Governance/Proposed/QuestionAndAnswerSoftware

Governance/Proposed/QuestionAndAnswerSoftware
Time:  <>

Drafter: EverettToews

Drafters Email:  <>

Status:  To be completed by POC

There has been a lot of discussion on the dev mailing list about creating a forum for users (starting at https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg02020.html), which I think is a great idea. However, in addition to forum software I would like to see Question and Answer style software (akin to StackOverflow.com) used. In my opinion this style of software is more effective and efficient than traditional forum style software, even considering the relative "greenness" of the user community.

This has been discussed at length on the mailing list and there's no need to reiterate it here. So far the people that have been explicitly in favor of it are:


 * 1) Thierry Carrez
 * 2) Lorin Hochstein
 * 3) Todd Morey
 * 4) Richard Hartman
 * 5) Michael Shuler
 * 6) Rick Clark
 * 7) Everett Toews
 * 8) Ed Leafe
 * 9) Jay Payne
 * 10) Jay Pipes

I propose that we evaluate QnA software and use the selected software at qa.openstack.org. The Open Source QnA software that I am aware of to date is Shapado (https://github.com/ricodigo/shapado) and OSQA (http://www.osqa.net/). To experiment with these you can go to http://meta.osqa.net/ or http://shapado.com/

I would be willing to host an OSQA site for evaluation purposes.