StackOverflow-like site for NEURON?

Suggestions for improvements to the NEURON Forum.
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JustasB
Posts: 28
Joined: Tue Dec 08, 2015 8:17 pm
Location: Tempe, AZ, USA
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StackOverflow-like site for NEURON?

Post by JustasB »

Would anyone support a StackOverflow-like Q&A site for NEURON and computational neuroscience in general?

The benefits of such a site would be as follows:
  • Best questions and answers are voted up by the community, flowing to the top of the page
  • People with best questions and best answers gain reputation, which is visible along with the question/answer
  • Would bring together computational neuroscientists that have expertise in a wide range of comp. neuro. software and methods
  • Would be very useful for new crops of undergraduate and graduate students to ask beginner questions
  • If made using the StackOverflow platform, the site would be free including hosting, upgrades, server maintenance, bandwidth, etc..., and all content would be Creative Commons licensed
  • Would have an option to convert some posts to "Wiki" entries that are editable by the community. Note NEURON-Wiki has been discussed here.
  • Over time, outdated answers can be updated by community members with sufficient reputation
Other reasons to have such a site:
If you feel that this is a good idea, please support my proposal for StackOverflow to create such a site:
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposa ... SbKQXb0zg2

I've posted some example questions that members could ask on the site (you can post your own as well), and you can vote them up/down as to whether those types of questions would be within scope of such site. If enough people show their support on the proposal page, StackOverflow platform will create such a site for us free of charge.

Overall, I feel that it would have a net-positive effect on our community.

What are your thoughts?
JustasB
Posts: 28
Joined: Tue Dec 08, 2015 8:17 pm
Location: Tempe, AZ, USA
Contact:

Re: StackOverflow-like site for NEURON?

Post by JustasB »

Having gone through the process of proposing the new Stack Exchange site, the main lesson I learned is that proposals for new Stack Exchange sites are more suitable for large communities with high volumes of questions. In general, the broader the topic of a proposed Stack Exchange site, the more likely that the proposal will gain enough proposal activity to be moved into a "beta". The more narrow proposals simply don't generate enough absolute interest for Stack Exchange to create a site.

That said, the closest alternative to a dedicated computational neuroscience Stack Exchange site is to use Stack Exchange 'tags' and create questions using them. If you're on one of the sites, you can 'watch' a tag, and you will receive an email whenever a new question is posted under that tag.

Here are some relevant tags:

On Stack Overflow:
neuroscience
allen-sdk
neuron-simulator
neuroml

On Psychology and Neuroscience Stack Exchange
software
computational-modeling

On Biology Stack Exchange
software
bioinformatics

If you know any other relevant tags, please post them as a reply to this thread.

Thank you to everyone who supported the proposal! :)
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