New Community Forums for Cloudera Customers and Users by Justin Kestelyn.
From the post:
This is a great day for technical end-users – developers, admins, analysts, and data scientists alike. Starting now, Cloudera complements its traditional mailing lists with a new, feature-rich community forums intended for users of Cloudera’s Platform for Big Data! (Login using your existing credentials or click the link to register.)
Although mailing lists have long been a standard for user interaction, and will undoubtedly continue to be, they have flaws. For example, they lack structure or taxonomy, which makes consumption difficult. Search functionality is often less than stellar and users are unable to build reputations that span an appreciable period of time. For these reasons, although they’re easy to create and manage, mailing lists inherently limit access to knowledge and hence limit adoption.
The new service brings key additions to the conversation: functionality, search, structure and scalability. It is now considerably easier to ask questions, find answers (or questions to answer), follow and share threads, and create a visible and sustainable reputation in the community. And for Cloudera customers, there’s a bonus: your questions will be escalated as bonafide support cases under certain circumstances (see below).
Another way for you to participate in the Hadoop ecosystem!
BTW, the discussion taxonomy:
What is the reasoning behind your taxonomy?
We made a sincere effort to balance the requirements of simplicity and thoroughness. Of course, we’re always open to suggestions for improvements.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of the taxonomy authors. Not one bit.
But all taxonomies represent the “intuitive” view of some small group. There is no means to escape the narrow view of all taxonomies.
What we can do, at least with topic maps, is to allow groups to have their own taxonomies and to view data through those taxonomies.
Mapping between taxonomies means that addition via any of the taxonomies results in new data appearing as appropriate in other taxonomies.
Perhaps it was necessary to champion one taxonomy when information systems were fixed, printed representations of data and access systems.
But the need for a single taxonomy, if it ever existed, does not exist now. We are free to have any number of taxonomies for any data set, visible or invisible to other users/taxonomies.
More than thirty (30) years after the invention of the personal computer, we are still laboring under the traditions of printed information systems.
Isn’t it time to move on?