If you’re not familiar with StackOverflow, it’s a collaboratively edited questions and answers site for developers. With its wiki-like editing and community voting and reputation system, answers at StackOverflow (and its sister sites like ServerFault) are more complete, accurate, and accessible than any other technical resources.

With this understanding, I was excited to see that George Silva was involved in StackExchange’s incubator, and had put together a proposal for a StackOverflow for Geographic Information Systems.

GIS has long been more of a diaspora than an online community, with information stored across dozens of mailing lists, forums, blogs and other locations. Each open source project and proprietary application has its own set of resources, as do academic communities. Answers have been hard to find, and expert participation in these communities can quickly lead to burn-out. I believe that having a StackOverflow for GIS will help to solve these problems, and increase our individual efficiency working with GIS.

If you agree, please take the time to sign up for George’s proposal, and commit to being involved in StackOverflow for GIS!

-J