Mindshare Committee: Migrate to Discourse in 2023?

Hi folks, I hope you are settled in after the new year! I am repeating this message to both the Fedora Discussion tag and the Mindshare mailing list.

I want to pitch that we fully adopt our Fedora Discussion tag as the preferred place for asynchronous discussion by the Mindshare Committee. The mailing list would be closed and retired, similar to the CommOps, Council-discuss, and Badges mailing lists. I would like to make this change on Monday, 23 January, for the next term of Mindshare.

I believe this change will help us be models for other groups and teams in the community who are also looking at moving from mailing lists to Discussion. As stewards of the non-engineering part of Fedora, we should be bold and take the step fully into Fedora Discussion.

Any thoughts on making this transition after Monday, 23 January?

2 Likes

As we were discussing, I’m fine with retiring the (barely used) mind-co tag and using mindshare for this.

(copy of my e-mail to the mailing list)

  1. The Fedora Mindshare mailing list is very low traffic anyhow, so this does not seem to make a big impact on the users of the mailing list:
    January 2023 - [MOVED TO DISCOURSE] Mindshare - https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tag/mind-co - Fedora Mailing-Lists
  2. Regarding being models for other groups: I think the main value would be in model the transition from mailing list to discourse for other teams with more active mailing lists and more diverse members, for example by providing best practices for other teams to follow which include early notifications, FAQ for affected users, maybe office hours to help answering questions or concerns, providing training for discourse (maybe through short Youtube videos) etc (not sure what is really effective). Maybe this already exists from the transitions of the other teams. Maybe this needs to be created after gathering feedback from the other teams.
  3. I am not a big fan of mailing lists and I believe that a discussion software like discourse can bring additional value. As a power user and long-time Fedora contributor, I still find the discourse badges regarding trust levels and theirs descriptions disconcerting since they assume that the Fedora community is only the discourse community, for example:
    Forum Level 3 badge on Fedora Discussion
    “This badge is granted when you reach trust level 3. Thanks for being a regular part of our community over a period of months. …” - And some very basic features are granted only by the activity in the forum ignoring whether someone was elected in Fedora, trusted as packager, … - I understand the technical reasons why it started like this and why discourse does it by default. The current way does not seem to be a good fit for Fedora, though. At least for Mindshare it should be made sure that all members have a appropriate trust level in discourse.

I’ve changed some of the titles, but not the default text. I will update that.

I have a plan for this too! I’m working on a little program which will listen to the Fedora message bus for changes in group membership in FAS, and update corresponding groups here. We can then decide that membership in certain groups grants TL1 or even TL2.

I’d like more feedback from the rest of the Mindshare Committee on this one. It makes sense to me, but I want to validate this approach with others.

I agree. I think it is safe to interpret this as an implicit “+1” for making the migration.

This is a great addition and I agree it would be valuable to leave a breadcrumb trail for others to see how to do it. I would like help from others who could help us leave that breadcrumb trail.

What do you think the best format would be for this? Is it documentation? A CommBlog post? A Discussion thread where people can ask questions? I am curious.

I have migrated a few lists to Discourse, but I am wondering if we know others who could weigh in here too? Speaking for myself, I have taken the following approach for deprecating mailing lists for Discourse. I did this for CommOps, DEI, Fedora Badges, and maybe one or two others.

These instructions are organized by the Hyperkitty settings menu:

  1. List Identity
    • Description: Add [MOVED TO DISCOURSE] prefix so the header is updated
    • Information: Note date of migration to Discourse, briefly explain decision, give URL to the Discourse tag
    • Display name: Add [MOVED TO DISCOURSE] prefix, append URL to Discourse tag (this only appears on list profile page)
  2. Automatic Responses
    • Autorespond to list owner: Respond and discard message
    • Autoresponse owner text: See example below
    • Autorespond postings: Respond and discard message
    • Autoresponse postings text: See example below
    • Autorespond requests: Respond and discard message
    • Autoresponse request text: See example below
  3. Message Acceptance
    • Default action to take when a member posts to the list: Reject (with notification)
    • Default action to take when a non-member posts to thelist: Discard (no notification)
  4. Subscription Policy
    • Subscription Policy: Confirm, then moderate

Example autorespond requests (from Badges)

* * * * * FEDORA BADGES MAILING LIST IS NOW RETIRED * * * * *

Did you know? Fedora Badges retired our mailing list in November 2022 and moved to discussion.fedoraproject.org. You can sign in with your Fedora Project account – no additional accounts are required. Please post your topic on Discourse to ensure you receive a response to your message:

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tag/badges-team

More information: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/badges@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/4TE5AFO5G7ELX2EWY6EZRW3QJEDXV45T/

1 Like

Hi,

I was unavailable, not sure if this is still relevant.

I am not part of the committee anymore, though.

This depends on the individual group. I guess this would be some kind of change management with the resources with whatever the group needs. At least some material that explains the benefits of discourse over mailing lists and how to make best use of its features would be great. Maybe this can point to training material that already exists from discourse. Maybe we can have badges for completing the training. Also, there should be some training about what timelines are good to implement this change. For example, in GNOME the mailinglists were disabled and projects are supposed to be moved to discourse. The discussions happened mainly in some dedicated mailing lists and only shortly before the shutdown, there were any e-mails to the individual project mailing lists. Plans like these should be communicated earlier and more visible.

We have some good guides here already — I hope this provides a good start on general tips:

and this about Fedora Discussion in specific:

… although that will need an update once we combine in Ask.

Are there other things you’d like to know, or have better guides for?

@till One short-term outcome of the Fedora Council face-to-face session was making a plan to stop creating new mailing lists and figuring out which lists are actually active versus zombie/dead lists.