Open First vs Public questions

Continuing the discussion from this message on help@, in response to this post on discuss.openedx.org:

Before asking Dave and the rest of the community, have you asked internally? We have some experience with persistent grading, so generally before requesting help on the official forum, it’s better to ask on our own forum. This way we can keep the times where we ask others for information, especially edX developers like Dave, for cases where we really need it.

Could you try, and once/if we have a result internally, post it on the official forum to show that we could resolve it, and that Dave doesn’t need to spend time answering it?

@antoviaque Doesn’t asking internally violate the spirit of “open first”? I was particularly pleased with how quickly this discussion grew, and how much information got added so quickly. And I’d hate to impose policies that make us hesitant to participate publicly, simply because there may be an answer available internally. Putting that internal knowledge on the public forum seems like the whole point.

And while I agree that Dave’s time is valuable, I think that asking this question on the public forum was the correct choice. Maybe if @gabor had avoided tagging Dave and Ned specifically, so that anyone in the community (including us) could feel entitled to answer?

@jill I didn’t mean to ask the question privately – I would expect that question to be asked openly in our public forum, so someone interested in our discussions could still see it (or even through a Google search on the error message), and that would not be an issue. But there are different levels to asking something publicly – when we have a question, it doesn’t hurt to ask (publicly) a smaller group, before jumping on the central stage and grabbing the microphone to attract everyone’s attention to it. :)

Especially as we grow, some people might know something that others don’t, and checking on that first helps to ensure that we manage the amount of attention that we grab as a group. If we escalate the discussion to the public forums afterwards, we can even link to our preliminary discussion for context.

PS: Actually, I would have even the current discussion publicly - it would be fine for my message above, and my reply here, to be public.

@antoviaque You are right. I could have been ask it on our public forum first. Generally, I’ll do that next time :innocent:

As a context on this particular case:

The ticket related to this issue is SE-4101, which created as part of an investigation. In the investigation all our cells participated (though @usman was only involved at the beginning). As neither of the participants found the exact issue and we only had theories we were not able to prove, so I decided to reach out to @braden who recommended to ask edX as they were aware of multiple issues with persistent grades - what I did not find - so I decided to cut it short and ask them about these issues. The reason I did ping Dave, is this comment where we directly reached out to him (and CC’d Regis and Ned).

Although 7 of us were not able to guess what caused the issue, it would worth to ask on our forum first so I’ll do that next time.

In case we find a solution - what I don’t think at the moment - I’ll update the forum for sure!

@gabor Ah, I wasn’t aware that you had actually already asked some of the team members who have experience with persistent grades – sorry, I should have thought of asking you about that, before jumping to conclusions. :slight_smile:

In cases like this, it can help when the initial conversation has been held in a public place, like the forum (when possible, it can be tricky with discussions about client issues at times) – to make sure that we have asked everyone, but also to be able to link to the original discussion from the official forum; this way people from the forum can read it, but also others from OpenCraft who discover the discussion then, like me here. ;)

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Ok! I misunderstood.

I’m happy to move this thread to a public discussion – just didn’t want to make an internal email public without giving people a heads up first.

Thanks for clarifying, and for mentioning all the types of “public” discussion we have available now. It’ll take some getting used to, but the value is clear.

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Yup, that makes sense - all good on my side to move it in any case :+1:

Yes, it will take a bit of practice to get used to it, it does open a few new possibilities. I’d also like it if, eventually, people external to OpenCraft came to discuss here from time to time, or contribute some ideas. :)

Excellent – I’ll move this to Discussions (public).

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