It seems like the Collections feature of Observable is still a bit of a special case: From what I can tell, only the side admins can create or edit collections.
First question: Is there a plan to at some point have user created/user editable collections?
Second question: If the collections are to stay a special feature, how big do you intend to let them grow?
Third question: If we encounter (or make) a notebook that seems relevant to some collection (e.g. Techniques or Explorables) what is the protocol for nominating it to be added? Is there some expected content/quality standard (possibly different between different collections)? Is there any kind of review process? (Code review is generally pretty helpful, but Iām not sure what a code review workflow looks like for observable notebooks.)
Itās quite possible that this particular notebook is not aimed at a general enough audience to match the collection, or should have various features added before inclusion. Itās mostly an example to start discussion here.
As another concrete example, Iād nominate @filās notebook for the Maps collection (though Iād suggest he might want to pick a different color than orange). Among other things itās a nice demonstration of ideas bouncing back and forth between members of the community.
And I canāt believe @jashkenasās inputs notebook isnāt yet part of the Techniques collection:
So, right now - yep, only admins create and edit collections, and we arenāt making very many of them. At this stage in the siteās growth, we really want collections to be an on-ramp for new users, so are being pretty picky about the content and quality of them, because itās likely that theyāll be many peoplesā first impression of Observable.
Weāll definitely add more user-accessible similar tools, and more ways to explore notebooks by topic - but itās not yet clear whether thatāll be similar to collections. For stuff like āMapsā, there are potentially hundreds of related notebooks, and organizing them in a big list doesnāt do much good. So itās likely that weāll settle more on āTopicsā or something more like tagging, for the next wave of site organization. Itās more of a community-dynamics challenge than a technical one - we want a good balance of surfacing great content, and making things participatory.
That Bezier notebook is excellent! Iāll wait until everyoneās back in the office before making any executive decisions about what to add, though
Right. At the moment itās pretty tricky to follow what people are working on and figure out which parts are worth examining. The only real options are (a) a firehose of all published notebooks, (b) individual usersā pages, (c) stuff linked from this discussion forum, or (d) Collections. The firehose contains a lot of peopleās half-broken experiments and forks that didnāt really change the original too much, which I donāt necessarily want to examine in detail. Figuring out which users are worth following is not trivial.
Iām not sure what the best mechanism is for better organizing/surfacing notebooks and building community is. Maybe other folks reading along have some other ideas.
Another thing I wonder about is helping people curate their profile. Right now the āprofileā page is just a time-ordered stream of all published notebooks, which is likely to be littered with tiny experiments, forks, half-finished tools, etc. This doesnāt necessarily indicate which notebooks an author considers interesting or important, and doesnāt necessarily help an author to build a narrative; the good stuff tends to just scroll off the bottom, where itās hard to find again (similar to the global firehose but not quite as high-volume).
.@jrus & .@tom yeah, surfacing notebooks by Topics with ability to hashtag slugs and sorting that list by most frequently visited or viewed, allowing others to create their own collections, and pinning notebooks you create on your profile page to order them could potentially assist in growing notebooks discovery. My personal notes on that here:
