Hi All
There's been the odd bit of discussion around StackOverflow on various lists,
but I thought this was probably the best place to discuss things.
Firstly, I want to make clear that I'm not suggesting we abandon all our user
lists, and shift everything over to stackoverflow!
However, for quite a few projects, there is an active community of people over
on stackoverflow answering questions on our projects. If a project was to want
to engage more with that community, what's involved? What should be in place
before a project starts suggesting that SO might be the place for some users
for some questions?
Personally, I've been playing with SO for a few weeks now. For some of the tags
around projects I'm interested in, I've seen people I've never encountered on
our lists giving excellent answers to questions. In other cases, I've managed
to get people to submit bug reports and patches to the project for their
probems and solutions, which seems to me to be a win.
(I don't think that having our own SO site is likely to work - we'd loose out
on the existing community that's much of the draw)
Before a project might list its stackoverflow tag as something to use from its
website (as we currently do for our mailing lists, and in some cases things
like nabble), what's needed?
One thing that springs to mind is the licensing. Can we get SO to dual license
content on our tags?
Next up is probably visibility. Could we get the feather logo shown? Is that
worth having? Can we get an aggregation point of all our tags?
The content itself on our tags would need backing up. That way, if SO ever went
under, we wouldn't loose the content. (Even if we couldn't immediately read
it...). Can we use the API to do that? Can we make it work in a way that infra
can easily support?
What about cross polination between the mailing list and SO? Do we post the
list of questions to the mailing list, or simply require that interested people
sign up to both? Pros, cons?
How about existing committers coming to SO. How can we ensure they have enough
rep to quickly take part in the tag for their project? And what about
moderation of the tag, should we push for extra access?
Anything else?
Nick
