[Bioc-devel] BioC on Stackoverflow et al.

Hi,

following the excellent bioc-devel at europe, I collected 
some notes on one of the suggestions of the final discussion:

Because of the (chronic) lack of documentation, 
and a perceived difficulty of sustaining a lively 
and well-organised wiki, there was a question 
whether we want to augment the existing 
resources with something like stackexchange.

I checked questions tagged with R and bioc:

    7 Questions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/bioconductor
 2500 Questions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r

    1 Question:  http://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/bioconductor
  200 Questions: http://stats.stackexchange.com/tags/r

One question would be whether to just join those platforms, 
or whether to apply for a community there. That process 
is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stackexchange#Site_creation_process

An alternative would be to open a community on shapado.com,
which has similar features, a lower entrance hurdle, 
but is less known. Currently there are no questions 
mentioning bioc on shapado. 

We should also have a backup plan in mind what would happen 
if any of those sites go belly-up. It seems to be possible 
to extract data from stackexchange and import into a local 
installation of shapado, which has an AGPLv3 license 
and is developed at http://gitorious.org/

Opinions ?

Yours,
Steffen

IPB Halle                    AG Massenspektrometrie & Bioinformatik
Dr. Steffen Neumann          http://www.IPB-Halle.DE
Weinberg 3                   http://msbi.bic-gh.de
06120 Halle                  Tel. +49 (0) 345 5582 - 1470
                                  +49 (0) 345 5582 - 0
sneumann(at)IPB-Halle.DE     Fax. +49 (0) 345 5582 - 1409