[Qgis-user] Re: Donations -> Knowledge mananagment platform

Wed Mar 28 05:30:45 PDT 2012

 +1 for shutting down the forums in favour of mailing lists and 
 stackexchange and potentially social media (if someone maintains that 
 stuff).

 Andreas

 On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:30:48 +0200, Anita Graser wrote:
> Hi Bernd,
>
> Thanks for your thoughts and feedback.
>
> As a QGIS forum moderator, I've had some discussions about the forums
> with some of the QGIS developers. As you might know, developers don't
> frequent the forums. The feedback I got was that they prefer the
> mailing lists and I can't blame them. Forums are a pretty outdated
> technology in my eyes.
>
> I'm also on gis.stackexchange. Their technology solves a lot of the
> issues classic forums have. You can tag questions and it's easy to
> spot which question has been answered and what the answer is. So 
> maybe
> we could have a QGIS stackexchange site and close the forums? OSM has
> a stackexchange site for example.
>
> We could also close the forums and tell everyone to use
> gis.stackexchange instead. That would reduce maintenance necessary on
> our side. It would also increase visibility of QGIS in the eyes of
> ESRI folks if more QGIS questions pop up on stackexchange. 
>
> Personally, I would welcome shutting down the forums since it would
> free me of the repetitive work of deleting dozens of spam threads
> every day. 
>
> Regards,
>
> Anita
>
>  On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Bernd Vogelgesang  wrote:
>
>> A.S: err ... only replied to Gary directly ... really don't know how
>> to work with mailing lists:
>>
>> Hi Gary,
>> hope my non-diplomatic style is not too embarrassing.
>>
>> Now, the mailing list here seems to be the place for the power users
>> and developers, but how do i retrieve infos from that? i already
>> store all those mails and try to do local text search in my mail
>> client, to find answers. But here, the threads are scattered over
>> several digests, and i can't see a way how to get a grip on that in
>> more structured way.
>>
>> The forum seems to be mainly used by novice users, who get answers
>> by a handful of advanced people.
>> The default forum settings are set that you won't get an email
>> notification when someone is answering, so a huge amount of threads
>> die, because the thread-initiators and participants don't get aware
>> that there is something going on. I already asked to change that,
>> but to no avail so far.
>> Then, there are only 3 really useful categories (from the users
>> point of view): 
>>
>> Help on using QGIS
>> Build and Install questions
>> Share Tips, Tricks and Ideas
>>  
>> Here most of the communication is done in the first.
>> It's very hard to find threads about a special problem, cause all
>> the topics are just stuffed into one big bucket and novice users
>> often lack the terminology to do successful full-text search to find
>> answers.
>> Solved problems are mostly not marked as such, so you have to do a
>> lot of reading and searching which ends up very often with no
>> results.
>>
>> Then there is this
>> wiki(http://hub.qgis.org/wiki/quantum-gis/How_do_I_do_that_in_QGIS
>> [1]), which is in a concurrence to the "Share Tips, Tricks and
>> Ideas" and it seems that there is not a lot going on too.
>> (besides, writing an article and writing an article in a wiki where
>> you need just another account are two different things and which
>> rejects a lot of people)
>>
>> What i propose is a platform with a single login, which combines all
>> those functions of the forum, mailing lists and wikis.
>> Posts of any kind should be able to be tagged with an activly
>> developed hierachical taxonomy for easier retrieval and
>> interconnection of different types of content.
>>
>> Especially the enormous modularity of QGIS with all its plugins
>> needs a better and more structured way of getting informations of
>> what this and that modules does, what which setting means, what bugs
>> people found, how they found workarounds etc. All this could be
>> accessible just by one taxonomy term with the name of the modul for
>> example, spiced up with sorting for popularity, ratings or whatever.
>>
>>
>> There should also be a group system for different audiences,
>> projects, interests, languages (not everyone is a fluent english
>> reader or writer) so people are able to pick the stuff that suits
>> them and subscribe to certain groups, taxonomy terms, projects,
>> events, working fields etc. and get notified in a structured way
>> when something of their interest had occured.
>>
>> The easier the access to already produced knowledge, the more likely
>> it will be that some people take the effort and collect the bits for
>> own articles, tutorials, working examples etc.
>>
>> I never managed to build sth that i propose myself so far, but i
>> invest quite a time investigating "better" ways to connect
>> communities and generate and preserve knowledge.
>> By doing so, i stumbled upon drupal some years ago, where i see a
>> lot of tools (nearly too many) to build sth that would provide all
>> means to develope a communication and knowledge management strategy.
>>
>> There maybe other platforms, but drupal is the only one i know
>> enough about to be sure that it could solve a lot of issues with a
>> modest investment in time and infrastructure.
>>
>> Thanks for your time
>> Bernd
>>
>> Am 27.03.2012, 20:34 Uhr, schrieb Gary Sherman :
>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 27, 2012, at 10:25 AM, Bernd Vogelgesang wrote:
>> >
>>>> There are more modern and sustainable ways for exchanging
>> knowledge and
>>>> provide user interaction than this. Just my 2 cents, do not wanna
>>
>>>> insult anyone with this.)
>>>>
>> >
>>> Such as?
>>>
>>> -gary
>>>
>>> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>>> Gary Sherman
>>> GeoApt LLC
>>> http://geoapt.com [3]
>>> Founder, Quantum GIS
>> > Chair, QGIS PSC
>>> Book:
>>> http://geospatialdesktop.com [4]
>>> "We work virtually everywhere"
>>> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>> >
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Bernd Vogelgesang * Siedlerstrasse 2 * 91083 Baiersdorf *
>> +49-9133-825374 [5]
>> _______________________________________________
>> Qgis-user mailing list
>> Qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org [6]
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user [7]
>
>
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://hub.qgis.org/wiki/quantum-gis/How_do_I_do_that_in_QGIS
> [2] mailto:gsherman at geoapt.com
> [3] http://geoapt.com
> [4] http://geospatialdesktop.com
> [5] http://webmail.carto.net/tel:%2B49-9133-825374
> [6] mailto:Qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
> [7] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
> [8] mailto:bernd.vogelgesang at gmx.de

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