Follow up to "Improving our support for the Open edX Community"
Shauna Gordon-McKeon
Hi everyone,
Thank you all for your feedback on potential new tools for supporting the open source community. It’s been helpful to hear your suggestions for tools and your thoughts on what features are important, which we incorporated into our list of requirements.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks going through a number of potential options, including AskBot, AnswerHub, Confluence Questions, StackOverflow, Vanilla Forums, Zendesk Community, VBulletin, Lithium and Jive. I’ve written up summaries of these options in this document if you’d like to see the detailed results of our evaluation process.
The short version is: we’re leaning towards AnswerHub. Although we’d love to have gone with one of the open source options, AnswerHub is the only one we’ve found that fits all of our main requirements. Perhaps the strongest reason we prefer it to other promising options like AskBot and Vanilla Forums is the increased support for analytics. One of our main goals with the new tool is to make it easier for our engineering and docs teams to understand what issues are causing the most problems and to address them. We also want the community as a whole to be able to prioritize answering the most pressing questions. Finding tools that let us ask, “What are the most upvoted/commented upon unanswered questions?” was surprisingly difficult to find, but AnswerHub let us do that and more.
There was a lot of enthusiasm on list for StackOverflow. As you can see on my summary doc, the main reason we didn’t go with them was a lack of control over content moderation. AnswerHub is very StackOverflow-like, so we hope that the community will see it as a good alternative.
Our plan is to go ahead with AnswerHub next week, but we want to give the community a chance to raise any potential issues we might have overlooked or to point out any options we might have missed. If you’ve got any of those in mind, now’s the time to bring them up! :)
Best
Shauna