The Carrot Project

A few thoughts:

(1) Sadly, I don’t think the community is big enough to consistently respond quickly to questions posted in the feedback forum.

(2) Which means I should have jumped right on it. Which I did not. For which I’m sorry.

(3) A few days late, here’s what I could find:

(3-a) This is a list of the “greenest” monitors according to EPEAT, an seemingly EPA-affiliated manager and enforcer of a set of electronics-specific environmental standards. Worth noting that the LG Flatron W2252TE, which looks like it might be the most efficient monitor on the market is not on the that list.

(3-2) The Mac Mini itself makes some pretty bold environmental claims.

(Follow up to 3-2) As much as I love the computer with which I’m typing this comment, I take everything Apple says about its crunchiness with a bucketful of salt. The fact that they stamp “Designed in California” on all their products is a worry in my opinion. I’m pretty sure it’s an attempt to mislead people into thinking those products are not manufactured in poor, faraway places under what very well might be less-than-strict human rights and environmental standards.

(X) I wonder what would happen if we let people tag feedback-type submissions as Questions. Let users tick a box when submitting. Create an RSS feed for submissions with the tag. Put a link to Questions on the feedback home page. Eventually, evolve it into Stack Overflow’s long haired vegan brother? Crunch Overflow? Hmmm…

The information you dug up on computer monitors represents an expert perspective, and should go into the computer monitor product category.

Two issues to consider before slapping a “question” tag on the feedback forum.

First, the purpose of the feedback forum (I thought) was discussion about the site, and are you going to get the right folks looking at these questions and answers if you haven’t branded the forum as a QA forum?

Second, even if the QA section is properly labelled / advertised, you still might have this troublesome chicken and egg problem of community and content which makes it difficult to see if the iteration has been successful.

So if you go the QA forum or what you ask would be something along the lines of “What is the crunchiest computer monitor I can get” and the rated answers would be links to expert opinions. Trusted editors would then put this information into the CP database.

Finally: A new project proposal, community driven munchies QA site: Snack Overflow

I share Wiley’s hesitation about muddying the purpose of the Feedback forum by making it a dual-purpose feedback/Q&A forum. If we want to provide an area for Q&A about general crunchiness topics (that don’t fit into any existing product category), let’s make an area of the site dedicated to that. Doing so wouldn’t be much more work than adding some kind of tag to feedback posts - we’d just be repurposing existing code for posts and comments.

@Wiley

The thumbs up a gave you goes for both your Q&A thinking and the Snack Overflow idea.

@the-thread-in-general

I agree that a dual-purpose space might be confusing, and creating a dedicated Q&A world within CP would def be better. I was just wondering if there might be a small step that would push us in that direction. Maybe not. Maybe we need to seriously commit to it. And, if that’s the case, I bet we’ll know when we need to commit; I bet it’ll happen because people start asking and answering heaps of questions in the Feedback space. So, for now, I guess the thing to do is pay attention (and respond more quickly when people ask questions).

So has a computer monitors category been started w/ that expert perspective that Jake linked to above?

I’m going to hold off on adding monitors as a category. It’ll be a little tricky turning EPEAT rankings into an expert perspective, given that they evaluate product by product, not brand by brand, so, before thinking about monitors, I’m going to see about translating EPEAT’s opinions on laptops into an expert perspective.

@Jake

You’re my content-adding-hero.