[ESIP-all] Open Data Stack Exchange - Request for Input

[Joe Hourcle]

On Thu, 28 Mar 2013, Carol Meyer wrote:

> The US General Services Administration is in the initial phases of
> launching the Open Data Stack
> Exchange<http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/51674/open-data>
> and
> would like ESIP Community input into the Q&A site. In particular, they are
> asking for the Earth/environmental data community to participate and up
> vote on the questions you think are most appropriate.  It's not yet clear
> how this aligns with other federal open data initiatives (e.g. data.gov &
> others) but it is another piece of the Administrations push to support
> improved public access to data. I encourage you to join the Open Data
> conversation at the link provided above.

For those who aren't familiar with Stack Exchange, it's all buit around 
questions and answers ... there might be some discussion to try to get 
clarification of  the question or responses to the answers (clarify / 
disagree / caveats), but they generally frown upon open-ended discussions.


... they've actually had a bit of a problem with getting sufficient levels 
of support in this sort of area in the past.  They shut down the 
'Astronomy' site (and then migrated some of the questions over to 
'Physics' where they were deemed off-topic).

There's been a proposal for more than a year to start up a 'Geoscience' 
site:

 	http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/36296/geoscience

And there are other proposal for 'Data' (which they've defined as 
'Statistical Data') and 'Big Data' :

 	http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/37195/data
 	http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40518/big-data


...

As I spent a whole lot of time trying to get the 'Libraries' site off the 
ground (which they renamed at the last minute to 'library and information 
science', which I tried to explain to them had a completely different 
community of practice), you need to get 100 people with sufficient 
'reputation' on the other sites to 'commit' to the project once it's been 
'defined'.

So, to get reputation, go to one of the existing Stack Exchange sites an 
ask questions (but look to see if they've been asked already, or people 
might vote you down ... and they don't like questions that seem 'too 
easy' (ie, could be answered via a quick web search).  Also check 
the 'Unanswered' section for questions that you might be able to answer.

Existing sites that would be related for this group:

 	GIS:
 		http://gis.stackexchange.com/

 	Physics:
 		http://physics.stackexchange.com/

 	Computational Science:
 		http://scicomp.stackexchange.com/

 	Databases:  (they renamed it to 'database administrators' at
 		launch, so the focus has changed quite a bit)
 		http://dba.stackexchange.com/

For the full list, see:
 	http://stackexchange.com/sites


Not all are technical; 2/3 of my reputation is from the home improvement 
and cooking sites.*  If you're looking to build up reputation, it's slower 
to do on the two original sites, Server Fault and Stack Overflow.

-Joe


* Which is what led to that talk on pancakes.  See 
http://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/12936/67 and 
http://cooking.stackexchange.com/q/784/67


ps.  There's also a proposal for 'Big Data' that just needs more people to 
commit (another 46 people, 12 w/ 200+ rep.); Reputation flows pretty 
freely during the 'closed beta' period, which is only open to those who 
commit ahead of time:

 	http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40518/big-data