I also have code I want to share, and I've also noticed how many silos there are in UW IT--most of the time for what amounts to personal reasons not professional reasons. As a public education insititution we should embrace open source (at the very least within the institution, right??).

Most of the industry uses either Perforce or a git-based solution. I'm sure the license cost of Perforce is out of the question so my vote goes to Github.

Also, as an informatics guy, I really hate forums. They are a crappy kludge of email BBS that don't surface the appropriate information. An immense amount of a new person's time is wasted searching for information and regular member's time is wasted answering questions that have already been asked.

GetSatisfaction has a really awesome (but expensive) workflow that surfaces answers to poster's questions before they are asked, etc. Even if it's not GSFN, a regular forum is only good for die-hards- so you might as well just create a separate Google group and QA site.

That being said, I also ran into weirdness recently with the course schema, the XML, the official spec, and the production code were different because of a bug in producing the XML sample. The documentation itself should have wiki functionality so those sorts of things can be noted.

I would go with GitHub because it will continue to evolve without UW leadership. It will also be more accessible to non-programmers.

I definitely like your idea for sponsoring both a code repro and a forum that supports it.

Currently we have the possibly of using a UW supported SVN repro or GitHub. Just curious if you have some thoughts about one or the other?

Or, if there is a forum/cvs/git repo online, make it more obvious in the various portals and documentation areas.