Summary - Meetings, brief

Owned by Joel Johnson
Last updated: Jul 22, 2020
6 min read

Brief

To enable interactions amongst a group of people aligned towards a common purpose.

Top of mind

  • Pramod wants to see a demo in sandbox by end of July.

  • Pramod wants to have a basic functioning discussions board live on flagship instance by end of 3.2, and before September 5th.

  • The licenses for the forum software we’re considering are GPL (v2, v3).

  • Bandwidth availability for completing MVP of discussions integration.

Upcoming asks

NISHTHA

The body has been asking to enable discussions within their courses, so that the learners may ask questions which can be answered by the instructors or peers. This also enables emergent conversations, thereby magnifying the value of the platform beyond a one-way communication channel. 

So far this has been proposed by the problem statement ‘Teachers want to ask questions on NISHTHA’.

For the first step, we’re only looking at discussions within a group, and not discussions across the platform.

Extended schooling

The MHRD has asked to enable means of a teacher to communicate with her students, so that the students may ask questions and make the engagement more interactive.

Having said that, this could extend such that any group may have conversations amongst themselves (and potentially amongst a wider forum).

Concerns

The primary concern is that of providing a safe positive space, when we enable communication via the DIKSHA platform - especially since children might access such User Generated Content (UGC). There are multiple ways of enabling this, and we’ve considered the following:

Public groups / posts

  1. Option 1 - Any post has to be accepted by a moderator, to provide a guardrail.

  2. Option 2 - We might just enable one-way announcements as an MVP.

  3. Option 3 - Only authorized personnel will be allowed to post. To be authorized, you need to be a state-recognized profile (e.g. teacher, CRP, BEO etc.)

  4. Option 4 - Every post will have mechanisms in place for taking down (e.g. report this post etc.)



Private groups / posts

  1. Option 1 - Treat like WhatsApp groups, what happens within the group remains within the group.

  2. Option 2 - Add one capability over WhatsApp groups, allow the moderator to delete any objectionable posts. (These posts are hidden from view of the others, so as not to allow visibility to objectionable material - but also allowing for the possibility of review by a higher authority).

Questions we need to answer

  1. Will users want to use a discussions feature?

  2. Intent - Feature is centered around topics vs. people ?

  3. Format - Transactional (WhatsApp) vs. recorded (Discourse) ?

  4. Will users find the experience of the discussions feature comfortable/intuitive?

  5. What is the scope for the first MVP?

    1. Capability

    2. Volume

  6. What is the timeline for the said MVP?

Options

  1. RocketChat - Used by Infosys in Project Eagle.

  2. Discourse - Initiated by the folks behind StackOverflow, and likely to enable meaningful discussions.

  3. Signal - Supported by the Signal Foundation with backing from the co-founder of WhatsApp. Essentially a reputed and formidable competitor to WhatsApp as well.

  4. Nodebb.org - Bulletin board (https://project-sunbird.atlassian.net/browse/SD-6 )

(more to be identified, if needed)

Constraints

Users

Preferably, the interface for discussions will be similar to something the user is already accustomed to.

The primary communication platform used is likely WhatsApp.

The primary discussion platform used is likely Facebook, followed by ShareChat and Quora.

(We might need to look further, to be certain).

People

The team that’s working on it is on exploratory assignment from ITC, over a period of 2 months. What happens after that for continued development, given the current hiring freeze, needs to be clarified.

Time

NISHTHA wants to integrate discussions at the earliest. However, the detailing of the use-cases they’d like to enable/block are not explicit at the moment.

Pramod wishes to see a POC by the end of July.

Engineering team availability for this project is not clear, beyond 2 months.

Options

We don’t want to build a real-time chat competitor to WhatsApp. But can we use one that’s available for integration?

Should we consider a WhatsApp groups integration (e.g. deeplink to whatsapp group chats), to quickly observe the uptake of such a capability?

Meeting notes

July 22nd

(Comparing Discourse and NodeBB)

The terminology here is based on what the open-source solutions provide. Category is the equivalent of a folder (this is the space where users can discuss within a specific context), and the topic is the equivalent of a file (this is the questions, answers or comments that users make).

Can we have the same user, more or less same admins, but as part of different groups?

  • This is possibly via either solution

How does the structure of forums manifest itself for enterprise instances - will there be multiple forums, or multiple categories? Can you have sub categories in a forum?

  • NodeBB appears to have the ability to have sub-categories that can be branched to any extent possible. Need to confirm though. We also need to draw up a sample of how this branching might happen.

Can users be followed, and their activity across platform noticed?

  • This can be done on NodeBB. Doesn’t seem possible in Discourse, out-of-the-box.

If we have parent categories - will the parent be the Sunbird instance, or the tenant?

  • Highest parent will be Sunbird instance, and each tenant can be a child category within (and further categorization possible under that).

  • The software doesn’t provide distinct user-base within categories, so the user-base is for the discussion instance as a whole. However, we can programatically create sub-categories and restrict participation in it to specific users in NodeBB.

What would this mean for cross-tenant grouping and discussions?

  • The users can be placed in a group irrespective of tenant, and anyone can be assigned as moderator on the platform.

Can global-admin have sub-admins who can handle things at a tenant level, district level or cluster level?

  • Not clear if we can have admin capability at each level of a sub-category, but we can have moderators. However, programatically we could imbue specific users with the ability to direct the super-admin to take sub-category level admin actions.

July 21st

  • Discussion forum should be available in Sunbird sandbox for dogfooding.

  • An experimental forum should be available in DIKSHA, to test. This might be used in content creation collaboration or so. (e.g https://discussions.diksha.gov.in/creation1234/ )

    • Capability to assign admin and moderator(s).

    • Capability for admin/mods to add/remove authorized members.

    • A 'discussion lobby' which users will see if they come to this page, but weren’t authorized to enter.

    • Basic telemetry for key actions

July 15th

  • We’re considering the possibility for mentored Q&A on the platform.

  • So far we’ve enabled content distribution (one-way), now we're bringing in learning interactions (sync and async)

  • possibly audio/video calls etc.

    • Quick spike to see how it can be integrated

    • Even discourse might be okay.

    • Want to see a demoable discussion board, and reasonable understanding of capability.

    • Mapping of how it will be used in various solutions.

    • These are not high volume capabilities that we need now.

      • Counter-point here - Enabling conversations are likely to result in a lot more traffic and usage because of its two way nature (think DoubtNut).

  • It's about enabling, not visibility of all conversations - it's fine to loosely integrate with WhatsApp, Telegram etc. (the platform / adopter should be able to decide what they want to use).

  • If Google is willing to provide their platform for free for educators and students, then we should look at whether our solution is allowing these orgs to participate instead of being prescriptive/exclusive about the tech.

  • Primary reason for going after discussion groups is that it's a completely fragmented space.

    • Give options to repost summaries from WhatsApp/transactional communication channel, on the discussion board if needed.

    • Just have discussion boards for now.

    • In these times of CoVID-impact, the need within the group to ask and answer questions should be addressed.

  • Look at MVP from the side of NISHTHA (We’ve asked the NISHTHA authorities to think through why they need discussion forums. So this buys us time to carefully build the foundations now.)

    • Authorized SSO

    • Teacher-teacher interaction (Courses)

    • Teacher-student interaction (students)

    • Creators interaction (VidyaDaan)

  • Dont want to do instant notifications - can get quite noisy

  • Don't want to do push notifications aggressively - it’s not a competency we’re looking to build

  • Discussion boards do end-of-day notifications - simple digest activity

We don’t want to build any interface that might compete with the defacto transactional communication channel in India (WhatsApp).

  • Counter-point here: “What if the custodians of DIKSHA want to enable intelligent analysis of the conversations on DIKSHA, in order to identify and respond to the needs of the audience”. WhatsApp won’t be an option there due to the potential costs (unless these are figured out).

  • We will cross that bridge when we come to it

There is no defacto communication channel for discussions in India (or across the world) at the moment. So it’s ok for us to provide a suitable channel within Sunbird / DIKSHA. We’re considering along the lines of a Quora / Facebook / Reddit / Discourse.

Our focus should be on testing if discussions can work fine within Sunbird/DIKSHA before the wave hits us. We should understand the limitations of our system, the discussions tech and the basic potential behaviours that may arise and thereby be prepared.

First phase should just be a Sunbird implementation that internal EkStep can use and dogfood.