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

Mon Jun 18 11:16:41 UTC 2012

> Any thoughts on attempting to start a new CKAN-focused StackExchange site  (
> http://stackexchange.com/sites)?  A proposal can be submitted at
> http://area51.stackexchange.com/.  It would take some concentrated effort
> by the community to get it from a proposal to a live site but the CKAN
> community is very active so this might be possible.

They set the bar for this quite high. I think anyone can propose a new
site, then for it to become a beta site it needs to get 40 hypothetical
questions with at least 10 more upvotes than downvotes for each
question, and enough users have to sign a digital petition saying that
they're committed to the new site (the number of signatures required is
not defined, afaik). Then to survive the beta phase the site has to be
used enough or it gets deleted (the required amount of usage is also not
defined, afaik). To be honest, if we can't get a tag going on stack
overflow then I don't think we're likely go get a stack exchange site
past beta, but if someone wants to take this on and give it a try, I
would be happy to help.

If we want a Q&A site it might be easier (as Rufus suggested a while
ago) just to host our own, OSQA looks like the most promising software
for it: http://www.osqa.net/

This would lose the advantage of all the potential interest and exposure
from being part of something larger such as stackoverflow, and would
mean we'd have to maintain the software ourselves, but we would have
control of it.

To be honest, I've gone off stack overflow a little bit, I happened to
browse it with adblock turned off, and realised that it's covered in big
banner ads in-between the questions and answers. Also, building a big
community around many federated, self-hosted instances of something like
OSQA would be better for the internet than something closed source and
centralised like SO.

P.S. I did post a couple more CKAN questions to SO and answer them
myself (which is totally encouraged on SO), but I don't have enough
points to tag them ckan. Maybe if someone with enough points tags these,
we can give the SO tag another go:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11066850/how-to-build-ckans-docs/11066852#11066852

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11066711/how-to-use-virtualenvwrapper-for-ckan-development/11066712#11066712