Forum:Biostar on Google Summer of Code. Suggest features that you would like to see!

Question

[Istvan Albert]

People often ask why Biostar is not using StackExchange or OSQA or some other software. The simple answer to these questions is that those platforms are simpler and more limiting than what scientific communities require to grow and flourish.

Thanks to the folks at Neurostars we now have a successful Google Summer of Code applicant Paolo Coffetti who will start this Month (May 2014). Paolo is looking for ideas see beyond those proposed.

Now is a great time to list your ideas on what you think would help scientific Q&As be effective. Think big not just small or cosmetic features. For example some of my interests would be:

1. support for natural language processing: rank posts by their information content, auto tag posts based on their content
2. improve the automated access to Biostar content (API)

This has been posted before in New features and bug fixes for Biostar to work on during Google Summer of Code this post tries to make the call to action more clear.

[Roman Valls Guimerà]

Good point with the API! I thought that main/server/api.py was already migrated into biostars2. There's a very good starting point, after that, programming additional external features/plugins should be more attainable.

Answer 1

[Mary]

So this idea is kind of out there--and may be beyond the scope of what this summer project could do. But I'm going to say it anyway. Feel free to ignore it, mull on it for something later, or simply laugh.

I was looking over at the new Galaxy Biostar, which is very cool. I am delighted to reduce the number of support mailing lists I am on, and that is an excellent way to manage the same kind of information instead.

What I think would be great would be to offer a sort of insta-portal for support for your tool within the Biostar framework. So what I mean is that some of the small software teams that deliver very cool tools have less support resources than would be ideal. Sometimes these include mailing lists, sometimes not. Sometimes I just email or contact-form submit stuff into what appears to be a black hole. Sometimes I get answers. Sometimes not.

But what if you could offer any tool provider a [MyTool]-Biostar kind of channel. They get a little intro place, a little branding, post notices of updates, people can ask questions, answers remain in the public sphere. If they don't have a lot of support resources, this could help them out. Even if they do, it might be a nice supplemental place to support users.

It might be a thing they could put in their grant proposals, something like: We will create a MyTool Biostar channel to support users, and then toss a little money to Biostar for maintenance perhaps.

This is something that would help me as an end user of many tools very much.

[Istvan Albert]

This is a really nice feedback Mary. I am very interested in this aspect, time and again I find it a great hindrance that there is no way to ask a question on a tool/method..

the task is that of developing the right user interface and display - and that of course can be very challenging on its own.

[Mary]

Oh, sure, there are challenges. But it seems to me it could be like YouTube channels. You have a spot of your own, but the questions can also flow into the main discussion area if they are not tool specific or more about underlying data. Or if a question came into the general flow and it could get shunted to the right tool provider that would be great. Yet still available for others to chime in. That's lacking often at "comment form" sorts of support places.

Answer 2

[Roman Valls Guimerà]

Hi BioStar users! Feel free to comment on the current BioStars2 API draft over here, your input is very valuable!:

http://nimiq.github.io/my-summer-of-code/api-sketch/

Answer 3

[Ann]

Hi!

Per the comment on please add tweet link to posts, I'm suggesting that BioStars add twitter links to be added to individual questions or comments.

Best,

Ann