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

Thu Jun 14 18:09:27 UTC 2012

+1

On 6/14/12 1:54 PM, "Sean Hammond" <sean.hammond at okfn.org> wrote:

>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
>
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