Regarding Q&A:
Half a year ago we already discussed moving the ROS Q&A to StackExchange:
https://code.ros.org/gf/project/ros/mailman/?action=ListThreads&mailman_id=20&_forum_action=ForumMessageBrowse&thread_id=89236
The identified key advantages of AskBot have been: supporting open-source software, own the data and no tedious and long verification / staging process.

Personally, I like the StackExchange Q&As and they often seem to be a serious and professional environment (e.g. moderation, quality of answers etc.). But I do agree with sticking with AskBot due to the reasons mentioned aboved. Nevertheless, I also agree AskBot does need serious improvement, but for doing so ROS users need to get involved on http://askbot.org/en/questions/ and start asking questions and bringing up bugs.

One thing I really do miss on the Q&A style forums is a place for discussing problems. It's great to ask specific questions people know answers to, but finding the root cause of a new problem together with others often turns into long lists of comments and/or answers, which do not really solve the problem. For those situations I would prefer a forum. Maybe we can find a way to bring both Q&A and forum together.


On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:34 PM, Thibault Kruse <kruset@in.tum.de> wrote:
I also prefer answers to forum for the purpose of community driven support.

However I am not too happy with the split-up of mailing lists. Searching Google for "ros mailing list" I get this:

https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo (This seems to be an reduced version of the next link)
https://code.ros.org/gf/project/ros/mailman/ (Some lists seem to be dead, other still active, but no overview)

And then looking for SIGs as well, I get to:
http://www.ros.org/wiki/groovy/Planning
with google groups for most sigs, some of which never had any activity.

The splitup makes it difficult to track activity and to search all archives, it also discourages users from following activity at a glance.
A page listing those groups would help fetching the interest of people to hot topics.

I want to add my thoughts to this:
Our current ways of communicating and collaborating inside the ROS community is - in my eyes - far from optimal. Even as someone, who has been using ROS for a while now, it's sometime hard to get to the needed information. I only can guess, how hard it is for someone new to ROS to get up to speed nowadays (Thanksx Claudio for your feedback!).
Hence, I would love to see improvements here. Maybe upcoming ROSCON would be a good place to discuss the main problems and start drafting solutions.

Regards,
Marcus


 

I don't know though whether any great solution exists that combines the convenience of a mailing list with the cohesive properties of a forum. Googl groups have categories, so e.g. all ROS SIGs could communicate within the same google group but in different categories, not sure how well that works via email. Else there are online offerings such as

http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com
https://onlinegroups.net/,
http://doc.tiki.org/Forum+and+Mailing+List+Synchronization (open source)
https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed (opensource)
and probably more.

The last in the list looks like phpBB, but seems to be quite fast and written in D (whatever that is):
see the dlang homepage for the forum: http://forum.dlang.org/

If there was forums.ros.org that looked like the dlang page interms of getting an overview of current activity, I think that would be much better than our current mailman/Google-groups combination.

cheers,
  Thibault


On 20.02.2013 10:54, William Woodall wrote:
This is just my opinion, but I feel that QA systems like askbot and stackexchange are far superior for this type of community effort than a forum like phpbb.  Case in point, I almost never find the answer to my programming or system administration problems on a forum anymore, I instead find them on *.stackexchange.com.

I don't think it has to do with owning the data as much as the arduous process of getting a stackexchange instance.  The http://robotics.stackexchange.com/ has been working towards getting vetted for a long time now, perhaps ROS questions/answers could live there in the future, but having a dedicated ROS stackexchange is not feasible IMHO.

--

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 1:48 AM, Claudio Carbone <cla_carbone@tiscali.it> wrote:
On 20/02/13 10:24, Claudio Carbone wrote:
you can have subforums tailored to the specific argument (eg: building which would cover build systems and package/stack structures; transformations which would cover urdf models, joints, publishers; Communications which would cover the ROS API, topics, services, etc...)

I just remembered that the phpbb.org support forum (phpbb being one of the widest spread free forum platforms) even has sub-sub-<...>-forums for each and every plugin/modification where the creator of the plugin/mod can answer users questions far from the main busy discussion areas keeping them clean.

I can't but think this would be much more useful to the community.

Although I acknowledge that it's ultimately a management decision from WG or whoever will guide ROS in the future.


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