OR Exchange

I've been a member at StackOverflow since it launched to the public. For those who don't know what it is, it's basically a question and answer site built the way a question-answer site should be built; namely, every page deals with questions, and answers (rather than traditional forum type sites, which are more for threaded discussion, but get question-answer sits shoehorned in). They've built a fantastic community, which means you can go on there and ask a programming question and get an answer in a pretty respectable amount of time.

About 6 months ago they launched StackExchange, which was a service that let people set up their own question-answer sites, with the same look and feel as StackOverflow, but you were responsible for getting your community in order. Apparently a lot of the sites that were created never really got going very well, and that's led the StackExchange people to change the rules a bit. From now on, if you want to start a StackExchange site, you have to put together a proposal convincing them why they should build it, and then you have to rally enough users to initialize the site with questions and answers, and hopefully get enough momentum going that they can launch your site and you end up with a community where you can get answers to your niche questions.

The point of this post, then, is to talk about OR-Exchange. OR-Exchange is a StackExchange site built for answering Operations Research problems, which involves a lot of math programming, but simulation is definitely a part of that. Unfortunately, the StackExchange people don't seem to think there's enough participation in the site, so it's got 3 months left before it's shut down (we'll call it early July is the termination date).

So I encourage you, if you're a simulation user (and why wouldn't you be if you're reading this, unless you're my mom (who doesn't read this, by the way)) to visit OR-Exchange.com and join the community, and maybe ask some general purpose simulation questions (if you know the answer, you're allowed to answer your own questions, too).