Comment-type
Mads Ringblom PublicSeen by 67So what if users had to choose what type of comment they where posting?
Types of comment could for example be: 'Question', 'personal experience', 'fact/statistics', 'scientific research', 'scenario', 'logical argument', 'personal oppinion', 'inspiration', 'idea', 'other'. (off course theese has to be really well thought through)
It could just be a dropdown next to 'post comment'
Cons:
* It complicates things a little bit making it a little less easy to contribute.
* The 'types' would have to cover all different kind of discussions. (maybe on locally installed instances of Loomio the admin could choose the types of comment.
Pros:
* It makes it a little less easy to contribute (forcing people to reflect just a little bit before writing can in my experience really help in creating a healthy debate)
* It opens a wide range of possible features like color-coding different type of comments, sorting comments (e.g. only showing ideas), creating libraries of for example personal experiences or 'ideas'.
* could maybe cover some of the needs behind the requested idea-features.
* makes it possible to see what we base our decisions on. (personal experiences/statistics an so on)
This differentiates it self from tagging because the 'types' are predetermined making it more valuable in regards to 'sorting' and making it visible what kind of knowledge we are maybe lacking in our discussion.
Thats a very good idea as well. (It goes without saying that I think my own idea is very good ;)
If others could tag comments and you would be able to sort comments according to tags, I guest you should be able to achieve some of the possibilities I'm describing.
It would just require some facilitation.
@alanna do you have a use case on tagging?
We haven't really fleshed out how tagging would work, just talked about it as something we'd like to do someday in the future when we have time :) I could see it being a powerful tool for enabling different views on a discussion, by sorting comments along different criteria and revealing new layers of information.
@jonlemmon @robertguthrie @richarddbartlett and other have thought about this... maybe they want to contribute tot he discussion.
Having a comment-type as proposed would be helpful for groups who want to follow formal argumentation. For instance, Stephen Toulmin proposed 6 comment types (he called them argument types) to introduce rigor in formal argumentation. These could be proposed as a drop down selection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Toulmin#The_Toulmin_Model_of_Argument
An alternative or complementary set that I have used is:
Idea - an idea you are submitting for consideration
Pro - a positive aspect of an idea
Con - a contrary aspect of an idea
Question - a request for clarification
Not very formal, but it helps tease out the intent behind the post.
Comment types helps both the poster and the reader in gaining clarity.
It also mitigates long posts with many different kinds of content, which tend to be unclear and difficult to confront reading.
(I'll stop here before I fall into the trap myself! :)
We've always thought of this in terms of tagging, but it's interesting to consider alternatives. I think it's also interesting to consider how it would be if others could take comments too, not just the author.