openstack team mailing list archive

[Lorin Hochstein <lorin@xxxxxxx>]

On May 4, 2011, at 1:02 PM, Everett Toews wrote:

> 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

On Area 51 they use the QnA format to do discussions. If you click "create new discussion" on a proposal, it's equivalent to asking a question on a Stack Exchange site.

Here's an example discussion question from the computational science Area 51 proposal: http://discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/questions/320/shall-we-unite-computational-science-proposals


Lorin
--
Lorin Hochstein, Computer Scientist
USC Information Sciences Institute
703.812.3710
http://www.east.isi.edu/~lorin

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