Discussion Contributions

Registration

Registration

For that a member can contribute to a discussion (going on in a discussion group), he has to register for that discussion group. After that, he can navigate in the tree of questions and follow up questions to the node he wants to contribute. He now sees the commands to create a follow up question or a completion enabled.

Contribution 1
Contribution 2

 

Creation

A participant's contribution can either be a follow up question or a completion.

A follow up question breaks up a starting question into several questions, thus breaking up the original complexity into manageable parts. A follow up question consists of the question itself and the substantiation for the question. The qualitiy of the discussion is heavily based on the qualitiy of the questions formulated. There's no place for rhetoric questions! The substatiation should demonstrate why answering the follow up question adds insight to the original question and, thus, enables the discussion group to better answer the original question.

A completion either answers a question or adds substantial information helping other participants to answer the question. Therefore, a completion provides only one text area field. However, participants can add any number of completions to a question.

workflow: private
workflow: waiting for review
workflow: under revision
workflow: published

Publication

A contribution author can edit his contribution as long as he wants. The contribution is saved under 'Pending contributions' on the system, however, it remains visible for the author only (see Question Lifecycle for more information).

If the author wants make his contribution public, he has to request a review. To do so, he can start the publication workflow by clicking the 'Request review' button on 'Pending contributions'. The system, then, selects randomly another participant of the discussion group as reviewer and sends an inivitation for review to this participant.

After the assigned reviewer accepted the review task, the contribution is put in the 'under revision' state. The contribution remains editable for the author only but is visible for the reviewer too. To reviewer sees the contribution in his 'Process requests' area. The author can improve his contribution based on the reviewer's input and feedback until both the author and the reviewer agree to publish the contribution. At this point, the reviewer can click the 'Publish' button in his 'Process requests' area. This will put the contribution in the 'open' state and make it visible for the whole discussion group.