ubuntu-hams team mailing list archive

[Jason Conklin <jason.conklin@xxxxxxxxx>]

> When the first question is, "How can I modify my radio to transmit on
> police frequencies?", I'm thinking this site will need a LOT of help.
>

It's too bad that the site is serving that question first right now
... ultimately the Stack Exchange engine will dynamically generate the
front-page questions list based on recent activity, and I'd say that
one is a bit of a lemon. Many of the questions are a lot better (and
anyway, everything on there is quite young). At this stage, the voting
and responses to the proposed questions are the more important
content.

> I'm not going to debate its value but wouldn't most prospective hams
> find their way to ARRL, QRZ, or eHam first (I honestly don't know as I
> was licensed well before the worldwide web)?

This is my opinion, of course, but I think a Stack Exchange site (with
a critical mass of good minds involved) has potential to far surpass
the usefulness of any of the resources you mentioned. Without going
into too much detail about why, I was really glad to see that this
effort is underway. Mainly because the community-content-moderation
model that Stack Exchange uses has a lot more content filtering power
than the forum/comments-driven content models of eHam or QRZ.

If you're unfamiliar with the Stack Exchange site format, I'd
recommend exploring this example of a mature Stack Exchange site:

http://stackoverflow.com/

I believe it was the first such site --- a collaborative Q&A site for
programmers. It has definitely been useful for me as a fledgling
coder. Since the amateur radio site is still "pre-beta", it doesn't
have the full Q&A features yet. Just my thoughts!

73 de N2NLY, Jason Conklin