Discourse for open science

open-science-discourse.md

The recent Open Science SE site got shut down by StackExchange folks.

There is another proposal for the same right now http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/90201/open-science.

I am all for that proposal, trying to get open science going again on SE.

However, an alternative is Discourse, created by Jeff Atwood, etal.

Example forums:

• Atom editor - https://discuss.atom.io/
• Discourse meta - https://meta.discourse.org/
• rOpenSci - https://discuss.ropensci.org/

We could put up our own forum. Benefits:

• We, the people involved in the forum, would run the forum - it can increase in size slowly w/o having to be subject to SE's rules
• It has a lot of the same features of SE (great UI, markdown support, multiple login options, badges), minus voting/points

We would have to pay server costs, but that's minimal for such a potentially big group of people.

If you're not familiar with Discourse, visit one of the links above and peak through some of the discussion threads.

Totally fine if this is shot down - just thinking out loud

Just a little progress update: With lots of help from the PhysicsOverflow admins, I have successfully imported the Open Science SE dump into a fresh instance of the Question2Answer software. Questions (including votes) are looking good, but single sign-on is not going work because SE dumps no longer contain user IDs (or the EmailHash field). I will report back when the URL of my service has stabilized.

On the other hand, while skimming some answers, I became aware of a SE community called Computational Science. This could be a venue for more technical OpenScience-related questions that do not fit into Academia.SE or OpenSource.SE (for those who want to stay within the SE universe).

Another update: The new Q2A site with all the questions and answers from the SE private beta is running here: https://openscience.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/

What this site now needs is administrators and moderators (and perhaps a logo and custom CSS). Contact me if you are interested. The nice people from PhysicsOverflow have donated two plugins that allow admins (and mods, if so configured) to help users regain access to their imported user accounts by entering the e-mail address. This needs some organizing.

Another possible alternative or complementary offer: A colleague mentioned HUBzero as a platform intended to bring researchers from a discipline together. Perhaps it would be a useful tool for Open Science, too? Has anyone had any experience with it?