Continuing the discussion from Please add "neighbors" category for Rocky Project:
I’m very excited for the idea of Fedora Neighbors as a way of supporting projects which are close to Fedora. However, I think it can open up the opportunity too broadly in a way that I don’t think is intended. We do want projects who need a forum space to feel like they can come to Fedora Discussion for a home. However, we don’t want Fedora Neighbors to becoming a graveyard of sections just to represent people’s favorite projects. We aren’t trying to provide an equivalent to subreddits.
From what I’ve gathered from the CentOS and Asahi sections, it seems like we would like to provide spaces to projects which need a primary space to host their community, as well as take ownership of running the section like it was their own forum.
If we need to collaborate between projects, that can happen in Project Discussion.
If we just want to gush about favorite topics then we can use The Water Cooler.
If it’s a project that comes up often enough, we should see if creating a tag addresses the problem before making a section.
If a project already has a primary space for discussions that works for them, then we should point to that space rather spreading the conversation to a new forum. Similarly there may be times where people from this forum should hop over to the other forum for certain topics. For this last point, I think it’s important to emphasize that other projects are not entitled to a section in Fedora Neighbors, but that’s also not an indictment against project who aren’t listed. For example, we love Ansible, but they have their own forum and that’s really the best place to have discussions focused on Ansible.
Selfishly, I would like clarification because I think this is a service that I could pitch to other communities and organizations. However, I don’t want to start that conversation if it turns out that their situation isn’t really one that would apply to what we’re trying to do.
The way that I see it, Fedora is trying to help other communities with a very specific need they may have. Having criteria written can help clarify when this service is available for a community. But that’s just my understanding.