5

(I don't know if it fits better to meta or nor meta.)

As we see very often, many problems in/about academia are not suitable for close-ended questions. Also, some important things involve polling questions, like software, university, scholarship, conference or journal recommendations.

(For example, I'm involved in projects about creating new software for new ways for collaboration and discovery sharing, https://gist.github.com/4540942, and I have a lot of related questions, but all of them are open-ended.)

So:

  • do we have a good place to redirect people asking such open-ended question?
  • or: should we start one?
  • or: maybe we should start a blog on Academia.SE?
  • I think this question fits better here on meta rather than main: on main, it would (for me) definitely be a candidate for closure & deletion – EnergyNumbers Jan 21 '13 at 17:33
4

Quora accept open-ended questions about academia. You could redirect there.

3

Chat is as close as we've got to a place for open-ended discussion. But it sounds like wht you're after is a forum. We don't do that round here (and I've hugely scaled down my contribution to forums since getting active here: they just seem so archaic and pointless now, and suffer from Eternal September syndrome much more than we do here)

  • 1
    For me chat(s) rarely work - as there is no structure at all; maybe except for trivial questions. When it comes to forums - implicitly, I referred to such; but for some reason there are not as active as they used to be + maybe something in between (blog + discussions in comments) may look more appropriate. – Piotr Migdal Jan 20 '13 at 20:44
  • Unfortunately, chat is the appropriate forum for that sort of thing, and our chat—like most beta chats—is too slow to be useful. SE does allow sites to have a blog, but it's a lot of effort, and we have to demonstrate that we are committed to maintaining the blog in the long-term. If you're interested, though, start a post and we can see whether there's interest. – eykanal♦ Jan 21 '13 at 4:19
  • I think chat is the way to go. Not the general chat room, but a "private" room with an appropriate title. – StrongBad♦ Jan 21 '13 at 8:55

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