<p>I think that it could be interesting as a first project to analyze the data from the <a href="http://stackexchange.com/">stackexchange sites</a>.  The goal would be to characterize the communities and the question/answer process itself.</p>

<p>We will need to further narrow the scope, but some possible questions:</p>

<ol>
<li>What makes a good question?</li>
<li>What makes a good answer?</li>
<li>How do the various communities differ?</li>
</ol>

<p>The data is all <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">cc-wiki</a> and available both through the <a href="http://odata.stackexchange.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">data dump</a> and via the <a href="https://stackapps.com/">API</a>.  For those people doing their analysis in <a href="http://www.r-project.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">R</a>, we can make the data available through the open-source <a href="http://code.google.com/p/overflowr/" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>overflowr</code> package</a>, but several other languages/tools are also available.</p>

<p>One nice thing about this project is that it opens the door for very different kinds of analysis that draws on our entire community, ranging from statistics to social network analysis and NLP/machine learning.</p>
