Feedback

[Chris Miller]

I work in the The Genome Institute at Washington University, and we've
released a number of open-source bioinformatics tools to the community
over the past few years. Many show up in questions on BioStar fairly
often (Breakdancer, Varscan, etc).

In light of this, we thought it would be interesting to explore the
idea of pointing users of our software to the BioStar boards for
support.

Key points:
- We've seen similar kinds of symbiotic relationships between forums
and software work well over at seqAnswers (for example, this Bismark
thread or any of a dozen threads where Heng Li has offered support for
samtools http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5502)

- We don't deal with a huge volume of requests, so such a move would
be unlikely to overwhelm the board. (probably 15-20 questions a month,
which would probably be cut in half if we weren't answering the same
questions over and over).

- This is not an attempt to off-load support - rather, we're hoping to
move our discussions into a more open environment. As such we'd be
staying involved in the BioStar community. (Judicious use of tagging
and tag-specific RSS feeds could also help us quickly find and answer
relevant questions)

- We would direct bug reports to our GitHub pages as those would
pretty clearly not benefit the BioStar community. Only usage questions
would end up on BioStar.

Of course we have other options, like rolling our own solution or
forking the biostar-central code, but a partnership with the site
could be mutually beneficial. BioStar would get more exposure, and
answers concerning usage of our bioinformatics tools would be publicly
available and easily searchable.

Any thoughts from the community? Pros and cons? We certainly haven't
committed to any solution yet, but thought it was an interesting idea
and we'd like to get your feedback.

-Chris

[Istvan Albert]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 11:33 AM, Chris Miller <chrisa...@gmail.com> wrote:

> In light of this, we thought it would be interesting to explore the
> idea of pointing users of our software to the BioStar boards for
> support.

> Any thoughts from the community? Pros and cons?  We certainly haven't
> committed to any solution yet, but thought it was an interesting idea
> and we'd like to get your feedback.

Hi Chris,

I personally think it is a very appropriate usage - in fact that is
what we already do (as you also point it out).

Also for anyone that wishes to do this, we'll enable a representative
of the organization to have access to the daily datadumps - so that
they would be able to move away any time to a different solution or
distribution mode (if they wish so of course).

best,

Istvan


--
Istvan Albert
Associate Professor, Bioinformatics
Pennsylvania State University
http://www.personal.psu.edu/iua1/