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Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited at the potential this has to organize your own internal information that normally lies stagnant on a wiki (or heaven forbid, email) with no context of whether it's still valid or useful to anyone. It seems like it would be particularly useful for organizations with a distributed work force.

On the other hand, so much of StackOverflow's value comes from the economies of scale at hand, and I'm uncertain how well the model scales down to small sized teams or even medium sized companies.

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There was an open source version of Stack Overflow that I set up internally a few years ago at a previous company. I was the only one on the team who actively used it, but even then I found it useful as it was a place to squirrel away these useful little pieces of information you come across and don't know quite what to do with. I ended up coming back to find stuff I'd put there a few times and was starting to refer others to questions here and there.

Then after a couple months, just as it felt like it was getting some traction, the server got wiped out accidentally by our server team and there were no backups. I never got around to putting it back up.

I hope not having your knowledge base arbitrarily wiped out by careless admins would be a feature of this service.

What tool did you use, and would you recommend it? I'm considering that route for project-relevant questions my students have.

I believe it was this:

https://github.com/dzone/osqa

But not positive. I vaguely remember it was a Python product. Not sure I can recommend it. I remember it not being nearly as polished as SO and not sure it's being actively maintained.

It's a shame that you can't use Stack Overflow itself constructively for this. I think Stack Overflow usage would be a great lesson for any introductory class. Just teaching new devs how to write a good Stack Overflow question is an invaluable step in problem-solving, even if they never post it.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I fear a good part of that lesson would be "the talk" about navigating the tricky culture of Stack Overflow.

can confirm: that's definitely one of the features of this product.

yeah, that's definitely a huge product challenge for us!

some things do work differently than stackoverflow.com to help with that - we built integrations to help surface questions to the right people in your team quickly (rather than the shotgun approach on the public site). and we've also built mechanisms to help guide you towards building a successful community (since it starts as a blank slate).

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