On 12/14/2016 01:00 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
Ask Fedora is one of our primary user-facing support resources. It's reasonably successful, with over 18,000 questions, with almost 80% of those having at least some answer. It has a small but active and passionate community. On the other hand, I've heard from the infrastructure team that it's taking an increasing amount of time just to keep the service running, and making improvements is out of the question. We're having trouble keeping up with things like keeping the software on the recent version, let alone advancing new ideas. Since this is such an important thing for users, I think we need an improvement. I asked the community what to do <https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/95681/ask-fedora-is-it-working-... and the top-voted response is from the upstream author, who has offered to host the site for $250/month, including 6 hours of development time. Assuming we can make the money work out, what do you think about this?I appreciate the time the developer took to answer questions in the thread, and the offer to host. Both of those are gracious indeed. However, I'm concerned about setting the precedent of paying to host a service. The cost to Fedora to host it is not in machine time or bandwidth, but in sysadmin and maintenance. Ideally, some of those same passionate Fedora Ask community members would step forward to help run the site by becoming part of FI, even if only to service Ask. The amount of money per year is not huge, but it is enough to get a person to e.g. Flock or a number of local people to a FUDCon. I don't believe we have any other paid-for services at the moment outside of the AWS accounts for amazon (which is a necessity). I'd be fairly hesitant to start adding more things we have to pay for and manage SLAs on, etc. josh
I'm personally leaning the same way as Josh for this one. I think this also follows up on a recent discussion on the Ambassadors list about using Meetup.com (which is a similar situation to this). The largest criticisms to using the service were the cost, but more about its focus as not being FOSS. I think for something like Ask Fedora, if we're going to offer this kind of service, it's important for us to have a community of people who can support the service, either with skills or finances (i.e. hosting), but also a community of people who use and contribute to the knowledgebase. This was the conclusion (I thought) that was reached on the Ambassador list, was that even though Meetup isn't FOSS, using it allows us to tap into a much larger community of users and open source fans that using an open source platform would never be able to compete with (and the end result being that people who come to meetups will likely grow their interest in FOSS once they start coming to them). I think this could be a parallel point for determining the future of Ask Fedora.
One of the things I've wished we could have done is integrate into the StackExchange network of Q&A sites. The benefits of using this service is that we have also have a much larger community who has access to the site and services. These may be people who maybe don't have Fedora FAS accounts, but have been using Fedora for years or are some of the top gurus on other Q&A sites like SuperUser, Unix StackExchange, and ServerFault.
I think if the big question becomes *what to do with Ask Fedora*, we should give special consideration to choosing a route forward that will provide the best user experience for people who are (1) asking questions, and (2) answering the questions too. I'm not sure of the process to become integrated with the StackExchange network is like, but I think this an option we should keep on the table for consideration.
-- Cheers, Justin W. Flory jflory7@xxxxxxxxx
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ infrastructure mailing list -- infrastructure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to infrastructure-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
