danbri
commented
6 years ago I set up an experimental slack a while back. I'll hold off on opening that up for now as I want to look into having a lightweight signup mechanism for contributors. Currently it's a bit tricky being split between W3C and Github in that nothing keeps participant lists in sync. People joining at W3C sign up to various things. There are some tools we can use here that can help, I'll report back in a week or two on that.
As for community we absolutely need to set the expectation that this group (W3C + Github) is not a place to support general webmaster/publisher use of Schema.org. Similarly, neither W3C nor WHATWG have ever attempted to support all users of HTML. It is natural that we get some people showing up with those needs and it would be useful to have a list of other fora where they can engage, e.g. Stackoverflow, webmaster forums of the various search engines, etc.
RichardWallis
[ ] Add a new "Help Me!" link on our Red Banner next to About, Schemas, Documentation
Pros: Solves the Contact Us problem in a better fashion. I've seen lots of sites using Simple English of "Help Me!" that doesn't get lost in translation and often is quickly absorbed and utilized, more so than "Contact Us", which is used 99% of the time to "get help" anyways. I think ideally this could be a community maintained page, and so I've started one by restructuring the Github Wiki Home page. Wiki's after all are meant to provide knowledge sharing (not neccessarily specs, like our other formal site pages) and would provide an ideal way for folks to actually GET HELP. So let's help them.
Cons/Fears: That folks will not even read specifications or other formal documentation and just click right on "Help Me!", and we then get flooded on our Mailing List, Slack channel, etc.
[ ] Setup new Slack Channel
Pros: Folks can get instant chat between one another in a helpful interactive format compared to email. Features available in Slack - Searchable messages to find stuff, Voice/Video One-on-One or up to 15, Quick File sharing, 2FA, etc. It can work from your hand, while riding a bus. APP BABY! It supports multiple channels, so that we can support multiple audience types, WebDevs, Ontos, Academics, Internal, etc. It integrates. Really. With Everything. Including Clouds. No idiot, not real clouds!
Cons/Fears: Dude, No one is ever in chat, I cannot get an instant answer!
[ ] Tutorials for Web Masters (yeah, Real Ones) - but maintained by the community itself
Pros: Its a wiki. It has been asked for 1000's of times. The community can use the Github Wiki, which actually can be checked out and modified The community maintains it and moderates it for the health of all. Actually, they already do some of that. The Tutorials would probably replace or blow away our Getting Started page (which actually does suck for Web Developers to get started), and be specialized by particular audiences such as Web Developers, Ontologists, GLAM, etc. Since it's a community wiki, there's no "official" tie-in, other than we provide a prominent link from the "Help Me!" wiki page
Cons/Fears: It becomes an SEO playground itself with folks wanting to put their external tutorial links at the top. Uh, the Github Wiki doesn't have Search ???