What questions should be "in scope" or "out of scope" for the RC Q&A site?

Meta Discussion
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This question is aimed to get some feedback and establish some guidelines on the question of what is in scope and what is out of scope on the RC Q&A site. That may help people joining the site think about how to ask things, what to ask and also how to respond.

I have suggested on possible answer to the question, which is a slightly modified approach to what I think the stackexchange traditional approach might be. The modified approach may be useful as a way to see what are the bounds that emerge and to not lock in to limits/practices before we know exactly what the options are.

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I think if may be useful try a slightly different approach than the traditional brief “go somewhere else” response that happens in places on stackexchange, with questions that

  • may be better posted elsewhere but

  • its not obvious they wouldn’t be useful here too.

The modified approach would be to post an answer that

  1. explains that the question may be better suited to some different locations and suggest where the question might be asked

  2. include any suggestions on how it be phrased for the suggested locations

  3. suggest that the poster update the question with a link to the question on the other location(s)

  4. keep the question in this the RC Q&A site

Questions like this one would obviously off topic. Other questions, however, are not as clear and may have some Q&A value in the RC Q&A .

I noticed that this question was proposed to be out of scope and possibly marked for deletion. Deleting this question may miss out on getting useful Q&A information available to the Q&A forum audience.

Following the steps above of posting an answer (not a comment) and including suggestions and follow up would allow others the option of

  • following up with an actual answer

  • avoid tangential discussion around what is in/out of scope (which seems like a meta discussion) being mixed in with (and derailing) focussed question and answer discipline.

3

After some pondering here is my poorly written starting point.

"Research computing is using computers to enable (improve, speedup, or make possible) all types of research.

It is by its nature an cross-disciplinary space, existing at the intersection of the research feilds conceptual space, computational methods, computing hardware (often in atypical configurations) and physical research equipment, as well as frequently involving atypical issues at the extreme end of large scale, and shared systems.

While all questions in the area are welcome, what best belongs here questions that are both research computing and due to its intersectionality (e.g. scale, HPC, special equipment related etc) does not fit well on any individual topic site. "

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@christophernhill I think this agrees with most of your points.