Is it possible to have a local 'programmers' running on a university local server only for students?

Question

I've been in the community for only few days, and I really enjoyed how the system works. I was wondering if there is any variant from the stack system that could be installed locally, say in a university? I saw few variations such as the one from Stanford online classes, but I was really more interested in the particular philosophy of this one of users privileges defining the community.

My university has many departments that are self managed by students, I believe a tool like this could increase greatly the interaction between students here.

One may say that instead of requesting to create a new tool, rather invite them to collaborate here and on other parts of the stack community too, but in my country english is not a native language, and this unfortunately still separate many students from nice things such as this community.

If this questions end up not belonging to meta (I really got confused on the allowed question 'is subject X allowed' and actually asking this since it doesn't directly benefit (maybe on the long run it does), this community (since Im talking about computer science students here), please could I get a pointer on where this is appropriated, or know if it is not possible or where would be possible? Or maybe the topic moved.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Unless you have lots of money you cannot self host the Stack Exchange engine. This was tried for SE 1.0 but it didn't work.

The business model is built around communities coming to a single location (Stack Exchange) and building within the existing framework.

When SE 2.0 (of which Programmers is just one site out of 80+) was started there was no possibility of self hosting, but there have been comments that indicate that large corporations (we're talking the size of Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) could:

There is a Stack Exchange Enterprise option for internal use. The pricing makes this feasible for large organizations only. You can email team at stackoverflow and your inquiry will be routed to the correct place.

If you really like the model then check out the list of Stack Exchange clones on Meta Stack Overflow. You should be able to find one you can install and use.