<div class="im" style="color:rgb(80,0,80);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">Dear Modelers,</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">
At the IBPSA-USA dinner meeting in Dallas I made a brief announcement about a <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/45232/building-performance-simulation-analysis">new effort</a> 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!</div>
<div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">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.</div>
<div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></div></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The computer programming community has faced this same problem and has come up with a solution called <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/about" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">stackoverflow.com</a>, 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.</div>
<div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
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 <a href="http://stackexchange.com/sites" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">several other question and answer sites</a> from <a href="http://photo.stackexchange.com/" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">photography</a> to <a href="http://cooking.stackexchange.com/" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">cooking</a> to <a href="http://judaism.stackexchange.com/" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">Jewish law</a>, all using the same platform as Stack Overflow and successfully supporting their respective communities.</div>
<div class="im" style="color:rgb(80,0,80);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">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.</div>
<div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">Please visit our proposal: <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/45232/building-performance-simulation-analysis" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/45232/building-performance-simulation-analysis</a></div>
<div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">If you'd like to support this effort you can do so by:</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">1. Joining the <a href="http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/45232/building-performance-simulation-analysis">site</a></div>
</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">2. Up-voting questions that help establish the scope of our community (This is currently our most pressing need!)</div>
<div class="im" style="color:rgb(80,0,80);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">3. Proposing your own example questions</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">
4. Spreading the word to your friends and colleagues!</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">For further reading:</div></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
- Blog post at <a href="http://openrevit.com/" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">openrevit.com</a>: <a href="http://openrevit.com/2013/01/a-building-energy-performance-simulation-qa-site-that-will-change-your-life/" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">A Building Energy Performance Simulation Q&A site that will change your life!</a></div>
<div class="im adL" style="color:rgb(80,0,80);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">- How Stack Overflow works: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/about" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">http://stackoverflow.com/about</a></div>
<div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)">Thank you!</div></div><div><div style="text-align:left"><br></div><div style="text-align:left"><span style="font-size:large">Neal Kruis</span></div>
<div style="text-align:left">828 482-2088</div><div><div style="text-align:left"><img src="http://bigladdersoftware.com/epx/logo_sm.png" width="96" height="37"><br></div><div style="text-align:center"></div><span><div style="text-align:left">
Big Ladder Software</div></span><span><div style="text-align:left">2549 Irving Street</div></span><span><div style="text-align:left">Denver, CO 80211</div></span><div style="text-align:left"><a href="http://www.bigladdersoftware.com/" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">http://www.bigladdersoftware.com</a></div>
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