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I was checking out the newly released college scorecard data from the department of education[1] and noticed a link entitled "Join the Conversation" that also included the Stack Exchange logo.
The link points to questions tagged with "collegescorecard"[2], of which there are none. Of no surprise, there is also no "collegescorecard" tag[3]/wiki[4].

A few takeaways here:

If an organization is going to use open data se exclusively for their forum/q&a, it would be prudent for that organization to actually be familiar with open data se (or se in general). If that's not a possibility, perhaps it would behoove us to create a wiki specifically for this, much like a style guide.
Pointing to a blank document benefits nobody.
Creating empty question tags benefits nobody.
To be completely anal retentive, using se logo and not opendata se logo is wrong, as well as text encouraging involvement in a non-existent activity.

I was going to create an issue on 18f's github repo[5], but i'd appreciate some feedback beforehand. Also, this repo makes opendata se's use not entirely exclusive, but the points remain.

UPDATE:
created github issue

  1. https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/
  2. https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/collegescorecard
  3. https://opendata.stackexchange.com/tags/collegescorecard/info
  4. https://opendata.stackexchange.com/tags/collegescorecard
  5. https://github.com/18F/college-choice
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    Wow- there are a lot of non-open data questions from the collegescorecard tag
    – philshem
    Sep 16, 2015 at 14:00
  • yes indeed. i'm all for this, but i think it can be handled much better. much much better.
    – albert
    Sep 17, 2015 at 0:21
  • there are a lot of non-open data questions not using the collegescorecard tag, but coming from the college scorecard site. pretty much the epitome of why i posted this
    – albert
    Sep 17, 2015 at 0:22

1 Answer 1

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I support using custom tags from specific data sources (e.g. - see top banner of https://open.fda.gov/), because:

  • questions & answers come with a friendly license

  • no required registration to read (like Quora)

At the moment there are no questions tagged with because the first one is in the review queue.

I believe that in addition to answering questions, the people who maintain the interface between OD and a 3rd party should be active here, namely by maintaining tag texts, editing questions, timely answering, etc.

I agree that they should use a logo that is specific to OpenData, and not StackExchange (also because it may discourage non-programmers).

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    custom tag supporter here too, this example just stood out in not ideal ways. i did see that someone tried to add the tag after i posted this. wasn't sure whether to close vote or not. there's been @ least one more question regarding collegescorecard, so that is two not using the tag. i'm not sure if that is the user's fault for not implementing it or the other way around. my immediate reaction to this was from a big picture stand point: what if this started to happen frequently, etc?
    – albert
    Sep 14, 2015 at 12:15
  • gis se is handling this a different way. good read, valid points: meta.gis.stackexchange.com/questions/4185/…
    – albert
    Mar 11, 2016 at 1:10

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