Status:

REVISED 2 SEPT 08 INCORPORATING COMMENTS  MADE BEFORE THIS DATE. PREVIOUS VERSION ALSO AVAILABLE.

This is a draft document, that builds on many people’s ideas over many years, and the details are open to discussion and change.

Still to come is a development plan, including priorities. Some of the features will be needed in a first release while others will come in later stages.

Purpose:

We want to create a discussion system for use by community groups, integrated within a community portal providing a range of other facilities, that will:

• be much clearer and easier to use for group discussions than conventional email-based mailing lists and many other online forums
• provide a set of features designed to help groups to come to agreement, to facilitate collaboration.

There is a strong social dimension in this, with skilled moderators needed for it to work most effectively. The software structure and facilities will encourage effective use, but there will also need to be a well constructed set of help files, and pop-up hints created for users and especially for moderators.
 
This proposal builds on best practice in existing online forums, and its innovative features could make it and the portal containing it a very useful app.

• Discussions available wherever needed: in a public forums folder, in group folders, in individual folders
• Simple linear chronological display, but with ways to display comments on given messages and ‘summary’ messages.
• Clear indication of new messages (since last logged in)
• Special message type for ‘sensitive’ issues, and polls for checking agreement.
• Facilities to support moderators to keep discussions effective.
• Flexible email notification of new messages.

I am assuming the context for this specification is a Plone 3 CMS but it is intended to be much more generally applicable. I am assuming that this system will be added to a CMS that has a 'Public Forums' area, group areas and individual users' areas.

Overall structure:

The discussion system should consist of ‘conversations’ that in turn are made up of ‘threads’ that in turn are made up of ‘messages’.

Conversations:

1. A conversation can be created by any registered user in a context: We assume that there is a general ‘Public Forums’ folder available to all users, logged in or not, that there are 'group folders' accessible to defined groups of users, or individual users' personal folders.
   1a. To consider: Whether a conversation or a thread can be created in other contexts as well, such as embedded within other forms of content. By default in Plone, there is a comment system for all content. This could replace that or now.
   
2. A conversation has a list of members. By default, the members of a conversation created in the Public Forums folder are all users registered on the system. The default members of a conversation created in a group folder are all the members of that group. The only default member in a conversation created in a users' personal folder is the creator. Other members need to be added.
   
3. Members of a conversation have rights to create new threads, write messages to existing threads, and delete messages they have previously written. They may edit messages they have created for a defined period of time, say 1 hour, after being created.
   
4. The creator of a conversation is its owner. The owner has additional permissions to delete the conversation, to remove threads and messages in threads, close threads and remove members.
5. The owner of a conversation also can create and remove additional owners, and can create and remove ‘moderators’, who are members with additional permissions to remove threads and messages in threads, close threads and remove members. (So there are three classes of member: owner, moderator, member.)
6. A conversation is normally visible to anyone who can access it, whether or not logged in, but non-logged in users cannot write to it.
7. When a conversation is created, the owner can adjust the usage and membership:  it can be made private, so it can only be viewed by users who are members of the group containing it (all logged-in users if in the public forums folder). If it is created in a group folder, it can be made open to other groups. If it is created in the owners personal folder, the owner can specify groups or individuals to whom it is open.
8. Upon creation, a conversation should be given a short description.
9. Display of a conversation: A conversation should be displayed on a portal-like front page of the place where it is created:  the public forum folder, a group folder, or a users personal profile page. Each conversation displayed should first show the owners’ avatar, its description and creation date. It should then show a sequence of small avatars of the members who have created messages in it, in order of most recent contribution, up to a maximum limit of members. It should then show a line for each thread giving a descriptive summary of that thread (see threads). The order of display of threads should be by the date of the most recently added new message in that thread.
10. Additional display of conversations: So that a user doesn't need to check for new activity in conversations sprinkled all over the site, there could be a personalised summary on the front page of the site, where a user gets a list of the conversations of which they are members that have messages added since their last log in.
    
11. There should be a specified maximum number of threads displayed. If there are more threads than the maximum, a 'more threads' button should appear at the end of the list of threads.
    
12. Before the list of threads there should be an ‘add new thread’ button, which should appear greyed out to users without suitable permissions (i.e. not logged in, or not in group). At the end of the list there should be an additional button for 'show archived threads', if there are any archived threads. (See threads.)
    
13.  Upon creation of a conversation a thread should be automatically created called ‘moderation’ which is visible and writable only to members who are moderators or owners. Thus there is a built-in expectation that there will be some people whose role it is to look after the discussion.

Threads:

1. A thread has a creator, a creation date, a subject and an initial message. (Individual messages that make it up do not have their own subject.)
2. The creator of a thread has no special privileges in it. Only moderators and owners have additional privileges.
3. A thread can be displayed as a descriptive summary (in the display of a conversation) or in full.
4. The descriptive summary display of a thread should include its subject and creation date, the number of messages, the avatar and date of the most recent message.
5. For logged in members of a conversation, the summary display of each thread should be preceded by the number of messages that were created since their last login, to give an indication of how much new content has been added.
6. The full display of a thread should consist of a linear, chronological sequence of the messages in it, starting with the initial message, so it can be read in sequence. For logged in members, there should be a suitable symbol in front of each message added since they last logged in so they can easily scroll to what is new.
7. At the beginning of the full display there should be buttons for ‘new message’ and ‘delete thread’. The 'new message' button should only be active for members with write-permission in the thread. The 'delete thread' button should only be visible to owners and moderators. (For other controls, see below.)
8. A moderator or owner of a conversation can 'close' a thread, meaning that no new messages can be added. A thread that is closed is considered to be 'archived' and is no longer displayed in the list of threads.
   

Messages:

1. Messages have creators, creation dates, and a body.
2. When a message is created or edited the usual Plone Kupu editor (or equivalent WYSISYG editor for other CMSs) should appear with its normal facilities.
3. The editor should have additional buttons incorporated for three types of special message: ‘summary’, ‘poll’, ‘sensitive’, intended to promote convergent conversations, where people are encouraged to come to agreement.
4. A ‘summary’ message, is an ordinary message, indicated in some fashion such as a different coloured border. It’s use (purely social, no attempt to enforce it through software controls) is to summarise recent messages, (which is good practice in any discussion, online or face-to-face). Thus users wishing to get an overall sense of the thread can scroll through, looking for the summaries. At the head of a thread should be a ‘show summaries’ button, changing to ‘show all’ when pressed. When pressed, all messages that aren’t summaries should be greyed out to make summaries stand out clearly.
5. A ‘sensitive’ message is meant to be used in situations where there is an actual or potential conflict between users. It is an ordinary editable message with three fields defined headed, respectively: ‘Your view as I understand it’, ‘Where I agree’, ‘Where I disagree’.
6. Polls: Simple polls, should be an optional message type. The purpose of this is to provide a low overhead means of checking group agreement, whether or serious matters of principal or minor matters such as the date or time of a meeting. The proposed functionality for this is that in Doodle or some reasonable equivalent. An initial option might be to create a link to Doodle.
   
7. New messages in a thread can be created simply as an addition to the thread, or as a comment on an earlier message in the thread. Each message should have a ‘comment on this’ button (greyed out if the user doesn’t have suitable permissions.) Messages that are comments are still displayed in linear, chronological sequence.
8. Each message should have a ‘display comments’ button, greyed if there are no comments. Pressing it should grey out all subsequent messages that are not comments on that message, making them stand out. (It should change to ‘display all’ when activated.)
9. Quoting text: If a user selects text either in the initial message of a thread, or any other message, the new message created will include that selected text, indicated stylistically as a quotation.
10. Each message should have a ‘report to moderators’ button (visible only to users with write permissions). When pressed, an editor should appear with a field headed ‘reason for reporting this message’. When sent, the message will appear in the moderators thread.

Email notification

Email is still the dominant application for most people, many of whom don’t check it that often, and would not be likely to check a website to find out if there are new messages in a conversation. Thus, we need to offer an option of email notification of new messages in an online discussion.

1. There should be a control at the start of each conversation and each thread saying ‘email on off’ with the ‘on’ and ‘off’ buttons highlighted as appropriate.
2. Switching email on at the level of a conversation switches it on for all threads in that conversation and for all new threads created. Switching email off on a thread overrides this. If email is off for a conversation, it can be switched on or off for each thread separately.
3. If email is on for a thread, then when a new message is created, a mail message is sent to that user. The creator of the message in the thread should be given as the sender of the email message, the subject should be the subject of the thread. The body of the email message should have a statement like “You have requested email notification of this message. You can see it in context, reply to it, or switch off email notification at: [URL].” The body of the message should then follow.