{"id":2626,"date":"2011-03-18T08:08:55","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T15:08:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/?p=2626"},"modified":"2011-03-18T08:08:55","modified_gmt":"2011-03-18T15:08:55","slug":"whats-the-best-technology-base-for-an-activism-qa-website","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/2011\/03\/18\/whats-the-best-technology-base-for-an-activism-qa-website\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s the best technology base for an activism Q&A website?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"twoAn activism group I know is thinking about setting up a Q&A (question-and-answer) site.\u00c2\u00a0 What technology base should they use?<\/p>\n

Here’s the functionality wishlist:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. users can ask and answer questions, vote on others’ answers, and leave comments<\/li>\n
  2. multilingual and accessible<\/li>\n
  3. a pleasant and attractive user experience<\/li>\n
  4. good moderation tools<\/li>\n
  5. easy to attach tags (or categories) to questions and to browse all the questions in a category<\/li>\n
  6. people can sign in with their existing Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. IDs<\/li>\n
  7. questions, answers, and comments are easy to tweet and look good when posted on Facebook etc.<\/li>\n
  8. there’s a way to include Twitter, Facebook, etc. responses as answers or comments<\/li>\n
  9. users can have profiles if they want but don’t have to spend any time setting them up<\/li>\n
  10. the overall look-and-feel can be customized (to match the activism campaign’s overall branding)<\/li>\n
  11. there are a few options for themes for questions, answers, profiles, and categories<\/li>\n
  12. it’s possible to integrate discussion forum and chat software [to help people as they’re learning to use the system, and to talk about ‘lessons learned’ as we’re using it]<\/li>\n
  13. secure<\/li>\n
  14. privacy-friendly (meaning a robust privacy policy if it’s hosted elsewhere)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In general, open-source software with a fairly\u00c2\u00a0 unrestrictive license (BSD-style) is preferable; if the GPL’ed or commercial tools for the job are better, that’s fine too.<\/p>\n

    There are a lot of different options.\u00c2\u00a0 For example:<\/p>\n