Procid facilitates consensus building by supporting the participants in understanding the current content and status of the discussion, keeping track of the solution alternatives, evaluating the solution alternatives, maintaining a welcoming atmosphere, and inviting other members to join the discussion. To calrify how Procid supports these actions, we explain the interaction of three participants with Procid: Lisa, Ben, and Susan. They are using procid to resolve an issue that aims at improving description of Drupal’s install profile. Lisa is a UI designer who has participated in Drupal for 1.5 years, Ben is an experienced developer who has been in Drupal community for 7 years, and Lisa is a developer with 3 years of experience in Drupal community who is also interested in UI design.
Susan was involved at the beginning of the discussion, but she got busy with other discussions and now that she is back she needs to understand the current state of the discussion. She starts by applying the must read lens in the Time-based view, to make sure that she read all the must read comments.
Ben is invited to the discussion to provide code review, he first reviews the must read comments to make sense of the discussion. He then applies the third lens to view all the patches and find out what needs to be improved in the next version. Finally, he clicks on the last patch to inspect that more closely and write his review.
Lisa has been actively participating in the discussion from the beginning. She knows that several solution alternatives have been proposed, however she doesn’t remember all of ideas and the reason that some ideas were dropped. She also worries that some ideas may have been lost in the midst of the discussion. She therefore opens the list of proposed alternative in the idea-based view. The list reminds her of the propose alternatives, their status, and the reason some of them were dropped and helps her to keep track of all proposed solutions.
Susan opens the idea-based view to see how other participants evaluated different solution alternatives. She reads participants concerns regarding a couple of alternatives and reviews the list of criteria shown next to each alternative. The criteria list says that the new description for installation profile should be simple. Susan remembers that users were confused about the word “default” in the current description. She thinks that the new description should also be explanatory. Therefore, she decides to add another criterion to the list. She clicks on the edit link next to the criteria and opens the edit criteria window. Then she adds a criterion: “the new description should be explanatory”.
Then she rates the idea that includes the word default as not explanatory and explains her reasons in a comment. Her rating and an icon representing Susan's comment will be shown in the criteria column.
Lisa loses her temper after involving in a heated argument around a solution alternative with another participant. She navigates to the commenting window and starts to write a reply. When she is done, she notices a message stating that her comment is more negative than average comments. She re-reads the comment and decides to edit her comment to sound friendlier.
To help participants in maintaining a welcoming and supportive atmosphere, Procid analyze the content of new comments as participants are writing them. It then compares the tone of the new comment with the median tone of all the comments and informs the user if his comment is more negative than average comments posted in the community.
Ben notices that the discussion has get stalled due to a controversy over implementation. Being in the community for a while, he knows that they need to seek expert advice to move forward with the implementation. He therefore opens the invitation list to see a list of experience members or members with whom he had prior interactions. Using this list, Ben decides to invite Matt to join the discussion.
