Hi folks, For a little while, I've been keen to see how we can improve our communication methods, both to make it more accessible to newcomers and to take advantage of more featureful tooling than has been traditionally possible with email lists.
As such, I set up an instance of Discourse[0] at https://discourse.debian.net, and am now asking for a wider input on if this is something the project wishes to use and if I should spend my time pursuing. FAQ === Is it Free Software? Yes. It's GPLv2+. Who else uses it? Lots of people. GNOME, Mozilla, Ubuntu, Fedora to name a few What about the mailing lists? This may or may not be a replacement for any particular list. I suspect there are some thet would benefit greatly from having Discourse be the primary interaction, and other places where this would be less suitable. Be specific! Ok... I think debian-user, debian-vote and possibly debian-project would be better off in Discourse. I think debian-devel-announce should stay as an email list (for now). However, I am not suddenly proposing that we shut those lists down. The aim of this exercise is to see if Discourse would work well for us. Email is still important to me! Fine, you can interact with Discorse by email rather than the web interface. It should be noted however, that there is not 1:1 feature partiy with email and the web interface, as Discorse does things that can't easily be done with email. For the majority of users though, email interaction should be "good enough". Why are you doing this? I have two motivations. First, is moderation. Discourse has built in tools to allow community moderation on a much better scale than our email lists. Secondly, I genuinely believe that ease of access to new contributors is of paramount importance to the project. What about X software instead? Feel free to explore other solutions. I've already done evaluations, and I'm pretty much set on this as the correct way forward. If there is insufficient interest in moving forward with Discourse, I'll leave it to others to invest time. What about forums.debian.net? I have no interest in interacting with a community of users and moderators who allow blatent Code of Conduct violations to go unchecked. What's next? I'd appreciate people testing Discourse. If you have any questions, then I'm happy to answer them. Thanks, Neil [0] https://www.discourse.org/
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
