I have spent broadly four months fighting to make InfoQube do the things I need it to do as part of my personal information management system. This has led to a significant degree of frustration on my part. A large part of that frustration is the extreme difficulty of finding out how to do things in InfoQube. There is an online manual. This is structured in terms of describing functionality rather than in terms of helping people to know what to do next. Because it has an index which is a web page, limited searching is available but beyond that it can be rather difficult to find a relevant manual entry. The pace of recent development has been fast – bravo Pierre, that is great! – but the documentation has not kept pace with that development. Often the only way to find out about recent functionality is to search web forum posts, and this is not a very precise process.

In addition, some long-standing functionality is simply badly or inadequately described. For example, the documentation of SQL use has been driving me crazy because it has involved me in a significant amount of my own research in an attempt to understand what is going on and subsequently to document it. I have similarly had difficulties in making effective use of the Gantt chart view for project planning. I would be quite happy to write some InfoQube documentation if I knew what I was talking about. But in many cases the only person who does know what they’re talking about is Pierre himself. And Pierre is a scarce resource on whom we already depend very significantly. Whatever we do must minimise the amount of time he has to spend.

Here is a concrete suggestion for a way forward. At https://dub130.mail.live.com/?tid=cm_tLxJA2i5BGbswAhWtnfhg2&fid=flsearch&srch=1&skws=hangout&sdr=4&satt=0, David_H suggested the use of a Google+ hangout – see http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/. It would even be possible to integrate Google + hangout usage into the Drupal-based InfoQube website, but only if that website moved forward to a more recent version of Drupal. See: https://www.drupal.org/project/hangouts. This forum website development is not a priority for Pierre. Therefore my initial suggestion would be that we use Google+ hangouts independently of the IQ forum.

Some active IQ forum users, such as Tom and myself, live and work in Europe and are therefore six hours ahead of even the eastern seaboard of North America (CET = EST+6). My core availability in European terms is approximately 06:00 to 18:30 and again 21:00 to 22:00 Therefore my core availability in eastern seaboard terms is midnight to midday 30 and again 15:00 to 16:00. I suspect that Tom will have similar constraints.

Why is there any need to interact in real-time? Here are some suggestions; I am sure that Pierre will wish to make counter-proposals.

Concerning documentation of new features. My suggestion would be that at the point in time at which Pierre gives advance notice of features in the next release, he tries, wherever possible, to drag together some notes on what he has done or is proposing to do. These should be made available off-line on the Google+ hangout. This will enable forum members to prepare questions in advance of a specific, timed, limited-duration online chat. Similarly, specific, timed, limited-duration sessions should be devoted to topics which forum users are having specific difficulty with. If it were possible to aim for perhaps one such hangout session per week, then one such session per month should be devoted to the concerns of new users. One or two should be devoted to new functionality. And one should be devoted to topic areas suggested by forum members with which they have had difficulty or where they have something interesting to share with others.

For each such session, one person should volunteer to maintain a record of the interactions which take place and to make it available off-line. I would prefer to use something like Google+ hangouts to the use of Skype simply because it is easier to maintain a record of what has been discussed and what has been agreed.