On 12/05/2011 19:34, Mohammad Nour El-Din wrote:
On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Ross Gardler<rgard...@apache.org> wrote:
On 12/05/2011 15:09, Nick Burch wrote:
...
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?
I was exactly looking into the same idea, but in a simpler way as a
start and assuming that SO is not an official channel but it is
something that it is nice to have and exposes what is going on on SO
inside Apache projects' mailing lists.
The idea is we can have configurable bot(s)/service which can be
configured to monitor questions asked on certain tags and their
related answers, and this bot can then send these questions, either
one question per e-mail or a digest of questions and answers,
committers then can login with their own SO account and answer the
question of interest which also will be sent to the mailing list as an
answer.
I'm not sure this is a good idea. It invisibly merges activity in one
place with activity in another. The reason I suggested a digest and a
summary answer was to:
a) differentiate the source
b) avoid flooding user lists
c) avoid triggering a discussion on the official channel that is not
received on SO
This is only as an initial integration, which has an advantage of
being listed and archived in the mailing list like any other e-mail
that can be sent directly to the ML.
There's the problem (at least for me) it is not "any other e-mail". The
communication was not sent to the mail list. We can't treat it the same
without causing confusion.
For the tags used when asking a question each Apache project can add
some information about that on their own site like they do when adding
information about ML(s) and IRC channels, so users can know about
these tags. And this is going to be optional as the service will be
available and configurable by committers who have access to it, just
like what is done now with CI services, like Hudson/Jenkins for
example.
I thought you said this was unofficial? What you describe above is "a
service configurable by committers... just like what is done with CI
services". Who is running this service? Who is maintaining it?
The moment this "service" is maintained by the ASF on ASF infrastructure
it becomes official and we need to maintain it. I'm not saying that is
impossible but infra@ will, quite rightly, resist anything that is not
fully supported and demanded by a significant number of projects.
Now, if you want to provide this as a codebase (perhaps on
apache-extras?) that projects can opt to install on their zone or some
third party server that's fine. This would be an unofficial service that
does not require infra@ to expend resources maintaining. If it's taken
up by many projects and a community emerges maybe it can become official.
[NOTE: I'm ignoring the question of whether we can do this legally for
now. This will need to be answered before anyone used such a solution]
I found a place where they describe how to use the Stack Exchange API
[1], which I can play with on my machine and I can comeback with a
feedback by the end of next week.
Sounds great.
Also I found this [2] which I am not sure what it is yet, but it seems
that you can build queries which we can publish some statistics using
it, I am not sure yet but I have to make sure of that.
Like Nick I'm interested in the "unknown community" that exists in SO.
I'm particularly interested in bringing that community into our own
communities. One way is to adopt their tools in some way, as you
describe. Another is to figure out who these people are and point our
communities at their good work.
If [2] can help in doing this then I'd be very interested in anything
you can do with it. It seems, on the surface, to be much easier, legally
sound and provides a quicker "win".
Ross
Thoughts ?
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
[1] - http://stackapps.com/
[2] - http://data.stackexchange.com/
