Comments below On May 4, 2011, at 8:48 AM, Jordan Rinke wrote:
> Because there is still debate over a forum or a QnA site I will wait to see > what the decision is tomorrow before making any demo sites for review. The > problem still is that the QnA solves a different issue, it provides a means > to answer very specific questions not a realm for discussion. A user forum > allows people to ask questions which require discussion and may have various > trade offs. Not just "how do I get a list of all running instances using the > euca2ools" which would be a great QnA question but questions like "How do I > HA my mySQL DB for Nova" a question that will involve discussion, multiple > potential answers based on their configuration and have trade offs depending > on what they are wanting. There will be no specifically right answer. I think > a number of people are failing to fully understand that not everyone is a > developer and not everyone has the understanding to ask a very specific and > provably solved question, and that not all questions are even specifically > solvable but that the discussion around those provides valuable information > for the community. As an avid user of QnA sites, I think they actually solve general questions very well. Examples: http://serverfault.com/questions/3780/useful-command-line-commands-on-windows http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14967/c-coding-standard-best-practices It still allows for discussions (see the back and forth in comments on posts), but still allows good responses to rise to the top. I find this far easier than scrolling through 10+ pages of discussion to find relevant issues. Administrators can convert popular questions into "community wiki" and allow them to be collaboratively edited more easily. > > A QnA site is basically an evolution of the mailing list which makes it > fairly obvious that everyone who loves the ML loves the QnA it is an > extension of the same concept but it is to narrow to accept the user > community as a whole. I don't think this is accurate. The mailing list forces people to search inefficiently for answers just like a forum. QnA would be more of a replacement for the Answers section on launchpad. > > For a moment, stop thinking as someone who has experience (possibly in depth > developer experience) with OpenStack and think like someone who has heard a > little about it, wants to talk to someone about the test install the are > attempting to run but doesn't know how to go about it. If we want mass > adoption we need to provide a welcome area for this type of discussion. We > can develop the best software in the world but if we don't make it easy for > people to use and understand and discuss it is useless. We should be doing > everything we can to make the community as accepting of new members as > possible and I think a forum is very much so one of those methods. This is the real value of a forum, the feeling of community that it provides. The common memes that are shared by forum members and the semi-off-topic back and forth is fantastic. Forums are great for these things, but for actual access to information, QnA sites basically win. Having a forum for community building is fine, but if our goal is really solving user's problems, I think we definitely need a good QnA site. > > I am not even saying that the Qna needs to be exclusive, we can have both if > that seems right... I don't know at what point we decided they were mutually > exclusive. Both seems fine to me, I only worry that we will have too many places that people are asking questions and not enough people answering them. > > > -----Original Message----- > From: "Vishvananda Ishaya" <vishvana...@gmail.com> > Sent: Wednesday, May 4, 2011 11:15am > To: openstack@lists.launchpad.net > Subject: [SPAM] Re: [Openstack] Creating a forum > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~openstack > Post to : openstack@lists.launchpad.net > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~openstack > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp > A few people have mentioned the stack exchange style idea. I think this is a > fantastic idea; StackOverflow, etc. has been extremely useful to me. Since it > is free to host a subdomain on StackExchange if there is enough support, we > might as well get the ball rolling in addition. This could replace or be in > addition to a forum. > > Note that this is not any kind of "official" decision to use Stack Exchange, > but if we want to leave ourselves the opportunity to use it we need to get it > started soon because it will likely take a couple of weeks. I went ahead and > proposed it here: > > http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/31788/openstack > > if this seems like a good idea to you, follow it and create and vote on > example questions. It would start as a community site. If there is enough > support on the site we can decide (with the ppb) whether we want it to be an > "official" channel. > > Vish >
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