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

Thu Jun 14 18:13:18 UTC 2012

Some input from a relatively new member of the community who is
strictly an "asker" and not (yet! :-) an answerer...

* As a new member of the community, I wouldn't have any objection to
registering an SO account to be able to ask questions.  By the time
you commit yourself to installing CKAN and run into your first major
roadblock, you've already invested a LOT more time than is required
for a quick website signup :-)

* +1 the notion that use of SO eventually results in a useful,
Google-prominent archive/knowledge base, somewhat moreso (IMHO) than
mail archives.

* Pretty much *all* of my questions so far have been
deployment/install/config-related and definitely not
development-related.  Just mentioning that in case the "what kind of
questions?" meta-question becomes important.

* I just want to add that I've been working in various Free Software
communities for over ten years now and the CKAN-Dev list is easily one
of the most helpful and responsive group of devs I've had the pleasure
of interacting with.  So whatever system you all think would help you
keep that up sounds good to me :-)

Thanks for all the support!
Jim

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 10:54 AM, 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> ckan-dev mailing list
> ckan-dev at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-dev

-- 
-----
Jim Craner, 2012 Fellow
Code for America
jim at codeforamerica.org
(+1) 773-809-4546
http://codeforamerica.org