Collaborations Workshop 2019 (CW19) #CollabW19          2019-04-01 to 2019-04-03

Slack overflow: getting permanent docs from instant messaging - HP9-CW2CC

Hackday Idea Proposer

ben krikler - mr.krikler@gmail.com


This document should be used to capture the information for a Hack Day Idea.

Context / Research Domain

Software projects where users and developers use instant messaging tools to support development and / or assist users.

Problem

Instant messaging platforms (slack, gitter, mattermost, etc) are great for providing instant support to users and connecting them with the developers as well as other users. A downside of this approach is that often a good response to a question can be lost in the sea of historic messages from users. How can we convert advice and examples produced on instant messaging services to long-term persisted documentation, in a simple and seamless way?

Solution

A tool that can pull a set of messages, and help or even automate the process of extracting the key points, code snippets, underlying question, and convert this into markdown that can be either posted as a github / gitlab issue or inserted into the documentation of the repository. This could include extracting tags to describe which functions or submodules are discussed, what version of the library was used, and so on.

Diagrams / Illustrations

/shrug (sorry, not sure what would be good here, maybe a slack logo plus a stack overflow logo ?)