Scenarios from the case study

A number of scenarios have been developed from the study of Mandriva users. The scenarios are part of the September 2006 deliverable. They are all described here.

André submits a question

André just bought a webcam and would like to know what software he can use for having video sessions with a friend of his. André logs on to the Mandriva Club, André writes his question in a simple text form: "what is the recommended software for video sessions?". The form also contains a set of optional statements for describing the context of André's computer work. These fields are pre-filled with what the Club knows about André's context, i.e. his hardware and software profile. André can either modify the field values, or check a box telling the fields are not to be taken into account. Once he has submitted his question, André gets a screen with following results:

• a list of resources from the Mandriva Club knowledge base related to the topics inferred from his question, with a summary of their content
• a list of similar questions that have received an answer, ordered by their social rank (see the scenario below on how to rank questions and answers)
• a list of experts available online for discussing the topic of video on Mandriva Linux live
• a list of external resources covering the topic, available on external knowledge bases

André contributes with "how-to" information

André has bought a very recent drawing surface that he wants to connect to his Mandriva Linux computer. In doing so he runs into problems. While searching for help using the Mandriva Club search engine, he gets only links related to the use of that drawing surface with a Gentoo distribution. Looking into the way Gentoo community members managed to have the drawing surface work properly, he understands how he can draw inspiration from them for solving the problem in his context.

Since André has received a lot of help from Mandriva Club he wants to share his experience on the drawing surface with the community. André uses his recent search track on the Club and clicks on "Share experience". He clicks on "External devices" and "how-to", accepts the pre-chosen computer model and distribution he has, and enters the name and the model of the drawing surface. He describes the problem he had and how he solved it. This "how-to" contains information on what the configuration file should look like for the drawing surface to work correctly.

Kim gives contribution feedback

Kim has been searching for a specific driver for his laptop and is presented with a link to information that André has contributed with earlier. Kim finds André's contribution very useful and clicks on the check-box saying that this information helped him solve the problem. When doing so, André's Karma increases, since he was the one contributing with the information. André can also see, on his Karma site, that Kim has successfully managed to solve a problem using his contribution.

Kim edits his personal notebook

Since Kim first became a Mandriva Linux user he has kept his personal notebook on his personal space in the Mandriva community. It helps him learn how to use, more efficiently, his system while putting into practice general how-to manuals.

By surfing around for information about his new laptop, he learned that in order to get his network card working he needs to change some parameters in the network configuration file. He finds this important to remember and clicks on the "My personal page" button on Mandriva Club. He uses the semantic editor on the site to make additional comments related to the network configuration resources available in the public knowledge base.

While saving the text, the system proposes an ontological representation of the text in order to make better searches for the information later on. This ontological representation is presented in natural language so that Kim does not need to know about the underlying RDF vocabulary. This representation consists of the following statements:

• this text is a personal comment authored by Kim on February the 25th, 2007, in English,
• it relates to following topics: network configuration,
• it relates to following products: Mandriva Linux 2007.0,
• it relates to following pages of the public knowledge base: Network_Configuration,
• it relates to following hardware type: Ethernet network card,
• it relates to following hardware model: 3COM-ETX-71661,
• it contains a configuration file example,
• the configuration file example was tested successfully with following hardware (here comes Kim's hardware profile),
• it relates to following RPMs: network-config.rpm.

As Kim also thinks that the notes he just entered might be of interest to others, he marks the text as public, thereby making the text available for others in the Mandriva community.

André searches for non Mandriva specific information in Linuxpedia

André currently has a problem with an installation script for his open source software. The script is working fine if he runs it from the hard disk, but not if he runs it from the CD, and he can't figure out why.

To solve the problem André enters Mandriva Club and searches for "installation script" and "open source software". He also checks the box "Linuxpedia" since he knows this is a general Linux issue. André gets three hits on the Linuxpedia page, among which two appear to provide him with the right information. He clicks on the links and together they provide enough information for André to make some clever conclusion about what it is he needs to do to get the installation script to work. André adds some comments to the Linuxpedia pages to help other Linux users solve the same problem.

Kim takes advantage of contextual help

Kim just bought a new camera from Logitech. While he plugs his camera into the USB port of his computer, an assistant offers him to browse the resources related to this camera available in the Club knowledge base.

He has the possibility to: • read tutorials in his language on how to take the most of this camera. He can choose to read tutorials that are available either in the community knowledge base or across his personal network of relationships knowledge bases • read articles describing identified issues and workarounds related to the use of this given camera and the laptop model he has

Kim and Anna have a live help session

Kim's new Logitech camera is working fine with his laptop, except that the laptop emits a high pitch noise while the camera is plugged into the USB port. Kim submits the issue to the online help desk, but he cannot find interesting resources on the matter. However, a set of experts available for help on cameras is provided.

Kim asks one of them, Anna, for help. Anna is a member of the community who is working for Logitech and who has a long experience with dealing with Logitech cameras. Once she has read Kim's profile and the problem Kim is facing, Anna accepts to enter into a Live help session with Kim. Kim authorizes Anna to view his complete hardware and software profile. While perusing this configuration, Anna understands Kim has to update the driver of his video card. She brings this answer to Kim, with a link toward the new video card driver. The video card driver update fixes the problem indeed. Kim then reviews Anna's profile: among other expertise areas, Anna's profile indicates an expertise on cameras.

Kim clicks the "thumbs up" button attached to that expertise. In the background, the help desk provides Anna with a summary in natural language of the context and message exchanged by both parties. Using a semantic wiki editor, Anna can then enhance this summary, add statements to it so that the fix can be referenced immediately in the public knowledge base for others.

In doing so, while André two days later plugs in the same Logitech camera for the first time on his laptop, he gets notified by the help desk that he should update his video card driver for not hearing a high pitch noise when having the camera plugged into his computer.

A group of experts write collaboratively a manual on virtualization

As hardware virtualization technology use is spreading, more and more questions on the topic are issued by the user community (hardware virtualization is used for running more than one operating system at the same time). Within the Mandriva Club community, a set of ten experts having an in depth understanding of the topic and who have answered a high number of questions related to it decide to together write a manual entitled "Hardware virtualization using Mandriva Linux". For doing so, they create an expert group on the Club, and use the Nepomuk core services for establishing P2P connections between their desktops for working together on the topic during a period of three weeks. The ten experts have accumulated on their desktop a large set of personal documents related to virtualization. André is part of the crew; he has 120 annotated documents on virtualization stored on his desktop, and a set of bookmarks, all together interlinked into a complex web of relations. This amounts to several hundreds of megabytes of data and meta-data. In order to share easily all their data in a common workspace, the team decides to use P2P communication, so that there is no need to transfer their large amount of data to a central place. Everyone can decide which part of his personal semantic web related to virtualization can be accessed by the others. Then this distributed workspace consisting of the aggregation of all individual semantic webs can be searched and annotated by all members of the group. The P2P communication mode is helpful for combining private semantic webs into a collective semantic web whose private entities can continue evolving as usual, on distinct desktops.

Group members can also edit some documents collaboratively in real-time. Using Nepomuk technology, they can work on the manual both while their connected to the other peers or not. When they get connected again, they can synchronize their personal web of data with the the updates brought by the rest of the team.

In order work in an efficient manner, the group first defines the global set of tasks that have to be performed when writing the manual, using the task manager component of Nepomuk. It lets them define specific and general activities, some of which can be directly reused from previous activity patterns identified by other groups while writing a manual.

The group extensively uses the existing question and answers issued by the community to make sure they neither forget key issues nor specific uses of the technology. The manual is written using a semantic wiki editor, so that it is actually not only a plain text manual, but also a semantic graph of resources harnessing the Linux ontology.

Once the manual has reached a good quality level, it released to the Club community. The release is published in three main formats:

• a PDF file,
• a set of HTML static pages,
• a semantic graph of resources, that is published to the Club knowledge base as a named graph. The resources can then be enhanced, commented by the community, and new links between the statements of these resources and other statements can be drawn.

A group of experts write collaboratively a manual on virtualization

As Kim uses Mandriva Club help desk more and more, he gets to know a large number of users and experts, who progressively become good acquaintances that he trusts. Kim decides to create a group "friends" on the Club and adds his best online mates to the group.

In creating such a group of friends, Kim can narrow his search to the resources (knowledge base pages, experts, questions and answers, or web sites) that are rated as interesting resources by his network of friends. This feature lets Kim more efficiently discover new trustful experts and resources that may be of interest to him. While browsing available resources, Kim also gets the information on what his friends think about the resources he's browsing.

Using a personalized view of the Club home page, Kim decides to display a feed linking to the latest personal notes issued by his online friends: in getting to know his friends solve problems, Kim learns better and has a chance to discuss the related topics directly with people he gets on well with.

As time goes by, Kim creates other personal groups on the Club: one is the "family group", another one is the "colleagues" group, to which a few of Kim's work colleagues belong to.

Pedro using the Club help desk in combination with Linuxpedia (not persona based)

Pedro, a Gold member of the Club, is quite an advanced Linux user but even so, a new device in a new laptop model cannot not be his speciality. So this sound card doesn’t work with the latest Mandriva distribution. Pedro has a "Contact Mandriva" button in his desktop, and being a Gold member he regards Mandriva as responsible for his problem. Clicking on "Contact Mandriva" opens a help desk new topic form, with his hardware data pre-filled. He notices that there is nothing about this novel sound card so he adds that information. He ticks a box saying that he’d like to see the post follow-up in his email as he’s not much on the web interface of the help desk.

As he submits, Pedro gets a list of a three Linuxpedia articles that seem to match his question. He is instructed to take a look at them. A Google search was also generated automatically from Pedro’s form post. The search opens in another browser frame.

Pedro checks the Linuxpedia articles and, comparing also with the Google info, thinks that one of them appears to match his problem, with some small differences, one difference being that the problem has only been spotted on Debian and RedHat. The Google search also confirmed another bug symptom that Pedro saw, so he edits the Linuxpedia article wiki-style. The article gets also marked automatically as "also seen on Mandriva". Pedro is happy and goes on to try the fixes that were tried on Debian and RedHat, but the fix on RedHat simply fails and for the one on Debian, the paths to the drivers in the file system are different. Pedro ticks some boxes in the Linuxpedia interface to mark that he tried the workarounds and failed.

Renaud is a Mandriva power user, who wants to get more karma and fancies with the goal of being paid part-time with Mandriva. When Pedro has confirmed that the sound card article is present for Mandriva, a bubble appeared on his screen. The bubble grew as Pedro marked the RedHat and Debian fixes as not working for Mandriva. Renaud clicks on the bubble and assumes from the log of actions taken that a possible new distribution-agnostic issue is on since this fancy new sound card appeared, and has not yet been confirmed on Mandriva but since it appears to be distribution-agnostic, it will be confirmed sooner or later. Renaud decides to take action and tries out the RedHat and Debian workarounds. He understands rapidly the difference in paths from Debian so he decided to try that first. Then he notices that there’s no way that he can get the sound card work soon. He inserts the correct Mandriva path at Linuxpedia. That moment Pedro gets an email and an SMS (since he marked it urgent and allowed the use of SMS) that there is a possible fix on his problem. He tries out the Debian fix with the path entered by Renaud and things work. He marks the fix as working and Renaud’s bubble starts to bounce, just as he was on his way out to buy crêpes. Upon lack of reaction from Renaud, the system also sends him an SMS, which she gets just after the crepes.

After devouring the crepes, Renaud goes back to his hacking spot enthusiastically and checks the Linuxpedia logs on the bubble. He now has a more complete picture of the issue and starts the steps necessary to introduce the fix in the next kernel versions. Renaud can’t do it by himself as he doesn’t have the sound card and the necessary rights, but he files a solution in detail, so he makes sure to get most of the karma on this issue. The solution can be found both by searching at Linuxpedia or by searching the Mandriva help desk.

Renaud is notified that many users are facing an issue with their sound card (not persona based)

Gonzo has got his Mandriva Linux from his father and just wants to use it to play games. He got this new laptop for his birthday, installed Mandriva and surprise, there's no sound in the game. Sound is very important to play the game properly, as the Bad Guys approaching can be heard and properly shot in due time. Upon losing some game points that he had work assiduously to accumulate, Gonzo gets anxious and slowly starts to think of doing something about this issue. He finally decides to use the "Contact Mandriva" button.

The help desk post opens, and he titles his post "the sound fails so i can't hear the Bad Guys" and gives some more detail but doesn't add any information about the sound card. When submitting, he is presented with five Linuxpedia links that correspond to sound card problems on his laptop type, and some Google search results. Gonzo doesn't have much patience to read, so he clicks "I don't understand all this crap, contact me!" in the header. As more people like Gonzo fill in sound card problems for this laptop type, Renaud's bubble shivers more and more. Renaud has a strong suspicion that the problem can be fixed with this latest hack that he did the other day, for which he got a lot of positive feedback that increased his karma.

Renaud has lately been in close contact with Paul, a young Linuxer who, like Pedro, used to do a good job in spotting issues and suggesting fixes. Renaud decides to ask Paul to take care of the issue before it gets into the next kernel version, by communicating with the users who are not that skilled and have this issue. Renaud attaches the bubble into an email and sends it to Paul, mentioning also the karma that there still is to get.

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