openstack team mailing list archive

[Everett Toews <everett.toews@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Jordan Rinke <jordan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
>

Agreed, QnA sites are not designed for discussion just as forums are not
designed for QnA. There's actually a pretty succinct answer about it at
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/36818/would-you-recommend-stack-exchange-sites-vs-other-types-of-forum


> 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.
>

IMO forums are an evolution of MLs and QnA are a different concept but what
have you.


> 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.
>
> 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.
>

No such thing was ever decided. My point was simply that if we're evaluating
solutions then StackExchange-style sites shouldn't be disregarded.

If the community decided that both or one or the other is appropriate then
that's what we'll go with. Obviously I prefer the QnA style, I've never
found the forum style helpful even when I'm a n00b on a subject (that's not
even necessarily software development related).

Everett


>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Vishvananda Ishaya" <vishvananda@xxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 4, 2011 11:15am
> To: openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [SPAM] Re: [Openstack] Creating a forum
>
> _______________________________________________
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> 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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