Well then to the original question:
I believe it’s Fairphone’s intention to use this Forum as the place to go for all your Fairphone related questions and discussions and not have many little communities all over the web. For developers to exchange their expertise there is #software:dev… @orschiro do you have a specific proposal how this could help the community without shattering the knowledge on separate places on the web?
I had to smile about the notion of a stock exchange.
The benefits I see for pursuing and investing time into opening a fairphone.stackexchange.com are the following:
For open movements such as Ubuntu, StackExchange has proven to be a very reliant platform to collect the best answers for specific questions and build a strong community of knowledgable users
Stack Exchange platforms rank extremely well in Google Search and can thus be easily find by new users. This would be a chance for new people to encounter Fairphone
I don’t mean to replace this forum as it is a great place for deep discussions. To the contrary, a Stack Exchange community would serve the purpose to collect the best answers around given problems and have them be made easy accessible on a platform whose functioning is familiar to many people.
If you are interested, we could pursue to begin a community here:
I would like to see something like stackexchange.com integrated here. And also a real wiki
I guess the problem is the maintenance. It’s a lot of work.
The benefit is that you get answers quickly. But I know that many professionals have stop posting on stackexchange-like-sites for several reasons on can easily find with searching. But in short: It’s not very rewarding and it’s not fun. People just take and you don’t get much feedback.
But I think it’s great for getting a FAQ-list with good answers quickly and ‘nearly’ automatically (rating).
It’s not so great for deep discussions … but deeper discussions are often killed quickly in the forum as well as “being off topic” or “not leading anywhere”.
Often I wish we could have something like a “speakers corner” here.
Let’s assume some of us would like to pursue the idea of having a Stack Exchange community for the Fairphone, is this approved by the rest of the community and its founders?
I would not approve of it. We don’t want the knowledge base scattered around the www, do we? As for the founders, you’d have to contact the Fairphone team via support.
This is a good and very valid point, but I think that unfortunately for so many topics here in this forum, other platforms would be much better suited than this “discourse”. Thus I support both, the idea of having a proper wiki for guidelines, as well as stack exchange for responding to problems. Because I don’t agree that the [quote=“Stefan, post:6, topic:18538”]
“Accepted Answer”-plugin to the Fairphone Forum […] pretty much does what Stack Exchange can do
[/quote], since stack exchange ranks the answers according to users’ votes on how helpful they were. Considering that there are threads here with hundreds of replies, stack exchange would significantly increase the visibility of the helpful answers and make it much, much easier/faster to find a possible solution for your problem.
But to avoid information being scattered around the web, it could be hosted on the FP servers. Maintaining for example a wiki doesn’t need much of administration, so personally I don’t think that it would cause a lot of additional maintenance work. And like a wiki, also stack exchange is pretty much moderated by the user base.
Thanks for floating this issue!
We’re aware of the limitations of the discourse platform and are investigating how we can change this.
Stack-Exchange like solutions might be good to look at. But on the other hand; they are really good at providing good answers to good questions, and less in organizing and fostering a lively community of individuals.
Our goal is that the new website, with a wiki or another tool, will be able to give more exposure to the help, ideas and solutions provided by the community.
In the meantime, you’re input is highly valued and used in the design decisions made here at Fairphone.