think about Panta Course forum for refereeing (private discussions)

[kohlhase]

This issue is mostly for putting down (remembering) my thoughts on the matter and for discussions.

The integration of the OGgroups into the new forum together with the idea of localized discussions gives us possibilities that we have not thought about much before, but this is something we shoudl (eventually) take advantage of.

Here are some ideas. Since forums are private to a particular, group, we can have private discussion forums in PantaRhei. So if we give students the opportunity to form private groups (that should be possible) we could also give them a private forum. I am not sure whether this is a good idea didactially, but we could do this now.

But for the Planetary System as a whole this would be even more interesting. For instance, I have long wanted to use localized discussions for refereeing of papers. The referee could have a general node for the referee report that has a text field (and maybe some numerical judgments) and a referee forum attached to the referee report, which would mostly be localized comments following the stackoverflow model we have implemented. For every object O to be refereed, we would need an OGGroup R(O) of the referees, and another A+R(O) for the authors + referees, probably the author group A(O) already existed before, since they have written the object together anyways. For refereeing the referees would read the paper and attach local comments and write reports. Then the referees could discuss the situation and iterate the reports inside R(O), and then they could open all but the confidential parts to A+R(O), for rebuttal and clarification, maybe even shepherding (controlled mprovement of O). Later some of the coments could enven be opened to the public.

I think this would be very attractive for the OAFF, but possibly (in simplified form) for PlanetMath and maybe even for problems/solutions/grading in PantaRhei.