What's this?

This is a tool to explore new ways to spread tribal knowledge of a software project within a group.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management

Features:

• Q&A - think a private StackOverflow
• Topics - A structured wiki
• Integration - Hipchat

Upcoming features:

• File uploads - with players/viewers for appropriate types, like video
• Google integration (?)
• badges for topic experts
• Hubot integration

Motivation

While wiki's such as Google Docs or Github wiki make it easy to enter data, a large complex project can quickly become overwhelming in pure wiki form.

The goal of this project is to provide the tools to enable members of a development team to enter and maintain the information that is useful to newcomers and existing members alike.

Q&A sites like StackOverflow are tremendously useful for getting answers to targeted questions. Unfortunately, it's not available for private groups.

In addition, the complex topics that an advanced software project needs to share can be difficult to squeeze into a Q&A format.

Long form articles require a skilled writer to clearly and correctly teach a concept or topic. Long, meandering mind-dumps aren't pleasant to read through. Tools to help manage the process of articles is necessary.

And finally, not everyone learns the same way. Some people are audio/visual learners, and some topics are better suited to demonstrating, rather than describing. Tools to help generate generate non-annoying screencasts are badly needed.

Setup

• install mysql

• clone repo, then bundle install

• install sphinx. using brew:

brew install sphinx --mysql to install searchd

If you want to use the github omniauth provider (optional, not required):

• set two environment variables, the client app id ID export GITHUB_KEY=your_key

• And the client Secret export GITHUB_SECRET=some_secret

See http://developer.github.com/guides/basics-of-authentication/ for more info.

• seed the database: rake db:seed

Thanks

While the work on this project has been done outside of Coupa, special thanks to my employer, Coupa Software, for allowing and encouraging me to do this side-project as open-source.

please contribute

Pull requests gladly accepted!

License

MIT-LICENSE