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As a reaction of this question, I wanted to propose a site similar to careers.stackoverflow, but for creating, recruiting and contributing to open-source projects.

To be clear, this is not a suggestion of creating a new StackOverflow-site, only with questions related to open-source programming issues etc., it's a site for finding projects to contribute to and getting help from people wanting to contribute.

To my knowledge, this is an unusual site for the Stack Exchange community, so I want to get some feedback on the concept before listing further ideas.


Off-topic:

I've been reading through the FAQ, browsing the site for an hour or so, but I'm still confused if I'm asking this question the correct place. So please direct me if necessary.

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Stack Exchange is about creating Q&A sites. And what you're suggesting is not a Q&A site.

careers.stackoverflow is special. It uses different code, different logic, different eveyrthing. While it may share some under-the-hood stuff with SE, it's ultimately a very different thing. Much like area51.SE.

Given careers and area51, the SE devs are obviously willing to create special code for certain sites. However, I don't think they'd do it in this case, for several reasons.

  • The accuracy of such a site will will be low. Careers.SO serves a purpose: it gets people jobs. These are real job offers given to real human beings with real contracts attached. There's a bunch of work on the SE end to make sure that those jobs actually exist and are connected to real companies and so forth.

    Your hypothetical site would presumably not have any means to declare that an open-source opening was "real" to any degree. Yes, you can ensure that a project exists for some definition of that term. But unless it's a popular open-source project, it's unlikely that it exists in anything more than a guy with a Bitbucket account. Anyone can post anything as a project.

  • Another problem is that there's no sense of a project being dead, unless the owner declares it so. That's a real problem for people who might want to develop on it.

  • SourceForge already exists. As do various other project hosting sites. What would make this SE different, save the fact that it won't actually do any hosting? Indeed, wouldn't that make it less useful overall?

  • Ultimately, I doubt the developers would take the time to implement something like this. The cost/benefit just isn't there.

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  • Great answer and some well-written valid points. I feel like a noob for not knowing SourceForge. Thanks.
    – Aske B.
    Aug 27, 2012 at 22:10

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