Distributed/federated setup

[avengerpenguin]

I'd be very keen to try this within an organisation, but one issue we come across is that no single team has the time to support a central service that might be used by other teams. I'd like to explore the idea that I could package things up nicely so that every part of the organisation can install this, but there is some kind of federation or synchronisation going on such that either a) the questions are synchronised between all instances (import/export?) or b) at least the search can return questions on other people's instances.

I can't see any explicit support this this use case so far (unless I missed it) and I'm happy to look at how that might work and even contributing it if there's interest, but first I'd like to open up a bit of a discussion as to what's possible in askbot in its current state, what approaches are the most promising and -- possibly most importantly -- what problems/constraints will prevent/hinder a distributed install like this so we know what paths will not work at least.

So, thoughts?

[evgenyfadeev]

Hello, this is not supported. With some effort it might be possible to set up a centralized instance which will provide portals for individual teams. Also - the more users are on the site, the more responsive it appears to the users, so splitting up may not make sense unless your organization is very large and/or interests of the groups are not intersecting.

There may be a feature in the future that will allow setting up sub-forums - those could be used for the sub-divisions of an organization and content might be shared between the sub-forums.

[avengerpenguin]

That's the problem here: I want all the information in one, searchable place as whilst we are very large, there is a lot of internal knowledge that is useful to a lot of teams. The problem we hit is that the moment one team runs something like this, then they are then responsible for uptime etc. and it becomes a victim of its own success.

We've had this problem with lots of things like Jenkins, Wikis, ticket trackers. Either the organisation is willing to pay for a dedicated team or everyone ends up fragmenting as they run their own. It becomes tricky just to get something up and running in a "grass roots" kind of way. For example, I got this running on a private cloud within an hour, but I personally would be wary about everyone then depending on something I just threw together. Federation is one way to solve this.

I doubted this would be an existing feature and wondered if you had some initial thoughts about what steps we would or could take to make it possible to have multiple instances of askbot sharing data or searching across the whole network. I guess the closest I see on stackoverflow is the content of "Hot Network Questions" showing questions from elsewhere.

Like I say, I'm not going to demand you actually implement this right now and I might be willing to find some clever solution here, but I thought I'd reach out to you guys first since you know the architecture and might be able to shoot down any ideas I have that definitely won't work at least.

[evgenyfadeev]

It is good idea, thank you. The sites could be coupled via matching records on both sites called something like "partner site" - by having both mutually marked as partners, then there could be a protocol for copying/moving data as a basic feature. In fact I've seen sites that have shared user bases and mutually interesting or related content.