[development] Drupal Answers: A Stackoverflow/StackExchange site proposal

[Ronald Ashri]

For the purposes of this and other similar discussions and in order to
help focusing on specific issues we should perhaps split the issues
into two questions:

1, Is their a need for d.o. to update its own user support mechanisms
in order to make it easier for people to ask questions and receive
answers?

 - Looks to me that there is such a need and it seems that people are
already planning to work on this - it depends, as ever, on how many
are willing to commit how much time to get it done.

A related question is:

Can d.o. afford to allow outside organizations take the lead role in
this or should it ensure that d.o. remains the main port of call for
support?

 - This is were the waters get muddier. Some are willing to leave an
outside org "win" the battle, others are not that happy about this.
The results depend (again!) on how many are willing to spend time to
make d.o. better so see question above.

What I would say is that if the outside effort has a valid and proved
model like the StackExchange one we can choose not to directly support
them but I don't think it helps the image of the Drupal community if
we show up and say "You should not be doing this".

ronald.



On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 3:43 AM, Josh Koenig <josh at getpantheon.com> wrote:
>> However, if a project is formed on d.o to create an "EntityUnderrun"
>> install profile, I'll be one of the first to revoke my commit on
>> StackExchange.
>> Justin
>
> Not to undercut my own argument for why a StackExchange site would be nice,
> but this already exists:
> http://drupal.org/project/arrayshift
> And, as far as it goes, this isn't very difficult to do:
> http://engineeredweb.com/blog/09/11/building-stack-overflow-clone-drupal-part-1
> However, the value to me is that nobody has to write any code for us to use
> StackOverflow, people are already using it, it reaches an audience outside
> the normal *.drupal.org sphere, and it will keep getting better as the
> general StackExchange platform gets better.
> If it really takes off and people decide to build a viable clone on
> something.drupal.org, we can easily migrate the Q&A data. They make it all
> available as dumps or via API and user contributions are Creative Commons
> licensed:
> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/
> -j