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

Thu Mar 29 10:28:33 PDT 2012

Doesn't nabble provide a forum like interface to the mailing lists? If
that isn't sufficient I know gmane does.

+1 on closing/relocating the forums (as expected since I'm in the
advanced crowd that dislikes forum technology)

...goes to like QGIS on all the social media...

Thanks,
Alex

On 03/28/2012 05:30 AM, Andreas Neumann wrote:
> +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 Forums are a pretty outdated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
> 