OpenQA
OpenQA is a web community system that allows people to propose ideas, questions and topics that bloggers can write about. It then collects the responses from users’ blogs and lets you browse and search the results.
OpenQA could best be described as a facilitator of conversations. Just like the story starter index cards used in creative writing (we’ll give you the first paragraph, you do the rest), OpenQA is meant to start folks writing. Create an account, pick some question lists, and then get to blogging. Either access the questions directly from your blog (using plug-ins), or get them right here from the web.
OpenQA explores the importance of reliability and context when seeking credible information online. Reliability is the repetition of results over time and sources. Do you get the same answer if you ask 5 people? Context asks: who are those five people? It also looks at answers as coming from a context. In library science we tend to do a lot of looking at the context of the people who are asking questions, as in a reference interview, but we don’t do too much talking about the people who are answering questions. Here you see an answer as one entry in a person’s blog. The other entries make up context.
Context also addresses the idea that different answers may be credible at different times. For example, a recent story starter post asked why teens abuse alcohol. There were two answers. One was a short narrative answer about family problems and the pressure to look cool. The other was a long list of citations. When you looked at the blog contexts, one was from a teen, and the other from a reference librarian. If you want a teen perspective, the first answer is more credible. If you want a more research broader perspective, the latter was more credible. How do we build tools that support “credible� information, they must accompany this situation.