Plone on the Wave?
OK, so Google Wave has been mentioned quite a bit since it came out and I have to admit my first impressions were 'yeah, OK so what?'. I mean we already have email, irc, IM, twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.... do I really need yet ANOTHER way to communicate with people?!
But I think the meme of 'Its going to replace email' has been what has been misleading me so far. Yesterday I came across a demo of Salesforce and Google Wave with a screencast showing an example of what could be achieved by linking these two services for customer service.
Suddenly the penny dropped for me. Don't think of it as replacing email, but how about replacing IRC? 'Wait a sec' I hear you say... 'IRC?'. Isn't that that old text based chat thingy that geeks use? Yes, the very same.
In the Plone community, as with many other Open Source communities, IRC is used as one of the primary tools for communication between the developers and for helping out users. IRC has been around since the dawn of the Internet and in many cases support channels have 'bots' in them. These are automated processes that respond to the conversation and can add in supplemental information. In the case of Plone and the #plone channel there are several bots in there. One displays a summary of new bug tickets from users into the channel and another displays commit messages from core developers into the source repository. This is general background information that many people like to keep an eye on, yet don't want to be actively pestered with. If a developer is in IRC he or she can see what is going on in the project and keep tabs of who is doing what in and informal way.
Google Wave is the new IRC! But web based... and persistent... and with a more accessible API for people to write plugins to interface with other services. And probably many other feature too that I don't even know of.
In the Salesforce demo above they are demoing a customer service interaction in which a customer starts a new conversation (wave) with the company's customer services bot and that bot tries to search Saleforce for answers to their questions. It can then also invite in real humans into the conversation if the automated help doesn't help. At any point in the future the user can return to the wave and continue with it... it is persistent.
So how about this for an idea: The Plone Wave.
Currently new users come into the #plone IRC channel and ask questions for support, many of which have been answered before or are documented elsewhere on plone.org. Plone has a fantastic culture with its IRC channel and there are some great people on there who will bend over backwards to help you, as evidenced by the recent Plone IRC Superstars award, but it can be a bit draining if the same questions are answered over and over.
What if there was a Plone Wave with which a Plone user seeking help could interact with? They start a conversation with a Plone Help bot and that bot tries to answer simple queries by looking up documentation on Plone.org that might help them. It could also look in the Plone bug tracker to see if there is anything else relevant there. Or search the mailing list archives. It could echo the question to the Plone IRC channel such that any developers on IRC who think they might be able to help could reply back and that reply appear on the wave. If the user decides they might want services from one of the many Plone Professional Services providers out there then it could ask them which country they are in and then list a bunch of contacts from Plone.net. If one of those providers is also using Google Wave then they could be invited into the wave to continue the discussion.
What do you think? Anyone got the skills to try and prototype such a system?
-Matt
Well, I am not sure what's so unique about it as you can already do this with a normal IRC bot ;-)
Wave's strength is probably in a) collaborative editing (but how useful is this for most people?) and the federation protocol (which is needed for the collaborative aspect).
And I am still struggling to come up with good use cases for these things ;-)
(like that I am able to edit your reply in a chat is probably not the most useful thing)
Comment by Christian Scholz — Oct 1, 2009 10:41:12 AM | # - re
I agree that all of this can be done with IRC and as I point out we have been doing this already for many years in the Open Source community... way before the commercial world.
The difference is that Google Wave might be a slightly more approachable medium than IRC. New users probably have not used IRC before, and either need to install an IRC client, or use the pretty bad experience of a web based IRC chat. It is also not persistent. OK, yes, there are some public web logs of IRC chats, but still they are not easily accessible or searchable and probably unknown to those that have a problem immediately.
I think Google Wave could provide a better end user experience, and probably a better brand experience as well in terms of seeing all of the Plone resources in one place.
-Matt
Comment by Matt Hamilton — Oct 1, 2009 10:46:32 AM | # - re
I think that the Stack Overflow model - collaborative, user-moderated, and with a built-in rewards system to turn occasional question-answerers into addicts - would give even a system based on Google Wave a run for its money. What would the wave bring that users are not already enjoying at S.O.?
Comment by Brandon Craig Rhodes — Oct 1, 2009 2:49:00 PM | # - re
Stack Overflow certainly seems nice, although I've not used it much so can't comment on it in too much detail, however doesn't it just create yet another repository of questions and answers?
Google Wave could provide something that integrates will all the existing sources of Plone info (mailing lists, plone.org/documentation, plone.net, IRC, etc.). Stack Overflow could also be one of the places searched.
It could also provide a nice hybrid of bot/human help in that at any time a developer could be helping a user, or a bot could be digging for info already out there.
-Matt
Comment by Matt Hamilton — Oct 2, 2009 8:59:11 AM | # - re