{"id":1443,"date":"2011-05-16T12:07:15","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T16:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1443"},"modified":"2011-05-16T12:07:15","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T16:07:15","slug":"recently-on-or-exchange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/05\/16\/recently-on-or-exchange\/","title":{"rendered":"Recently on OR-Exchange…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"OR-Exchange<\/a> is a question and answer site on operations research (and analytics). \u00a0 The concept couldn’t be simpler.\u00a0 People ask questions about operations research;\u00a0 people answer questions about operations research.\u00a0 Kinda like the usenet group sci.op-research without the spam.<\/p>\n

I put together the site a couple of years ago when stack-exchange<\/a> made it easy to put such sites on their server.\u00a0 The idea was to mimic the popular mathoverflow<\/a> site, but to specialize on operations research issues.\u00a0 I had no idea of how well this would work, but it started off pretty active and continued to grow.<\/p>\n

About a year ago, stackexchange decided on a different path, and they no longer wanted to host or support other groups.\u00a0 Instead, groups of people could go through a process to become a true stackexchange site.\u00a0 A number of groups have done that, and have done well with that path.\u00a0 Unfortunately, our site was a little small for that direction.\u00a0 Even now, with 381 “official users”, it would be the smallest of any stackexchange site (the current smallest is Jewish Life and Learning with 401 users).\u00a0 The requirements to be a stackexchange site seemed insurmountable, so we needed another solution.<\/p>\n

At this point, INFORMS<\/a> stepped in and offered to sponsor the site.\u00a0 After receiving confirmation that “sponsorship” did not mean “ownership” and that we could continue acting the way we were, we (i.e. me, along with a few of the very active participants) decided to move the site to INFORMS.\u00a0 A big question was the software to use, since stackexchange software was no longer available.\u00a0 Fortunately, there was an open source replacement from osqa.net<\/a>, so it was just a matter of installing that….\u00a0\u00a0 Famous last words!\u00a0 Installing the software and getting the current questions and answers from stackexchange was no easy feat.\u00a0 Fortunately, David and Herman from INFORMS were up to the task, and were able to do the herculean task of getting things up and running smoothly.\u00a0 The conversion happened on April 8, while I was sitting in a faculty meeting, doing the few minor things I needed to do, like pointing or-exchange.com from stackexchange to INFORMS (Here is some advice:when sitting in a faculty meeting, do not try to guess URLs;\u00a0 godaddy and bigdaddy lead to radically different sorts of sites).\u00a0 And things have worked great since then!<\/p>\n

As I said, there are 381 registered users for the site, with about 40 being reasonably active.\u00a0 But you don’t have to register to read the questions and answers, and there are about 300 unique visitors per day<\/em> who do so, often due to hits at google.\u00a0 This 300 is more than the background hits on this blog (when I post, hits spike up, but I run about 275 hits per day between posts).\u00a0 There have been 316 questions asked, generating 1152 answers, along with at least that many comments.\u00a0 At this point, there are eight moderators, though the moderation touch is extremely light.<\/p>\n

Recently people have asked about<\/p>\n