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Qunu: an Open Source Approach to Realtime Q&A

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Enabling people to convene and interact online in the same rich ways they can offline is the holy grail of social computing. Imagine being able to ask a question, on any subject and at any time, and getting an expert response in near realtime, via your IM client. Such is the idea behind Qunu.com. Qunu, which sounds like GNU—the license under which the site and its contents are licensed—is an open source approach (swarming) to Community Q&A, which is motivated by a desire to centralize (and qualify?) geographically-distributed domain expertise and then make it (the experts and their persisted answers to FAQs) available to the general public, for free. It’s an ambitious idea.

A few open questions and notes about Qunu:

  • Reputation and Tagging –
    • Users sign up as an expert (or “qunista”) by “tagging” themselves (ie, with a tag like “jabber” or “Gaim”).
    • How can you confirm or be assured of the integrity and trustworthiness of an expert or the probable accuracy of an answer they provide, using Qunu? Like eBay, a question and answer system like Qunu is essentially a marketplace of ideas. eBay does a good job of enabling reputable vendors to communicate their trustworthiness to buyers. Will Qunu enable “qunistas” to do so? If so, how?
    • Google solves this problem, by the way, by carefully screening its question answerers and charging $2.50 for each question you ask. Essentially, Google underwrites the accuracy of responses to your questions by charging you for them.
    • Microsoft Windows Live QnA (in beta) proposes to solve this problem in a more democratic, "open", and less costly way: by allowing consumers to rate the quality of answers through "Reputation-based scoring, so you know which sources are most reputable."
  • What in the world would motivate an “expert” to participate in Qunu?
    • Recognition? Qunu does a poor job of recognizing experts. Look at their Qunistas page. Note: they launched 39 days ago so I leave it open to the possibility that they might yet get around to rewarding Qunistas with recognition.
    • Money? Nope. Perhaps a business model involving micro-payments for questions answered will evolve but such will probably be years in coming, if ever. For a raft of "new economy" business models, see Everything 2.0.
  • WikiWiki, Authorization, and KM –
    • You must be logged in to edit the Qunu Wiki, which is a MediaWiki implementation (same as Wikipedia).
    • “ Since we're all about "real time" solutions, the traditional support forum just felt... "wrong". So instead of slapping up a phpBB like everyone else, we've decided to go with a wiki instead for bug reports, documentation and discussion. We invite you to add anything that you think fits.”
    • Increasingly, community owners are turning to Wikis as an alternative to Forums as a content persistence medium.
    • Where do people have back and forth conversations in such a venue? Every MediaWiki topic is accompanied by a “Discussion”, or ‘Talk Behind’ page. For example: https://qunu.com/wiki/index.php/Talk:RevenueModel.
  • Client Restrictions – Qunu supports “any jabber-enabled IM” client. No Messenger, which is too bad.
  • Qunu's competition: hmmm, Windows Live QnA, GoogleAnswers, forums, listservs, newsgroups, blogs...

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