Home

ReadMe | License | Blog | Developer Forum | Roadmap

Open Question is Open Mind’s contribution to the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community. In order to move our efforts with the Question Box software forward, we are open sourcing our source code to allow the community the opportunity to contribute to the Question Box project.

Examples of contributions from developers might include: integrate a software PBX routing system, creating an IVR system, SMS applications, analytics or anything else one might want to contribute. We also hope developers will work with us to creak ways to push and hook data from other platforms like FrontlineSMS, Google Earth, RapidSMS, Ushahidi and others…

In addition to offering a platform for developers to contribute to, Open Question allows the concept and technology behind Question Box to scale beyond the modest constraints of Open Mind as a company. This means any organization on the planet can now set up their own instance of Question Box without approaching us first, although Open Mind as a company is available for consultation services related to setup, deployment and oversight of operations where necessary. Our intent is for any organization with a need, but especially global development organizations, to use this in ways that allows them to disseminate information more efficiently.

Developers will have access to the three core elements of Open Question: the database, the front-end GUI and the middle tier architecture (search, relevancy algorithms and archiving).

Because the question and answer data we use in our deployments does not belong to us, it cannot be included in an Open Question instance with additional consultation. However, the strength of Question Box lies in the indexing of data relevant to you, your organization or the people you are attempting to serve.

Example uses for Open Question software:

• All questions answered hotline (ex. services similar to ChaCha or 411)
• Vertical questions and answers (ex. customer support hotline, community knowledge base)
• Text Document Server and Search (ex. document repository for organizations)
• Cross referencing large amounts of text (ex. compare one document’s relevancy to another)
• National surveys (ex. census info, political campaigns)

Open Question can be configured to work with any server (local or hosted) and can work with any search engine like Sphinx and Lucene or any web search engine like Yahoo!BOSS or Google.

ReadMe | License | Blog | Developer Forum | Roadmap