[Personal] Would it be possible to do "Q&A" sessions with Igor Ashurbeyli?

Basically, the concept is to have, every week or couple of weeks a Q&A session, for a couple hours. Questions would be asked by Asgardians, and Mr. Ashurbeyli would answer them. (him or another official, but I believe it'll have more weight if it's him, at least for starters)

The aim is to improve communication between Officials/C.A/Asgardians and allow common citizen to see their questions answered. (as well as questions from the staff of C.A)

The Q&A session would take place during week-ends, at a different time for each session, like [10am, 4pm, 10pm (UTC)], in order to allow as many citizen to participate as possible for the different timezones. I choose weekends because I believe it's the best time for people to participate in the Q&A. Since Q&A would be written, it would be available to anyone afterwards.

Questions would be filtered, either by Officials or by C.A. In order to avoid troll or duplicated questions. The questions should start before the session, like a day or two. So that people can still ask question even if they won't be available during the session, and read the transcript/summary of the Q&A.

If this needs a proper proposal then I shall make one.

One possible way to go would be through a dedicated Discord server. One channel would be used for asking questions, another one would be for selected questions and the last one would be read-only and would be used to quote selected questions and answer them one by one.

Or we could use the forum, ask the community to ask questions, filter them, and answer in a read-only post. But I believe a real-time chat would be better for the session itself. A summary of Q&A could be posted on the forum afterwards.

Edit: Proposal online version made at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ohSScHXIGH9vOmfq7ZxJiHs21iBo83-02FRh4Akj1u8

Edit (10 Feb 2017): Proposal has been sent to officials. See https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByzbHcAxmCyvSWNnemEwZllpUUE

Go ahead and make a proposal, it's a good idea.

Other "officials" are also prime candidates, for more specific Q&A sessions dealing with what their specific function is and the projects contained within.

Communications is something that can desperately be improved and there are many questions many citizens are currently unable to locate answers to. The filtering I don't like the sound of. This could easily lead to picking out all the easy to answer questions and specifically avoiding certain others. Clearly 160,000+ people all shouting at once is unlikely to work, and pre-collection of questions would be sensible. A sensible input system(and or use of, which is harder to ensure) should enable users to locate duplicate or similar questions which they can add their permutations of onto. That could happen with existing forum infrastructure if it had common features like search and even better if it'd have the ability to nest replies to individual posts in the thread in some sort of tree - as has been available in more thought out interfaces for a few decades now.

Discord really isn't a clever idea. It's a shady datamining operation, as a nice description. There's really no excuse for pushing this data(or any other) through random third parties for their long term storage and profit. Especially at the price they pay for the privilige of doing so. You might not be able to understand the value of the data you generate and are willing to whore it for no recompense but that's no excuse to expect everyone else to be doing the same. Ultimately there's only one way to ensure this isn't happening and that's to run the services ourself. There's nothing discord can do that proven secure in-house solutions like XMPP cannot. Closed source solutions are not something we should be willing to entertain as it'll take far more to audit that than the source, minimally.

The forum itself should be more than adequate for this purpose - both the storing and answering of questions. However, long term storages of answered questions would possibly suit the format of a wiki section more prominently. For the session itself, then realtime chat only makes sense if you're taking questions in realtime. If precollecting questions then there's no particular reason to wait inbetween answers for the next - the transcript of answers should be enough, and result in less total bandwith needlessly utilised.

Well, I like to ask the people sometimes, before going into a proper proposal. Sometimes, it's a good thing to do. Sometimes not...

Yeah, I totally understand your concerns about the filtering part. But we both have seen the amount of trolls here and the time it wastes. Filtering is not an option, but it must not become a mean of silencing citizen either.

That could happen with existing forum infrastructure if it had common features like search and even better if it'd have the ability to nest replies to individual posts in the thread in some sort of tree

I also relate to this... The main reason why I'm proposing external 3rd party software is because we don't have yet what we need. I'd prefer to keep all this at home. Believe me.

If precollecting questions then there's no particular reason to wait inbetween answers for the next

Well, pre-collecting is needed, but some people may want to react to the Officials answers, and thus, in a real-time fashion. The forum isn't good enough for that, I'm afraid.

To assume the question is answered "properly" then this shouldn't generate additional questions. But, such a response is "best" delivered in realtime, certainly. If taking the time to pre-collect questions specifically to cut down on per-second input and reduce the "troll factor" how would propose to insulate the "realtime" services from such? I'm aware of the "multisectional" model you'd described earlier - that doesn't so much as solve the problem but move it to another space. To assume it rolls out with three sessions as you suggest, and 1/3 of the population attends each session then that's still a potential 53333 messages a min. Assuming they only ask one each, and take as long as 60s to type it. Management of this to "redirect" "valid" questions would be nightmarish at best. It also gives rise to data being in one session that isn't in another. There's really no requirement for external software to deliver this, the existing infrastructure would readily cope. Inserting an IRC-style chat into a page could be done in seconds. If approaching it a little more sensibly, something resilient like XMPP can take care of the entire comms stack, not just this facet, and be equally trivial to embed into existing services and be accessible from standalone clients. If you really must entertain 3'rd party services then these should preferably be Asgardian hosted, open source and certainly not represent any security or privacy risk from useage. It's far more sensible to not begin at all than to start something shoddily. It's likely everything done in this aim will need to be done again once it can be done properly, or simply discarded and represent a massive waste of effort minimally.

I fixed the typo, thanks.

Well, from my experience, Q&A always raise new questions. People want more details, etc.

You make a valid point, if there are too many participants, it's gonna be hell in the chat. Nobody's gonna be able to follow the questions. I don't see any solution around that right now... Real-time is gonna be hard.

As for the sessions, I didn't mean to do several of them at the same time, or in the same day. But even though, if only 10% of the citizen are online during a session, then it's gonna be around 15000 people (and counting).

Well if it is going to be weekly, why not line gather all the question in the weekdays and then pick the first say 5members to ask questions (next 5 on standby, untill yourun out time or questions) on the weekend get the questions and the member who is asking the question to speak to the official, with a possible of 2 follow on questions (if needed). then move on to the next member, and do it that way. With a 3rd independant overseer who will write the answers (questions will have already been written). To ensure no duplicate questions are asked.

Realtime is, IMHO, best avoided for now. It creates more problems than it solves. I wasn't thinking of several sessions at once, instead looking at:

at a different time for each session, like [10am, 4pm, 10pm (UTC)]

and splititng the population across. But, yeah, even at 10% per session it's gonna get "interesting". Also, allowing "offline composition" should allow "better", more complete answers to be provided as there's no particular rush in provisioning an answer.

I'd suggest bi-weekly or monthly myself - it minimises the time spent actually answering the questions. I'm sure the least we monopolise Dr Ashurbeyli's time the better. It'd allow plenty of time to collect up the "next sessions" questions - check they haven't been previously answered - possibly a cut off date the day before or similar. I really doubt things to change that rapidly that weekly is more viable.

Concerning "just taking turns until time runs out or run out of questions" - Maybe possible if we'd first develop some sort of queueing system. Your model seems to involve a lot of people to do very little.

I wrote a first draft of the proposal. Anyone has suggestion access.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ohSScHXIGH9vOmfq7ZxJiHs21iBo83-02FRh4Akj1u8

The idea is great, as I fondly believe in the power of communication in any kind of society. But I, personally, do not approve the weekly basis, as we all know Dr. Ashurbeyli is a busy man. Now even busier with this not-at-all small project. I would suggest the time gap to be stretched to two weeks or even monthly and I also second the suggestions by EyeR to hold the sessions at different times to get as many citizens as possible to be at time in the place. But, we still have to remember that Dr. Ashurbeyli lives in only one time zone himself. It is quite probable that there's going to be an overwhelming amount of even the approved questions, so I suggest we take the same route with this that Dr. Ashurbeyli himself took at the end of last year, and close the question submissions at some point and only answer questions from this premade batch on the next sessions.

As I said above, Dr. Ashurbeyli is a busy man, and may not be available to continuously answer to these questions, and so the Officials should be able to answer for him. But, on the second hand I think the same about that he himself should be the answerer at least in the first few batches, as it would help to calm some unsure minds to get response from the Head of Nation himself. The amount of a few hours could also be a problem, and so a shorter session could be the solution. But we would need official confirmation from Dr. Ashurbeyli's interpreter about this.

I totally agree with your feedback. If anyone is interested in building this proposal, let me know. I'll most likely not do it on my own, and I'd prefer not to ;)

Yeah, of course. I'd be happy to help!

• S

I'm pretty confident multiple sessions wasn't my idea - just a qoutation - but to assume this isn't taking place in realtime - which is loads of issues within itself - then there's no requirement for multiple sessions - monthly is possibly a good window as it leave time for lots of questions to stack up, potential votes to be cast on the questions put forwards for response and Dr Ashurbeyli can just turn up to a stack to work through as many as he can in a few hour or however long it'd take to get bored with. An hour or two a month isn't much to ask of anyone. Three sessions of that would up total to 6 hrs and eat a full ¼ of his day, minimal. Not to mention the tedium of effectively giving the same speech three times in a row.

EyeR,

you are quite correct. This is a grim reality, any human being has only so much time in their hands, and Dr. Ashurbeyli has even less to be put into this.

With regards to the proposal itself, aside from a few typographical issues it looks aiight. I'd personally nish all references to the realtime and multiple sessions, focussing instead on the single reply instance and possibly placing it instead in the "improvements" section for later consideration when we've got better facilities on tap.

I started thinking; do we have any kind of a team working on this yet? I got the feeling you are in fact doing this alone right now. It would be great if we could get the proposal done by the end of the month. As forementioned, I would gladly contribute to this if needed.