July 14th, 2010 by 
Evan, seen lurking here in the background, has a favour to ask. Stackoverflow is a website that allows professional and enthusiast developers to ask questions of one another in order to share ideas, solutions and make the life of developers better. It’s an extremely high quality resource but those clever folks over at Stack Overflow aren’t content to stop there!
They have another site they call Area 51. This is where groups of people can propose custom sites based around Stack Overflow for their own projects. This is where Evan’s favour comes in as he, like many of us working on Ubuntu, would like to have a really great place to send people with questions about Ubuntu. Not only that but one that’s already got an army of intelligent helpful people helping one another – with a healthy collection of Ubuntu users in there too I’ll wager.
A stackexchange powered solution would be nothing short of amazing and YOU can help!
But how do I help, Iain?
I’m thrilled you asked!
1. Visit the Ubuntu proposal page on stackexchange.
2. Register and vote for this proposal.
Then while you enjoy a celebratory cup of tea and a biscuit think of ways to spread this as far and wide as you can.
Let’s tweet www.tinyurl.com/stackexchange using #ubuntu and put up signs in our offices, and send each other pictures of these signs in our offices!
Tell your brothers, sisters, friends, lovers, mothers, ex-lovers, ex-mothers … wait that doesn’t work … get a tattoo!*
If you can think of any other ways of getting this out there tell us in the comments! Thanks for listening and good luck. We’ll follow up with progress 
At time of writing we have 76 people committed!
*Seriously, really don’t get a tattoo
The toolkit
the Area51 link is broken FTR
Can someone please explain what a "Stack Exchange" actually is?
Thanks Anon person! Fixed yesterday so should be ok now
No one,
A Stack Exchange any one of several question and answer sites run by Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/). What sets Stack Exchange apart from other Q&A sites is its excellent reward mechanism for answering questions. Users receive points and badges for what other users deem to be good responses. This has created a veritable army of high-quality contributors and a vast library of their answers to a very wide range of questions.
It also has a very clean and focused design. It does not aspire to be anything more than a Q&A site, thus freeing the interface from complication.
Because they are an excellent medium for just asking questions, because the website is so finely tuned to create the best environment possible for this, and because Stack Exchanges rank so highly in Google results (try searching for "hidden features of python"), we feel this would be an ideal way for new users who are entirely unfamiliar with forums and find Launchpad to be intimidating to interface with the rest of the community in a really constructive way.
To get a feel for what a Stack Exchange for Ubuntu users and developers might look like, visit some of the proposals that have already made it to the open beta phase:
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/
http://gaming.stackexchange.com/
Hope that helps.
Evan (and Iain),
When I look at those example pages, I see a whole lot of noise and I have no idea what I’m doing or what I’m looking at. (In other words, the repeated "to find out what SE is, go look at a SE!" mantra for all of these posts is ineffective, unless you’re trying to tell me it’s confusing.)
From what I can tell, this is just a case of "oh, since I’m already familiar with this, I don’t need to explain anything since it’s obvious" which is a typical bad-habit with regard to FOSS (well, and everything else).
Can you explain what a typical use-case for a stack exchange is without the buzzword bingo? I don’t care about how it "leverages the synergy of generation two point oh to deliver a seamless experience across the cloudspace".
I would prefer to hear about what it is and how it does what it does better than other mediums (and therefore why I should care about it). You mentioned search results in your reply, which is certainly a strength, but for most search queries, the ubuntu forums are high ranked (if not top) as are a few assorted websites for various other niche topics. You also mentioned that new users would find this more comfortable than forums. Many people (even the non-technical ones which this is aimed towards) have used forums, and unless the "Ask Question" button becomes more obvious (it took me 20 seconds to find it), I don’t think this accomplishes that in the way you were aiming for. This isn’t going to be something I convince you of, nor am I going to try.
I implore you to come up with a thorough statement of why the Ubuntu community ought to care about this new medium: what it is/does, how it does that better than other mediums (and why an arbitrary reader should care).
Why not use shapado instead? It has the same features and clean design as stackexchange with the advantage of being Free and Open Source. It support reputation, badges, wiki, widgets, theming and more.
It also integrates great with Facebook login and Twitter login making it easier for people to participate, stackexchange doesn’t support those. Also it has great support for i18n so it’s not limited to English speaking people. Last but not least, you don’t need to ask anyone to start a site, hosting is free and anyone can start one. Actually there’s already an Ubuntu site here: http://ubuntu.shapado.com
Patrick Aljord, Shapado dev.
Please use Free as in Freedom Software as Shapado.com instead of yet another proprietary stack.
http://stackoverflow.com/legal
If both Shapado and Stack Exchange have similar features, it’s *always* better to choose the FOSS solution. Should really this have to be reminded in this community??
Hi Iain, you should not overlook OSQA (http://www.osqa.net/) which is being used by a growing number of sites, both homegrown and professional. OSQA is fast, reliable, easy to work with, and it works great on Ubuntu. We should know, that’s what we run it on!
It would be a pity for you to move forward on a good idea like a Q&A community server but miss the boat by selecting a closed, proprietary system that isn’t even as good as the FOSS solutions that are readily available.
Feel free to get in touch if you want. We would be happy to help you get things going.
Cheers,
Rick Ross
rick@dzone.com
And this is why everyone who cares about software freedom is leaving Ubuntu. You guys had a good run, but it’s pretty much over now …
If Shapado or OSQA weren’t even present on the initial idea, it’s already a lost battle.
Good luck "being better than OSX".
I want to encourage the use of Free (as in Freedom) Software as Shapado.com instead of yet another proprietary stack for the Q&A site. Please listen to your loyal users!
I want to show my support to shapado.com too.
I didn’t know about osqa.net, but it looks really good too!
How is this even an issue, just use http://ubuntu.shapado.com/
It’s Free Software.
I vote for shapado http://ubuntu.shapado.com/
I vote for shapado!! FOSS NOW!
I support and open source and all the free software, I support shapado, it have more features and are open source;
Maybe shapado have the possibility to integrate to win karma like answers on launchpad, and maybe to sing in too..
Shapado rocks!!
http://ubuntu.shapado.com/
It’s FOSS
+1 for shapado, osqa or any other free (libre) alternative.
+1 for Shapado. We are free people so we need free/libre software.
Mostly a Forum user myself, but, if we going to have a community Q&A site surely it has to be FOSS?
i vote for shapado.
The Open Source software issue is a no brainer, there’s no way that we start using a propietary platform when there’s an OSS one available.
There are several advantages in using Shapado over StackExchange: it has beeen localized; it allows you to define which languages you’re fluent in and shows you questions asked in those languages; it can be easily tied to part of the Launchpad infrastructure.
The core features of StackExchange are already present in Shapado.
All of these advantages are a result of Shapado being Free / Open Source software. Like Andrés Mujica wrote: it’s "a no brainer"