Communication Channels at CPod...

Sorry, typo. "the CPod staff".

Hi guys. I can't address the discussion on wikis/forums/blogs and the locus of conversation. But I can give some answers to Henning's question about the overall direction of architectural changes. From a technical perspective, the big architectural shift over the past year has been away from a monolithic website and towards a more modular system. The goal is better stability and scalability and the ability to iteratively improve features without breaking existing content. V3 was a more complex system when it was introduced. The added complexity of the main site was balanced on the backend by shifting lesson production onto a separate system. This sped up lesson production and helped us produce recordings like The Fix. More importantly, it made lesson production independent of website maintenance, helping the academic teams fix problems with lesson materials more quickly once they were identified. Iceberg involved a number of changes that were critical for making SpanishPod work. The main code base became language-agnostic and user authentication was split off from ChinesePod. We took advantage of the overhaul to standardize the way lesson/extra content was handled. This turned extra content into regular lesson objects that could be added to feeds or studied and bookmarked. In the long-run, we're looking to make "extra" materials as potentially flexible and feature rich as regular lessons. We had another transition in January where we split the authentication server onto a different server. This caused a HTTPS alert for some users while DNS records were updating, but was otherwise relaively non-eventful. None of the transitions were problem free, but I think it's a good sign that the severity and incidence of upgrade issues is declining as the architecture of the system improves. There's a lot of room for improvement, but we are listening and trying to make the necessary changes to make the site better, easier to use and generally less stressful.

Henning, I agree, only a lilite number of channels can be kept active at the same time, by the editorsand the rest of the community. I spend a fair amount of time here (and on my 88groups lately), with little time for anything else even if I did have the inclination. It certainly is part of the growing pains for any startup, and I think it will get worse before it gets better, what with the upcoming expansion into other languages, Confucius Institutes venture, and other behind the scenes activity where CPod tries to capitalize on their content and processes (e.g. language training offering to the corporate world). I feel it they're loosing focus, clearly Ken and possibly other founders have moved on to new and exciting challenges, not the least of which probably is to attract capital and skills, strategies, recruitment, the works. In the end, the only thing that seems quite stable and probably constitutes the core business is the podcasts, and supplementary material that comes with it, including this place for lesson conversations.

(small number of channels is what I meant). I have to say we're seriously lacking clear communication from CPod management regarding their strategies, plans and tactics, Ken's enthusiastic polls and announcements notwithstanding. It's been the case around v3 migration, 88groups, server upgrades etc. It's as if daily operations were taking precedence, with no time left for any other communication. Another case were a lower-intermediate comms level is needed maybe; between lesson support and business deals announcements. Users are left to their own devices, the product is good so it takes care of itself...

Being a newbie, I've been confused on the many communication paths that are available (or not available). It took me awhile to understand just what the heck the "Conversations" tab does. Commenting on the individual lessons I got right away and saw the value but the individual user posts took me some time to "discover" and even then I wasn't quite sure what the purpose of them was (a cross between a forum and a blog?). Wiki? We have a wiki? I had no idea. I actually think having a wiki would be a good thing to help distill some the information and common questions we seem to get around here (e.g. "I'm a newbie - Where do I begin?", DVD, software recommendations etc.). In this case, I think a wiki done right would help alleviate the communication issues by having a single point of entry. For example, I've looked around the forums and there is some good information in them. However, I was a little put off that it was a separate registration process and thus disconnected from the main site. It would be nice if the pertinent information generated from the forums could be summarized into the wiki. As for the other various blogs, I felt like I stumbled upon them accidentally rather than them being presented to me. I'm not sure if that was the intention or not. Again, I'm new so forgive me if some of this stuff has been discussed ad nauseum. I very much like the site but for me there has been a real learning curve, unrelated to the actual language, in getting the most out of ChinesePod. Some of this learning curve is related to the various communication paths that henning so nicely described. p.s. How about a "Preview" button next to the "Add Comment" button so we can see our entire post before submitting it? Writing long comments in this little window is a bit of a challenge.

The Wiki disappeared during the V3 change, and I wasn't aware that it came back. I think wikis are great! They need to be well maintained and there needs to be Help files online for wiki newbies, but it doesn't take long at all to feel at home and join in. Unlike these kinds of discussions, you can alter, correct, update, all of the information, even other people's. It is true community collaboration, the basis of Web 2.0, and we should be making better use of wiki systems. The forum seems to have been handed over on a platter to the spammers, which is a shame, because that stops it from being what we've always known as a fun place to be with other CPod students, now more a place to go to read ads or "marketing", and who wants to do that? Nowadays, at our CPod Students Forum, the posts from Chinese people outnumber our fellow students' posts four to one. It seems to have redefined itself without consultation. The forum lets us collaborate and share things in ways that are not technically possible on blog-based software like this one. It holds a lot of our most precious user-submitted information over the last two years, and it would be an awful shame if we ever lost those resources and that history.

你说得不对!! The forum hasn't been handed over to the spammers on a platter. The spam situation is 100% under control.

Well that changes everything. I shall reinterpret the waves of multiple similar promotional messages that I have been seeing there over past weeks, now that I know it's under control.

A large part of the problem is the same trouble we've had before: these communication areas are not all linked from the site where we can find them. There's no way for a new person to know that many of them exist. Without a link, they virtually do not exist, and cannot assist or survive. What happened to the Community link that used to be at the bottom of every page, giving a page that itemised them all?

Hello my family of Chinese learners. Long time no see. Henning, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on how to bring these lines of communication into a manageable communication system. May the new lunar year bring you all healthy challenges with strengthen results.

I also find it interesting that with every upgrade to the V3 site, it starts to look a little more like the old V2 site (albeit new and improved). Although I remember the wiki, a new user now would unlikely even know if it exists. I could also believe that a new employee at CP might also not know it is still out there. At least some ideas that didn't pan out, like babelpod.com, were quietly put to rest. I agree, the CP related blogs and communication channels outlets are too many to keep track of. I like to think these are just growing pains as the company matures, so I hope CP leadership can carry the company past this.

I agree with most of what has been said here. I've never had much time to utilize any of the peripheral communication channels, even though I would certainly like to if I did have the time. Like Henning, if I have 1.5 to 2 hours to spend studying Mandarin, I want to get the most out of it (i.e. not spending an hour posting comments in all the available channels). Personally, I feel (and this may be a bit controversial) that the different features of the Forum should be broken down and migrated either to 1) the Conversations section here or 2) the Wiki. The ability to search the Forum is nice, but as you might guess, I don't really have time to read 17 threads on calligraphy resources. Even though you have the search function available, you still end up sorting through a lot of information that's not too useful. I would much rather read *1* article on a Wiki that has been updated and fine-tuned over time. And when it comes to general conversations, I much prefer the style of the Conversations section we have here. It's easy to access, and I can check out all the recent conversations quickly. Granted, it could use some upgrades, like the aforementioned "preview" function, and a search capability (I've heard rumors that it actually is searchable, but it's not real obvious how you would go about it. I'm talking about an actual button that says "Search" on it next to a field in which you can type your query.). And while we're at it, I would like to add to what goulniky said about communication from the Management. I'm a little disappointed, to be honest. I've mentioned this before, but I'm amazed at how you can launch new features, and then say virtually nothing about them. No wonder nobody uses them! Somebody high-profile needs to be in here telling me how great this stuff is, and how it's going to change my life when I start using it. And by "here," I mean right here, not in a blog hosted off-site. I don't want to sound like I'm dissatisfied with everything (I've renewed my subscription for 7 months for lots of good reasons), but I can't help feeling like CPod is maybe drifting a little towards being comfortably corporate. I hope I'm wrong.

Adding some info points... sparechange, just so you know I can check the latest comments in the Forum quicker than the latest comments here. There's a URL for it, or a link on the front page. The Comments section (this thing right here) has fewer convenient tools and the pages take a lot longer to load when almost empty, and you have to always load every comment ever made which is huge for some topics. But it's largely a matter of familiarity, for both of them. The problem I recall with the wiki was that it needs a lot of daily maintenance work. Although we had a number of students willing and competent to do that maintenance, there was a limit to what they could get access to do, the server admins naturally wishing to preserve security and not having time to learn and execute wiki design and daily wiki admin themselves. What really makes this a problem is that the wiki software used is virtually undocumented. There are no help files for users or maintainers. There is a lot that needs to be done, with high level privileges, to set up mediawiki well, so that others can run with the maintenance. It has a lot of features, such as a categories system for example, that we cannot use because they have never been set up at server admin level. I've used TWiki for many years, another wiki which has very advanced features that can be set up by any power users, such as forum-like and blog-like areas, even mini database-style apps without a database to catalogue reviews of our favourite DVDs or whatever. In the case of TWiki, everything is documented, for users and power users and admins, and it's all part of the wiki. Adding a comment is as simple as typing in a box and clicking a button, like we do here. (Many other wiki systems exist, but this is one example that I'm familiar with.) Still, any wiki is going to require time from tech students and facilitator students to take care of it, and that needs the documentation and permissions for them to be set up for them to do so. Despite being easy to use, a wiki's care and feeding is more demanding than the Forum we have. Like a Forum or anything else, for good results it needs carefully planning and design before implementation.

Man2Toe, I am still of the opinion that this section needs enhanced features for correcting, categorizing, structuring, searching etc. And building up on that: different views. A linear one such as the one we see here and a less time-variant one: a "Forum" view. AuntieSue , I think, the interlinking that you propose does not solve the problem, as it keeps the information torn apart, only with some small bridges in between. No, regarding the future of the Wiki and the Forum (and 88groups) I stay pessimistic. I do not think technology can fix that issue. Wiki is great. But I do not think we will enter information into it. And what information? Navigating and using CPod? Should be in a help section. General info on Calligraphy or culture? That belongs to Wikipedia. Or into personal blogs. Vocab lists? Highly individual. Here we have the vocab manager (which is fine) and the dictionary which I hope will see some more attention again in the future. Shared vocab for the vocab management section would be cool (e.g. user-defined vocab-lists, shared tagging,...). But not in an unstructured Wiki. sparechange, I do not agree that CPod has become "comfortably corporate". The issue is rather the opposite. The team here is still brimming with ideas, spontaneous, and acts quickly. But, as much as I hate to say it, that might be part of the problem - as Goulnik pointed out above, we are talking about growing pains. We need some "comfortable corporate" security. The lessons, Expansions, Excercises, and Dialogues + the related discussions are handled beautifully proffesional without losing their charme on the content side. But additional functionality comes and goes since the day I entered here. We need processes that professionally cut away ideas *before* they are launched if their future is unclear and we need communication about them. I would personally love to see an overall architecture or at least a vision that we iteratively growing towards and that we can discuss here. I am absolutely not into that "permanent beta" thing. And I warn to decend into a "permanant alpha" state.

henning, Your points are very well taken. Communication Over the past 2 1/2 half years of running this service, we have definitely thrown out a lot of tools to enable communication. Lesson comments, forums, wikis, various blogs, posts, post comments, etc. It is too hard to keep up-to-date with the conversations on the site and personally, I end up using Google Reader to pull in all the disparate RSS feeds into one place. Going forward it seems to make sense to unify all types of conversation around one account (so that a separate login on the forum isn't necessary!). That said, we won't to cut off the forum, various blogs, etc and would rather have the conversations migrate organically around the unified accounts because of the better tools and better overall experience. It is the responsibility of the team here to make sure that gets done. 88Groups 88Groups was launched as a separate site to make sure that it didn't negatively affect the experience of ChinesePod users. ChinesePod is designed for adult individual students, but we have been looking at ways to also integrate lessons into the classroom. Right now, 88Groups is primarily used for ChinesePod Practice Plan students to design courses for them, but it is clear from these students that they do not want to be forced onto a separate domain and want a more tightly integrated service on ChinesePod proper. Now that we have a better grasp on how to do it, the course and class admin features on 88Groups will be incorporated into future versions of ChinesePod itself. We will definitely be asking for testers and feedback when the time comes. The reason any of these issues come up is because we are very aggressive in evolving the site with the goal of making easier for all of us to learn Chinese. The biggest problem that I can see from this approach is maintaining high quality. From our publication work to our production work to our customer support work, we haven't been nearly as consistent in quality as we should be. We are very aware of this and are working to build in systems to make the overall service level much more reliable. Appreciate the feedback and ideas.

What happened to the great Cpod forum after V3 made me think of a typical attitude called 喜新厌旧 (like the new dislike the old) or ever 喜新嫌旧 (ditto). But will I understand if Cpod denies 喜新厌旧 ? :) <-Smiley !

Re quality: the site does have a Labs section, which is where I would expect to see non-field-tested applications like 88groups, and where I would expect to be able to play with new ways of using the product without being disappointed if they didn't work. The 88groups home page definitely does not present itself as a new application that has not been field tested from a technical as well as a user perspective. Personally, I will not be upgrading my free account until the number of lesson comments like 'hey, the links are broken...the translations are wrong.....the traditional characters are not correct...the audio files are missing.." decreases significantly. Those kind of problems have nothing to do with growing pains.

sushan, from my perspective the type of mistakes you mention still stays within reasonable limits, given the amount on content we get here. And the reaction times of the CPod team are also usually pretty fast. Only during the major transitions (V2-->V3-->Iceberg) it got out of hand. As I said above: I am convinced that the production of the core content is handled pretty professionally. If you don't need it, don't pay. For me, a small glitch once in a while definately do not keep me from using this service. There is simply no alternative. My post is solely directed at the sense of the many communication channels.

A question I have is, "Why have five, six, eight, or whatever different channels?" I barely have time to go through this one. I understand that each different type of forum has its strengths and weaknesses; however, it seems that, while you might gain a certain "geeky" advantage, at the cost of focus. On the problems mentioned by sushun, the only serious problem I've had with Cpod was its recent problematic migration. Most of the other stuff is 1) minor and 2) fixed quickly. I think sometimes that the problems appear numerous simply because the Cpod staff is responsive, and members know they will get results from posts.

Just learned on the Cpod forum that it is Bazza's birthday. An inspiring day to you Bazza:)