Stack Overflow Research

General Overview

Stack Overflow features questions and answers on a wide range of topics in computer programming. The website features the ability for users to ask and answer questions, and, through membership and active participation, to vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions and answers in a fashion similar to wiki or digg. Users of Stack Overflow can earn reputation points and "badges"; for example, a person is awarded 10 reputation points for receiving an "up" vote on an answer given to a question, and can receive badges for their valued contributions, which represents a kind of gamification of the traditional Q&A site or forum. All user generated content is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

As of January 2012, Stack Overflow has over 1,000,000 registered users, and more than 3,500,000 questions. Based on tags assigned to the questions, the most common topics on the site are C#, Java, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, and Android.

• About
• Badges
• Stack Echange - SE platform applied to other subjects.

Relevance to OSE

• Q&A for machine designers, independent replicators, prototypers, permaculturalists, and all general types of remote collaborators.
• Replacement for the forums.
• Potential integration with OSE Smart Mob platform.
• Way to utilize and filter out volunteers using the badge system.

Open Source Options

Solace

• website
• Solace is a fully open-sourced multilingual support and knowledge exchange platform written in Python.

Shapado

• website
• Shapado is a questions and answers site for your enterprise or community, your “knowledge base on the cloud”. It makes sure questions never get asked twice by making the information flow. Thanks to a powerful search engine, the ability to answer by email and edit each other answers to improve them as wiki, Shapado will make information available across the company with no fuss.
• source code
• Create a test group on their server here.