Melange Tags
From Google Summer of Code Mentor Wiki
This page is to brainstorm possible (future) extensions to Melange to support tags.
Contents |
[edit] Purpose
- To categorise organisations
- To make it easier for umbrella orgs to manage large numbers of proposals
- This page originated from Issue 270, Issue 425, Issue 516 and Issue 577
- Please star the Issue 425 in the issue tracker if the feature matters to you.
[edit] Comment
Note that collapsing all the issues that happen to mention the word "tagging" into a single issue severely conflates two different use cases: Tagging *proposals* so that an organization can sort and track student submissions and tagging *organizations* so that students can find ones that interest them. The former is for larger organizations that are already known to most students, the latter is for smaller organizations that students may not know.
Since people persist in lumping all the tagging proposals together, I have at least tried to separate the two use cases in the whiteboard commentary. (I'm JGN in the opinions below.)
As issues in the tracker move from proposal towards implementation, commonality in features becomes increasingly important. Both student proposal and organization tagging are likely to use the same tagging class, a mixin in taggable.py. Separating the use cases, as here, helps clarify the differences in requirements. For mentor tagging of student proposals we do not need an approval process for tags. We do for organizations.
[edit] Whiteboard
This was one of the most popular feature requests in prior years - and this year too.
[edit] Tagging student proposals
We'd like to be able to view our student proposals by project, since proposal titles are all over the place (vary significantly and sometimes don't name the project at all). I had suggested that students link proposals to a project using a list provided by the org admin, but SRabbelier suggested that this could be accomplished through tags.
For tagging to work for linking student proposals to a project, we'd need two additional features:
(1) students can add tags -- we would give each project a tag name on our organization's project page and insist that student tag their proposal using the tag name for their project. This way mentors/admins aren't forced to do all of the tagging later.
(2) tags can be removed (at least by mentors) -- since student project assignments can change during the review process, we'd need a way to replace a "FooProject" tag with a "BarProject" tag
- Gmail has lovely tags. Particularly nice is the ability to select multiple items and with a single change add or remove the same tag.
- Sometimes tags need to be 'managed', where a "TagMeister" can define what the tags are, but a wider pool of people can add or remove them.
- Are hierarchical tags useful? In the organisations page we have two tag families, the Language. tags and the Category. tags.
- Perhaps something like the issue tracker's two-tiered tags? Type-Feature, Priority-Low, etc?
(JGN) Admins and mentors should be able to freely create and destroy tags on proposals. Perhaps admins should have final discretion on tags (and more power over them), but the choice of tags applied to proposals should be totally within the control of the organization.
[edit] Tagging organizations
(JGN) This is issue 270, which happens to mention tagging, but has nothing to do with tagging student proposals, the subject of all the other tagging issues.
(JGN) The categories applied to organizations should be almost completely inflexible, or it will quickly degrade into one category per organization, at a net loss of usability. It should be possible for organizations to suggest new categories, but the final decision should be made by a "Category Czar".
(JGN) This was shown in 2009, when organizations were encouraged to self-tag themselves. As a result, the bulk of the tags were singletons, offering no real help to a student looking for an organization. This case requires an authoritative decision-maker (the Category Czar) to rule on which tags make sense.
(JGN) I nominate Alexander Pico for the role of Czar, since he volunteers to do a categorization of mentor organizations each year.
[edit] Vote here
Vote by changing the numbers in brackets. Only one vote each for each item please.
- Naming: "Tagmeister" (1) Vs "Category Czar" (3)
