On 12/05/2011 15:09, Nick Burch wrote:
On Thu, 12 May 2011, Benson Margulies wrote:
No discussion at the ASF is complete until we have had it twice.
Or maybe three times, looks like our emails were sent at the same
time, doh!
Can we merge these two threads. I'm going to respond here for both
threads. Please keep all responses here.
1) Some of us observe that many people are posting questions about
Apache projects on stackoverflow.com. Some of them are getting
good answers, some less so. Some TLPs have taken note of this and
made some effort to provide support there. Some haven't.
And some TLPs are enjoying the good answers being supplied by people
not in their existing community :)
A *very* important point. As far as possible we need to limit the
dilution of our projects support efforts, but we can't (and shouldn't)
control the world. Things will happen outside, we should seek to be
inclusive.
4) Talk to the SEI management about their choice of license.
We'd probably be asking them to dual license code (but probably not
text) in answers to our tags. Not sure how they'd take that, but it
presumably isn't too big a deal. In the mean time, some people
recommend just asking people posting code that they want to push
upstream to agree to re-license.
I don't believe we (ComDev) should be addressing this issue, this one
belongs to legal@ We can ask them to look into it if we have a proposal
to move forwards.
5) Propose an ASF site for SEI at their area51 site.
Again we miss out on the existing community of people answering
questions for us. For me, the big value to SO is that existing
community of smart people answering questions. Personally I find the
SO interface better for some question types, and a mailing list
better for others, it's the community that interests me!
I agree, but most people will not relish the idea of monitoring yet
another channel. Furthermore making another channel "official" in this
way means that we are diluting our support solutions.
Like Nick I'm interested in the community StackOverflow surfaces. How do
we get them more engaged with official support channels? What should
those official support channels be?
[I'm bringing over points from the overlapping thread below]
On 12/05/2011 15:03, Nick Burch wrote:
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?
PMC approval. That's it.
This is not an ASF wide decision, a PMC can adopt Stack Overflow now if
they want to. User support need not be governed by our IP policies.
However, what I don't want to see is developer support moving off ASF
lists.
One thing that springs to mind is the licensing. Can we get SO to
dual license content on our tags?
As I say above, not our concern. This is a legal@ issue. There's no
point in asking legal@ to explore it unless we have a plan to make
StackOverflow a useful part of one or more Apache projects.
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?
If SO becomes an official channel then these points become very
important. If it is an unnofficial channel for some projects, who cares?
The only way I would want to see it becoming an official channel is if
we can tightly integrate it with our current channels. For example, a
daily mail to the user list saying "these questions were asked on SO"
and, after a week of inactivity, the question and highest scored answer
are mailed to our list.
The problem is can we do that (does SO have an API) and will someone
write and maintain the necessary code?
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?
I think my suggestion above covers this (although it only gives a
partial backup of highest rated answers)
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?
Covered by my answer above.
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?
I'd want committers to be recognised with an automatic rep making them
stand out. They've earned their merit here, if SO were an official
channel then that merit should count. If it is an unofficial channel
then this is less of a problem.
As for moderation - no idea since I don't know how this works at
present. I have noticed very little bad content on SO so it sounds good.
Anything else?
Nick
