to be a discussion substantive enough to capture (though I do remember something about allowing these to be optional). Also, despite the column name, I'm willing to bet there aren't many people that equate stars (in the context of rating systems) with anything other than quality.

[matentzn]

I would back a motion to make it optional if it prevents it from being removed. I would also not push back against a public vote for removing it. But I don't feel like removing the whole column without a vote is the right move now that it's been public for so long.. even if we didn't have a formal vote (I think we should have had, agreed Darren) we 100% had a lengthy discussion on the OFOC call, and the related PRs also had to be reviewed, approved and merged.

[nataled]

Agree that we can't just toss it aside at this point. Sorry if it seemed that I was advocating removing them without vote. I was stating why a vote should be taken. Another possibility to explore would be changing the badge from stars to something more representative of what it is, like a thumbs up (most accurate) or silhouette of a person or people.

[matentzn]

This is unfortunately a little widget that is automatically pulled from GitHub, and since the stars are called stars on GitHub, that is what it will show (this is not part of the website where we could somehow modify this, is what I mean).

You would not be happy with a simple opt-out flag? If not, feel free to call a vote!

[nataled]

I view the potential opt-out flag as a separate issue from the vote. So long as the badge is shown, the ability to opt-out should be there. I still think a vote should be taken, because that's the process we normally use for major website changes.

[nlharris]

Should we discuss this at the next OBO Ops meeting?

[matentzn]

Action items:

1. For @nataled request "I view the potential opt-out flag as a separate issue from the vote. So long as the badge is shown, the ability to opt-out should be there. I still think a vote should be taken, because that's the process we normally use for major website changes." create a new issue describing the rationale for the request. I cant see any reason for resistance against this - its a good idea. This is a technical issue that can easily be fixed.
2. If more is wanted ("drop the column") then you have to call a vote in this ticket here.

We have raised the issue a few times during the OFOC call; just the two above need to be done.