few things to consider
While I was thinking about this, I had to consider different things:
Who would be answering questions in this?
How to category the answers/questions?
How to promote this and get enough interests to keep it alive?
Would teams really need this?
The big question is: Who would answer the questions?
There is something good about getting everyone, in that the more people we have, the quicker the answer will be posted. And the more minds thinking about it, the better the answers would be. But at the same time, I worry about having random people come in and post random answers that adds no value (may even confuse the people who asked the question).
So I thought about it being "invite only", and make sure all the answering people know what they are talking about. But how would we make it so it doesn't come up as unfair/selective...? The good thing about "invite-only" would be the quality of answers and the overall effectiveness since it won't be endless debate on different things. The down side is, with limited people there might be some questions people can't answer.
At the same time, there will need to be a selection process to figure out who gets to answer questions...
The most important point, though, is to get questions answered quickly and leave all the discussions in CD.
Hmm... this will need more thinking time...
Second thing is categorizing the answers, and put it in an index, so that teams can easily look up the answers.
But how do we divide the answers? Into regions of the country? or Topics? or both? It would be nice for teams to ask questions like, where do we buy pneumatics in Bay Area, California? and have teams from around that place answer those kind of questions. At the same time, it would be useful to divide the forum into topics like CD. But for the example question above, would you put it in pneumatics or west coast?
Maybe we could put the question/answer in both categories?
Third thing is publicity. If there's not enough interest to ask questions and enough people to answer them, its likely that people will stop using it. We will have to make it successful and helpful in order to develope a reputation, and that takes time. If it won't last more than a month, then its not really worth developing...
Forth thing, I still need to convince myself that something like this would be worth the energy doing. It would be if teams find it useful and there's enough interest to keep it going. Otherwise, its just not worth doing.
Any comments/ideas?
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