Ask an Expert (AaE) has been rethought and rebuilt from the ground up. Come learn about the new version. We’ll cover a bunch of new features such as the introduction of groups, tagging, widgets and forms, simpler routing and assignments, plus one of the biggest changes — the ability to share questions and answers publicly at the new Ask site. There will also be time for a Q&A and feedback on the app.

1. Ask an Expert 2.0
Ben MacNeill
eXtension

2. Big Picture
• Sharing/Public (opt-in)
• Groups
• Simpler assignment rules and interfaces
• Better mobile
• Better search
• Better notifications
• Evaluations

3. What I’m
Covering Today
• Groups
• Categories, Tags & Areas of Expertise
• Getting Questions into AaE
• Assignments
• Openness & Privacy

4. Groups
• Groups were created from:
• Every widget
• Every primary “Area of Expertise”
• Question Wrangler community

5. What can you
do with Groups?
• Assign questions directly to a group
• Groups can decide if they want a “Question
pool” or individual assignments
• Define geographic region and only accept
questions that match it
• Decide if the question submitter has the choice
to make their question public.

6. Categories, Tags &
Areas of Expertise
• The category hierarchy (49 terms and
growing) didn’t work well.
• Each expert’s “areas of expertise” have been
converted to tags for that expert.
• Sub-categories for each “area of expertise”
have been converted to tags for that group.
• The tagging UI is designed to make it easy to
use existing terms.

7. Getting Questions
into AaE
• Current model
• the multi-purpose Ask form on
www.extension.org
• Individual Ask widgets embedded in
thousands of pages across the web

8. The Goal
• The trend: widget submissions are
outstripping www submissions
• Continue to increase the number of
questions that come in through dedicated
widgets

9. How
• Existing widgets
• Group’s Ask form (each group has a
dedicated URL)
• A generic Ask form (which sends questions
directly to the QW group)
• Every piece of content on www will have a
link to the group’s Ask form or include its
embedded widget.

10. Question Wranglers
• Will handle groupless questions
• Will handle location non-matches
• Use the new reassignment UI to assign to
the best Group or Expert

11. Simplified Rules
• Questions from widgets or via Group Ask
pages are assigned to that Group.
• UNLESS the group has defined a
geographic area. Non-matches go to the
QW Group.
• Questions submitted through the generic
Ask form are assigned to the QW group

12. Automatic vs Manual
• Automatic assignments are only based on
question source (i.e. which widget/form)
and geographic location.
• Manual reassignments use tags and/or
geography to find a matching group or
expert.

13. Groups and Experts
• Define locations (for automatic assignments)
• Define tags (for manual assignments)
• In the future, may experiment with tag-based
automatic assignments

14. Openness and Privacy
• Public sharing is opt-in
• Questions can be marked public, and are publicly
searchable and browsable
• Robust GA tracking baked into Public questions
• Limited Group Expert profiles are publicly viewable
• e.g. default: Ben M.
• Ability for the public to comment

15. Who Controls Privacy?
• The submitter can choose to make a
question public
• Experts can choose to make public
questions private
• Groups can choose to give submitters the
option (default is private)
• All existing questions will be marked
private when migrated to AaE 2.0

16. Time Line
• 3 weeks out (hopefully)
• The demo site is running:
http://dev.ask.extension.org
• The look and feel is an evolving design

17. Thanks!