====== Set Window of Discussion ======


Due to the self-determined growth of Wiki content, the effort needs to be refocused from time to time. For certain content, setting a **Window of Discussion** encourages a burst of contributions to get the content up to a certain level of quality, or helps draw attention to neglected sections of your knowledge base.

===== Example =====

Pages documenting how to resolve certain issues in your project contain half-answers and haven't been touched for months. You create a meta-view that lists the pages, reverse sorted by the last date they were updated, to encourage people to work on the stale pages. You then post a notice stating that pages older than a certain number of days will be frozen, hidden, or removed (depending on the nature of the information). You also set the expectation with your contributors so they take a look at the pages. The 'important' or 'sponsored' old pages are soon updated to avoid the deadline, while the less important pages are allowed to be purged from the system.

===== Symptoms =====

You may want to apply this pattern if:

  * Documents remain in an uncertain state for too long. (See  [Stale Pages]  ).
  * Open issues are not answered. (See  [Sponsorship]  ).
  * Articles and/or comments often wander **far** from the stated purpose (See [[SingleProblem]] ).

===== Solution =====

  * Look at open issues and social tags denoting hypotheses on a regular basis. Then prioritize and assign a deadline to open issues. ( [[Maintainer|Maintainer]] role).
  * Set a date that the survey or discussion will be closed (and close it).
  * Set a release date where the work of the group will be presented to some audience. ( [[BarnRaising]] pattern).

===== Related Patterns =====

  * A [[BarnRaising]] is another way to focus energies for a short time.
  * A [[Maintainer]] can help encourage others to keep things fresh and rolling.
  * Using the [[|SingleProblem]] pattern will help to focus discussion.
  * Documents with [[Built-in obsolescence]] often become stale, not because of a lack of interest, but because the nature of the document itself.

===== References =====

This contribution was initially taken from Using Wikis to Manage Use Cases: Experience and Outlook, page 113 of  [[http://www.se.uni-hannover.de/events/LSOplusRE/LSOplusRE-Proceedings-web-v1.0.pdf|Proceedings of Workshop on Learning Software Organizations and Requirements Engineering\]]