openstack team mailing list archive

[Vishvananda Ishaya <vishvananda@xxxxxxxxx>]

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" <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
>