Organizational Issue ... somewhere to ask questions

[N7DR]

This is an organizational issue, not a technical one.

Trying to wrap one's head around everything is a formidable task for someone coming to SOS Notebook/Workflow from scratch.

It would be of tremendous help if there were an e-mail reflector (or perhaps two, one for Notebook and one for Workflow?) where questions could be asked.

I realise that the documentation is quite extensive, and I'm certainly grateful for that, but I am finding myself spending an awful lot of time digging around to see if something is covered, deciding that it isn't, experimenting to see if I can make something work, and (sometimes) giving up but feeling that I'm probably just not understanding something correctly.

If SOS is to catch on (and from what I've seen so far, it deserves to), I think some reasonably accessible way to ask questions is likely to be necessary. Burdensome to start with, I know, but one hopes that it could quickly become a place for other users, not the core developers, to help out as well.

[BoPeng]

I spent a whole lot of time on documentation but at the same time I fully understand your frustration in finding the information you need. I welcome any suggestion on how to better organize the documentations but for what you have experienced you perhaps should have chatted with me on gitter. Check the top right corner of the homepage for a link to the chat room.

[BoPeng]

I have added a getting help section to the documentation pages (https://vatlab.github.io/sos-docs/notebook.html#content) to direct casual questions to our gitter channel. I still need better ideas on how to organize documentation though.

[N7DR]

Bo wrote on 3/5/20 7:53 AM:

I have added a `getting help` section to the documentation pages (https://vatlab.github.io/sos-docs/notebook.html#content) to direct casual questions to our gitter channel. I still need better ideas on how to organize documentation though.

Thank you so much. I had spent much of the last few days looking for something that pointed to a place to ask user questions, and finally decided that it wasn't just that I was being blind, but that indeed there was nowhere that said, effectively,: "go to this place for help". Hence the creation of this issue. I had never heard of gitter before (I'm more used to XMPP-based systems for real-time interactions), but I suspect that I will be using it for the first time sometime quite soon :-) About organizing the documentation: I'm probably not a good person on that subject. I read books to learn how to do things. I find that wiki-based documentation is usually pretty good for finding a solution that one can copy for a one-off problem, but leaves a lot to be desired if one really wants to understand something. (Yes, I was hoping that there was an SOS Notebook/Workflow book, but of course there is not :-( ) Doc

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-- Web: http://enginehousebooks.com/drevans

[BoPeng]

@joannfeng I would like to get your feedback on the organization of the doc once you go through some of it.