[ckan-dev] Proposal - direct CKAN questions to stackoverflow.com

Thu Jun 14 17:54:22 UTC 2012

Hey, I'd like to propose that we direct questions about CKAN and
thedatahub to stackoverflow.com.

We should keep the mailing lists because we'll still need them for
discussion, announcements, certain kinds of questions/requests for help
that don't fit into stackoverflow's format, and for people who don't
want to use stackoverflow.

But I'm proposing that on ckan.org/contact and other places where we
put our mailing lists and email addresses, we should put at the top of
that list something like:

   # Ask a Question on Stack Overflow

   We watch the CKAN tag on Stack Overflow, you can post a question
   there and get an answer quickly. Make sure you tag your question with
   CKAN!

You need to have at least 4000 points on stackoverflow to make a new
tag, but I happen to know someone who has this many points, so once the
first CKAN question has been posted I can ask him to tag it for us (in
return he'll get a badge if the CKAN tag that he created gets over 50
questions).

Here's an example of a CKAN tag for a project:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/subsonic

I've given this some thought, and in my opinion the pros outweigh the
cons:

+ You get a good, searchable archive of CKAN questions and answers
+ There are lots of people on SO and questions show up in google searches,
  good exposure for CKAN
+ You get points for asking and answering questions. Much like having
  your code on github, it looks good and people look at it when you're
  applying for jobs etc.
+ Might encourage more people from outside of the CKAN team to ask and
  answer questions
+ You can subscribe to the CKAN tag and it will send you an email
  whenever a new question gets posted
+ We also get an RSS feed for the tag. Might be useful, e.g. for the
  CKAN website?
+ All the Q and A's on SO are CC licensed.

- SO itself is not open source
- People need to sign up for an SO account and click through SO's page
  about how to ask good questions before they can post. Arguably less of
  a PITA than signing up to a mailing for many people, though
- Some of the questions we get on the CKAN mailing list might be
  off-topic for SO, which is supposed to be about programming. I think
  questions about installing and deploying things might be okay.
  Questions like is this a bug?/this isn't working for me? I'm not so
  sure about
- It might just split the community and mean having to check and answer
  questions on both SO and the mailing lists
- We can't control what questions and answers people vote up and tick as being
  the correct answer
- We might not be able to edit the text at the top of the CKAN tag page
  (which should say what CKAN is and link to the website etc) without
  asking someone to do it for us, because you need a lot of SO points to
  do that, see
  http://stackoverflow.com/privileges/approve-tag-wiki-edits
- You can't download SO Q&A's for reading and answering offline like you
  can with email. I don't know whether there's an API.

By the way, I think SO themselves are fine with open source projects
encouraging people to ask questions on SO, as long as the SO tag is one
of several places people can go to discuss the project, rather than
trying to make an SO tag into the official support forum of the project:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/13282

Also, apparently it's okay to post and answer your own questions about
your own product:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/133522/encyclopedia-stack-exchange-vs-commercial-products