Question

Is it possible for a user to kick off their own groups? I would love to use this as a self-learning study tool, and as a way to pull together people on more focused topics. The power of the internet is(one part of it anyway) is connecting people to allow seemingly niche applications or corners of knowledge to be explored deeper. I would like to be able to take a website say something like diveintopython.org or say google code university or even some chinese language resource and kick off a group on those. I'm ok if it takes alot of effort to do so

Answer 1

i think it's a great idea. Very ambicious, a lot of work would have to be put on that... but maybe in a couple of months or so they'll make it...

Answer 2

Hi quanyilong. As of now, users cannot create their own groups. Our main reason to start out with pre-existing groups was to ensure that people who need help can always find others to help them.

There are two main kinds of groups that users are looking to create:
- Groups based around a particular topic
- Groups based around a set of people (friends, people on OpenStudy etc)

The problem with topic-based user-generated groups is critical mass. Imagine if there are very few users to start out with, and if you post a question, no one answers (this is already happening in a bunch of pre-existing groups). There are many other issues like discovery, fragmentation of the community, etc that we have been talking about in detail.

That being said, we are exploring possibilities to allow people to create "sub-groups" or "teams" within our broader groups. This is part of our longer term plans, and will certainly take a bit of time to materialize.

I encourage every one to suggest how they might see private groups working. Some questions to consider:
1. Where will I see the group on the site?
2. How will others find my group?
3. How will I make sure my group members don't come to a dead group? How will I make the group useful to all members?
4. How will my group interact with already existing or future group about the same topic?

Answer 3

Fair enough, I can understand the need to make sure that every group has that critical mass. I do like the possibility of a sub-group or team that exists within the realm of a larger group. Perhaps if a person could break off a new group off of an existing question that frames the purpose of the group.

For example just as a traditional forum can make a particular thread a sticky to reflect that it contains important or information that is not related just to the one person you could provide an important questions category. Thus on the left side you would see

All questions -- Unanswered Questions -- Important Questions -- My Questions

The decision to mark it as sticky or important could be a group decision, requiring multiple people to request it get made into an important question, this would ensure that there is at least some level of interest in the topic.

For example in the computer science category deepak621 asked about learning the c language in this question. http://openstudy.com/groups/computer+science#/groups/computer+science/updates/4e14c81a0b8b62a9006e55d5
FNeiva then replied with with a link to a fairly useful website. Since it would be fairly common for some one to want to learn about c programming that question could be made a sticky/important question/sub-group where-in people could compile more answers about good resources or articles about learning c as well as being able to ask specific questions under the context of learning the c language.

As far as cooperating with future groups to make sure that things just don't get clogged up you could have an archiving function that archived those sub-groups after so long. Since some of them may start to contain reference material though you could post a warning and allow users to vote that it remain rather than being archived.)archived is still available just hidden somewhere else to reduce clutter.