<p>I agree with Shane for everything but I will put in my responses as well. I think it will be useful though because I have seperate interests in the project than Shane. I am solely interested in the question "Are there repuation effects in SE communities" (not because the other things aren't interesting, simply because that is how I personally like to pursue topics in a simple, counter-factual framework).</p>

<p>1- Restricting to Stackoverflow, Superuser and Serverfault is fine to answer my question, but if people want to consider a wider array of topics it is benificial to have a broader range of communities (its necessary to examine between community variation). It also doesn't hinder my quest to only consider every other community than these three as Shane suggests (I don't have any theoretical reasons to expect differences between reputation effects in different communities apriori). So I concur with Shane's suggestion of every other community besides Stackoverflow, Superuser and Serverfault.</p>

<p>2 - I agree with Shane as well, and I think more data is better at this point. If people need to reduce the data to either make it more manageable or address particular questions they can do it on their own. If we had more refined goals I wouldn't disagree with a sampling strategy, but I don't want to limit potential projects before we get started.</p>

<p>3 - Again I agree with Shane, and I think it will be simpler to manage if we all work with the same data dump. This will allow easier replication and I think will make trouble shooting easier to handle (although if people use different sampling schemes this will become more difficult). I could volunteer some space either in my Dropbox account or google docs and publish the link (as long as people are fine with delimited text I don't see any space problems on my end). I suppose in the future we may want to think about how to store results/code in a manageable and retrievable fashion.</p>

<p>4 - I'll come back to this when I take a closer look at the variables and what information is contained. Although we may want to include everything just so it does not limit anyones ability to answer different questions at this point.</p>

<p>Sounds like a really cool project, and I hope it gets some really good user input from the community. I am really interested to see how different people approach the subject. I think I may use this as personal motivation to learn some more R so I can disseminate results.</p>
