Tag Archives: StackOverflow

Stack Overflow for GIS Launches from Area 51 into Orbit!

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Whoo hoo!

The Geographic Information Systems Area 51 proposal has entered the private beta period. Over the next week or so, folks who committed to the proposal have a chance to create the initial shape of how this site will work for our community. If you committed, don’t forget to go to http://gis.stackexchange.com/ to help out on this critical part of the process!

After this week, it will open to public beta, where a wider audience will be able to access it, and the community norms will be further refined.

While I was waiting for this proposal to reach the beta phase, I participated in the Pro Webmasters proposal, and it’s been a blast! I highly recommend that you have a look on the Area 51 staging website and see if there are other areas where you can lend a hand, or where you might need some intelligent collective answers.

As a reminder, all of the content on the Stack Exchange sites is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution / ShareAlike licence, so these are truly community resources we’re building.

-J

StackOverflow For Geo!

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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