Where would I ask a broad question about maintaining new technologies

Question

I'm looking for a proper platform to ask about the maintainability of a multitude of technologies as the amount of differing platforms increases.

Most notably, I'm looking into some usage case for NoSQL and non RDBMS databases.
I need to look at the big picture, how do we maintain these differing technologies over time if each of them is different to the last.
While we can search for a person with SQL-Server or Oracle knowledge, I have a much harder time imagining looking for someone with Neo4J combined with SQL-Server through custom API knowledge.

I also can't imagine putting a developer into a systems administration role, required to maintain and support these platforms.

As each fringe technology is used only for a few cases, and can't warrant a full time employee to maintain them, I can't present a usage case for them without also mentioning how we will future-proof it and maintain it in a few years.

So I'm looking for someone who has experience with handling a multitude of smaller technologies, that are not common and often tailored to their specific usages, to explain how to properly handle such a task.

Where could I ask this?
Alternatively, how could I word this in a format that would fit the SE community of sites?
I'm quite sure people have been tackling this problem with each new technology that arises, so there has to be an answer somewhere.

Answer 1

At first glance your question is exactly on-topic for ServerFault, as it is about managing information technology systems in a business environment.

Although the subject is as much as if not more a business question than a technical problem and should be addressed in your enterprise architecture and/or at management level as part of your companies strategic business goals, in practice the operators and system administrators are indeed the ones having to deal with such issues.

As such it passes my litmus test for an an interesting opinion based question, so I propose you simply ask it and see what happens...

If you're actually looking for such a person and have an actual vacancy there is of course http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ as the SE job board.

Answer 2

These are the types of questions are the reason that I want StackOverflow to implement the ability to do two things, both upon being flagged to a moderator's notice:

• meta-site visibility
• question-specific chatrooms

Some questions are just plain impossible to place in a specific SE site and would greatly benefit from the exposure of multiple communities. And by meta-site visibility, I'm not giving cross-posting a different name; I mean the same question and it's answers should be visible and acted upon from separate SEs deemed to cover the topics raised in the questions by the moderators.

The second point is already around in the form of pushing lots of back and forth comments to a chatroom. But why let all that accumulate when you can just have a general chatroom specific to the question which can eventually be cited upon when creating the final answer?