@mattwilkie It's interesting to compare your experience--which I believe many expert users share--to experiences with other mature, complex, sophisticated products that are heavily used. For me that currently involves Stata 11 and Mathematica 8, both continually developed over 20 years. I keep sessions open for weeks, run many copies simultaneously, log thousands of command lines in each session, and have never had to log a bug. Code that worked 20 years ago still works today unchanged.

These examples demonstrate that "big and complicated" software can be written to work, work efficiently, work correctly, and not break user code even after decades of evolution. I speculate that one major factor explaining the difference between ESRI, Stata, and Wolfram Research may be respect for the users in the latter cases. Another factor may be the presence of significant competition in the markets for statistical and symbolic mathematics software.

Hi GISers! (:

also known as @whuber, apparently q:

Hi @Rebecca! This is so unusual, having two users on GIS chat at once ;-)

hehehe

Blog Overflow is fully up and running: blogoverflow.com

@RebeccaChernoff You answered my question before I asked it! (We're having the same discussion on CV, too.)

I think a GIS blog would be great!

oh yeah?

oh right, I did know that q:

Oh there's a chat scheduled for tomorrow! I'm so glad you mentioned that!

@whuber saves the day (:

@RebeccaChernoff I don't know that we have enough active users on GIS. The tickler on meta didn't attract many responses. I'll follow up on it, though, to see whether there are any volunteers.

@RebeccaChernoff I apologize in advance for missing the CV chat tomorrow: work intervenes.

I think people try to be over-ambitious.

Thinking they'll post once a day, and trying to find the people for that.

1 post per day is ridiculous!

@RebeccaChernoff Yep. Been there. Even monthly volunteers are hard to find.

But it doesn't even have to be once a month.

If you get 10 people, and there's 1-2 posts / week on the blog, each person doesn't have to write every month.

@RebeccaChernoff Right. But--as you know--as the frequency per volunteer goes down, the need for volunteers goes up. Heck, we don't even have 10 people who vote for questions on a routine basis.

fair point.

I think people also freak out about writing a blog post (I know I do q:), but really, if you are writing a pretty detailed answer...those can make for a great blog post giving a bit more of an in-depth look at something.

Still, it's worth gauging the enthusiasm level. This group has a lot of experience it can share.

It is unfortunate that people started talking about the blogs a couple months ago, but we didn't have Blog Overflow set up then.

Now we've been ready, and... crickets

@RebeccaChernoff Your point resonates with my thoughts about reactive versus proactive blogging. An answer is a reaction to a prompt; it can almost write itself. Anything else takes more initiative--and a lot of optimism that it will be of interest. So the trick is to identify good questions to react to.

It's getting late here. Nice chatting with you!

Yup!

Please let me know whatever I can do to help...I'm here to offer support! (:

A blog sounds wonderful. I can only hope that the kind of information it provides will touch on various interests in the GIS field. The GIS umbrella is prohibitively large when it comes to creating something like a blog. What is going to be its purpose? regurgitating interesting news? Elaborating on deep questions and their implications that might escape a cursory examination?

There's so much the blog could be, and I think it would be best for it to be many things and one thing all at once, just as varied and constant as GIS tends to be.

@Nathanus Excellent points, well put. I think a successful blog requires a broad cross-section of experienced GIS practitioners. One of the things that would attract me to reading it would be the opportunity to get perspective and deeper insight into the many topics I barely understand or appreciate. I would love to read about how people find unexpected interest or usefulness in an answer (or even a comment thread) that has recently appeared.

@Whuber Nice to see you! I have to wonder what makes a blog relevant and stay relevant? That is, what is going to keep people visiting articles even after they have fallen off the page and become part of the archives? Creating a post based on an unusually popular question might be something good. We can use it to open the community's eyes to all sorts of things. I think a blog could be really exciting for GIS.se

@Nathanus Are you volunteering :-)?

We should take Rebecca seriously and not overcommit. Do you think we could find, say, 20 people willing to write 4-6 blogs over the next year?

20 * [4 to 6] = about 100, but assume half of them don't come through: that's one post a week.

You might also be interested in tracking the conversation in the CV (stats.SE) chat, because it exactly parallels ours (but is slightly ahead of us).

Okay, I can hop in there

And I daresay that my knowledge base is far too small to make anything even remotely authoritative when it comes to blogging. I'm more of an op ed kinda guy. :)

Which chat? Skewed or Ten?

An interesting or unusual perspective can be good enough. For instance, people can write about what they do and why that interests them in a particular thread or set of related threads. I once published an article by a guy at the Smithsonian who was using GIS to analyze Jackson Pollock paintings. He wasn't too sophisticated in GIS but it was a popular, well-received article.

@Nathanus Both rooms are currently relevant: TenFold has a log of today's chat on the Blog topic and Skewed is a new room created as a result; it doesn't have much in it yet, but I expect the conversation to continue there.

We can also borrow or adapt ideas from other sites. Some I've run across include (-) interviews with users, (-) constructive criticism (maybe show how to improve some code and illustrate useful techniques? maybe some map criticism?), (-) reports of conferences and meetings, (-) synopses of significant events, (-) wild-eyed speculation about what the future might hold.

@Whuber My hesitation comes from seeing this community from an almost employee-employer standpoint. While I know I'm a part of what goes on here, I feel like quite the small cog in the larger machine. There just seem like so many ways to go wrong when making a blog for a community of professional peers rather than shooting one's mouth off to whoever gets (un)lucky with a google search.

It sounds almost like a modular blog. Interviews are like "Getting to know GIS.se", reports of conferences seem like a "Current events in the GIS world" section.

@Nathanus I think everybody feels some of that no matter how good or experienced they are. Communicating with peers is risky; it invites criticism. But the rewards are great, because you either learn a lot in a hurry or, at the least, you get affirmation that your point of view is coherent and justifiable.

"Modular" is right. I think @Rebecca Chernoff is championing a similar approach. I think I even skimmed across a reference to "area editors" or something like that. The idea (I believe) is to make this work by breaking it into smaller manageable chunks. Otherwise we'll never get it started.

I would love to see the blog bring people together, more. Sometimes GIS.se feels just a little aloof. Maybe that's the desire to maintain a professional air, or just what Stack Exchange at large feels is best. Sure, we're not all drinking buddies but it can be daunting to enter into an arena like an SE site and feel like you can honestly contribute without being found wanting.

It'd be interesting to see if a blog could foster more of a feeling of community. Where people point to it and say, "I'm a part of that."

I think it's the SE style. One thing I prefer about the ESRI forums is the chance to be informal, to call people by their names, to mix questions and discussion.

@Nathanus Building community is a good objective to have in mind. It suggests we should make efforts in a blog to point out positive contributions made by our members.

Even if the posts are best kept to concise and professional, there should be somewhere where the GISers could mingle and be at ease (within reason). You would think the chat room could do that, but it's a ghost town in here!

There's a lot to cover in a blog about a place like this. I suppose the best way to start is to... start.

My knee-jerk reaction to a question of 20 people writing 4-6 blogs over a year's time is "not even close."

You're right. I suspect this community is smaller than it looks. A dozen or so regulars could account for all the voting and most of the answers, too.

But a half dozen bloggers is within the realm of possibility: most users with 2000+ rep would be good candidates. It's a bootstrapping process, with the aim to draw more active and dedicated users who would start contributing to the blog after (say) the first half year. The missing piece for me, though, is incentive: why would people want to blog here? I'm not being sceptical, merely ignorant.

No, I think you're on the right track. If we can't answer questions like that, we certainly shouldn't have a blog!

Do we want to turn GIS.se into a one-stop shop for news -and- answers? That could be one reason to do so.

This is not an appropriate forum for news. It's Q&A: that's its strength and its weakness. A more workable strategy might be to collaborate in some way with one or more of the active GIS news sites. At a minimum we can send them all press releases of good blog posts. :-)

Also, do you mean personal incentive, or a more general incentive ("I do it because it is my privilege!")?

Any incentive. But committing to a blog is more work than you might think, especially after the first article or two, so I don't think that earning another bronze star or two is going to do much. Possibly those interested in GIS certification might be able to represent such activities as professional development or contribution to the community. Those looking for new work or promotions and those of a consulting bent might see blogging as an asset on a resume.

For that to work, though, blogging cannot be just a vanity exercise. That's where the SE structure can work to its favor: with community feedback, a blogger can establish--in black and white--that they have actually engaged their peers and not just thrown some stuff out into the ether.

Having your work (however you want to categorize work) on something as reputable as an SE blog is definitely going to be worth something to an aspiring professional or student. There's also the pride in having created something others find useful and informative. I think being invited to write for something like GIS.se's blog would be honor enough to be considered incentive.

And I'm a pretty big cynic!

I'm glad to hear that (not about being a cynic; the part before that). I hope plenty of others think the same!

It was meant mostly for purposes of establishing relative weight to my words, but yes, I hope so as well.

Obviously soon we have to go beyond talk and do some actual organizing. I'm hopeful that others will join in here and share their thoughts, so (as a moderator who feels a duty to help with this) I'm going to hold off doing anything immediately.

Gotta go. I enjoyed the conversation. Let's come back soon. Cheers.

Take care