This is an idea that I thought about while I was perusing reddit the other night. I think that it would be a great idea for chiefdelphi to have an AMA! Series.
What is an AMA! series you might ask?
See http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA for a more detailed explanation but it in most simple terms is this: an interesting person will post a brief one liner stating who they are with the prompt “Ask me anything!” Then they will essentially do a question and answer in the thread.
This would be great if we could get famous CD users (KokoEd, Karthik, Joe Johnson, etc…) or even a well known team (67, 233, 610, 27, etc…) to do a quick series of AMA!'s. I think that these would be insightful, interesting, and well received by both everyone.
Each person or team would have the right to decline any question if they deem that it is over the line but try as best they can to answer everything. Each thread could be open for about 2-3 days before it gets locked down so that it is more of a limited exciting event and it does not clog up the portal that most people use for too long of a time and doesn’t put too much of a strain on busy mentors/teams during build season. One a week for a while seems like a pretty good pace for this if we can get it started.
This would be a great way for well known figures to share their experience with the community. However, I am not sure if Chief Delphi is the best place for an AMA formatting wise.
You are correct about the formatting. Even though there are hybrid views that you can use (I enjoy to use them from time to time) it still is not as friendly to look at as reddit in order to keep a thread organized by response. I think that we would need some sort of mod to keep track of it and make a summary post from time to time.
You could have the person doing the AMA start the thread and then have them edit their initial post to include [quotes] and answers from questions asked below.
When I started working at Xerox there were a large portions of Eds on the line including our supervisor so he got to stay Ed. A group of ladies on the line started applying nicknames to all the Eds (Mr. Ed, Special Ed, Co-Ed who later became Sarge since his last name was Schultz and I got dubbed Koko Ed.) Mine was the only one that stuck.