How can we get more experts into the private beta?

Question

A few days ago we all agreed that the quality of our questions and answers could use some work. Many of us have been hard at work to fix this, and I feel like we've definitely broadened and thus improved the scope. And their certainly have been some pretty good questions. but I feel like the problems we had then still plague us.

As Gilles said, we'll need expert-level questions to attract experts. However, to successfully ask and answer expert-level questions, we need experts. (Or at least people with intermediate experience who are actively working with open source.

And sadly, it seems like we're lacking there.

So my question is, how can we reach out to people actually active in and knowledgeable about open source projects and convince them to join this beta to help raise its level?

Answer 1

The best way to recruit experts is to show them content they're interested in. This can be answers that teach them something, or questions where they can demonstrate their expertise. To attract experts, you need at least original questions; to retain them, you need also original answers (but having experts around tends to generate that).

If you know experts, think what kind of content they would like to see. Would they be interested in our most popular subjects, such as how to determine whether two licenses are compatible — which doesn't go much further than summarizing content found elsewhere? Or in how to relicense a project, or how many licenses a source archive must contain, or how to monetize an open source project?

If the answer is no, we have a problem. You can't count on experts with no prior motivation to raise the level of questions. Experts' questions tend to be few and far apart, and they'll only ask them in venues where they feel they're likely to get an answer. Experts will raise the level of answers provided that they have some incentive to do so — seeing a lot of poor answers (short, unresearched, only repeating what can be found elsewhere…) isn't an incentive to take the time to craft a detailed, interesting answer.

Answer 2

Well, I disagree we lack experts in Open Source. In the question you linked many identified their projects. One who didn't answer there was Bruno Lowagie, author of iText. I think expertise is given. But, experts mostly answer questions and often pretty good (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to give some examples). But they lack in asking questions. So I don't agree, that we lack expert, though I agree we lack good example- questions. We should get more people interested in Open Source, they may have the better questions.

Answer 3

This problem is caused by the scope of this sites. Most questions about specific licenses and their application to various situations are already answered elsewhere. It makes no sense to, for example, formulate new questions and answers that in the end just duplicate the FAQs of the FSF about their licenses.

The GNU GPL experts of the FSF and the SFLC will not participate in this site because it is about "Open Source" and, at least at the moment, there is no consensus to rename the site to include Free Software in the site name. The experts that could cover all aspects of GNU licenses will not take part in a site that is, from their perspective, hostile to the very idea they try to promote.

Will CC people come here if they host an extensive list of FAQs at the CC site? I think they will not.

What unasked quality questions are left if you effectively exclude GNU and CC? I find it hard to find questions that will not just lead to duplication of content better found at the original sources.