[Ibpsausa] Ask questions, get answers, no distractions

[Neal Kruis]

Dear Modelers,

At the IBPSA-USA dinner meeting in Dallas I made a brief announcement about
a new effort<http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/45232/building-performance-simulation-analysis>to
improve user support for building energy modeling. I'd like to follow
up
with a brief description and a few links that might be helpful to clarify
this effort. Please consider joining and contributing!

We want to make answers more accessible to the building energy modeling
community. There are many venues (usually mailing lists or forums) where
modelers are already asking questions, but, though these services include
an archive of all previous questions, answers, discussions, and
announcements, they lack the organization and structure to make the
knowledge base of answers easily accessible.

The computer programming community has faced this same problem and has come
up with a solution called stackoverflow.com <http://stackoverflow.com/about>,
a website that focuses entirely on providing answers. The Stack Overflow
platform relies on the community to up-vote good answers to increase the
visibility for others who may ask the same question in the future. When
others vote for your answers you gain "reputation points" that help
establish your expertise in the community, which in turn provides a better
incentive to provide answers even to the most beginner-level questions.

Since launching in 2008, Stack Overflow has been extremely successful:
boasting 17 million unique visitors and 8.3 million answers! The success of
Stack Overflow has led to several other question and answer
sites<http://stackexchange.com/sites>
 from photography <http://photo.stackexchange.com/> to
cooking<http://cooking.stackexchange.com/>
 to Jewish law <http://judaism.stackexchange.com/>, all using the same
platform as Stack Overflow and successfully supporting their respective
communities.

We would like to do the same for the building energy modeling community,
but before we can launch a fully functional site we need your help to prove
that we have a large enough active community to support such a site and to
help establish the scope of support the site will offer. This is the only
requirement to use Stack Oveflow's platform; it is completely free and open
to the public.

Please visit our proposal:
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/45232/building-performance-simulation-analysis

If you'd like to support this effort you can do so by:

1. Joining the site<http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/45232/building-performance-simulation-analysis>
2. Up-voting questions that help establish the scope of our community (This
is currently our most pressing need!)
3. Proposing your own example questions
4. Spreading the word to your friends and colleagues!

For further reading:
- Blog post at openrevit.com: A Building Energy Performance Simulation Q&A
site that will change your
life!<http://openrevit.com/2013/01/a-building-energy-performance-simulation-qa-site-that-will-change-your-life/>
- How Stack Overflow works: http://stackoverflow.com/about

Thank you!

Neal Kruis
828 482-2088

Big Ladder Software
2549 Irving Street
Denver, CO 80211
http://www.bigladdersoftware.com
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