Ask an Expert 2.0Ben MacNeill

eXtension

Big Picture

• Sharing/Public (opt-in)

• Groups

• Simpler assignment rules and interfaces

• Better mobile

• Better search

• Better notifications

• Evaluations

What I’m Covering Today

• Groups

• Categories, Tags & Areas of Expertise

• Getting Questions into AaE

• Assignments

• Openness & Privacy

Groups

• Groups were created from:

• Every widget

• Every primary “Area of Expertise”

• Question Wrangler community

What can you do with Groups?

• Assign questions directly to a group

• Groups can decide if they want a “Question pool” or individual assignments

• Define geographic region and only accept questions that match it

• Decide if the question submitter has the choice to make their question public.

Categories, Tags & Areas of Expertise

• The category hierarchy (49 terms and growing) didn’t work well.

• Each expert’s “areas of expertise” have been converted to tags for that expert.

• Sub-categories for each “area of expertise” have been converted to tags for that group.

• The tagging UI is designed to make it easy to use existing terms.

Getting Questions into AaE

• Current model

• the multi-purpose Ask form on www.extension.org

• Individual Ask widgets embedded in thousands of pages across the web

The Goal

• The trend: widget submissions are outstripping www submissions

• Continue to increase the number of questions that come in through dedicated widgets

How• Existing widgets

• Group’s Ask form (each group has a dedicated URL)

• A generic Ask form (which sends questions directly to the QW group)

• Every piece of content on www will have a link to the group’s Ask form or include its embedded widget.

Question Wranglers

• Will handle groupless questions

• Will handle location non-matches

• Use the new reassignment UI to assign to the best Group or Expert

Simplified Rules

• Questions from widgets or via Group Ask pages are assigned to that Group.

• UNLESS the group has defined a geographic area. Non-matches go to the QW Group.

• Questions submitted through the generic Ask form are assigned to the QW group

Automatic vs Manual

• Automatic assignments are only based on question source (i.e. which widget/form) and geographic location.

• Manual reassignments use tags and/or geography to find a matching group or expert.

Groups and Experts

• Define locations (for automatic assignments)

• Define tags (for manual assignments)

• In the future, may experiment with tag-based automatic assignments

Openness and Privacy

• Public sharing is opt-in

• Questions can be marked public, and are publicly searchable and browsable

• Robust GA tracking baked into Public questions

• Limited Group Expert profiles are publicly viewable

• e.g. default: Ben M.

• Ability for the public to comment

Who Controls Privacy?

• The submitter can choose to make a question public

• Experts can choose to make public questions private

• Groups can choose to give submitters the option (default is private)

• All existing questions will be marked private when migrated to AaE 2.0

Time Line

• 3 weeks out (hopefully)

• The demo site is running:http://dev.ask.extension.org

• The look and feel is an evolving design

Thanks!