We’re starting a special interest group for Hummingbird work (Hummingbird - Fedora Project Wiki) in the Fedora space, and would like to have a tag created so that people subscribe to, or mute, conversations about hummingbird work. At the urge of @bookwar and because of discussions with @jspaleta and @nhr we’re going to start out with this instead of a Matrix chat. We don’t think we have the bandwidth to start a synchronous channel like that yet, but we are working on scheduling a weekly or bi-weekly meeting for synchronous communications. At least initially though, we’d like to be able to have conversations here.
So I reviewed what I could find concerning discourse tag policy.
It looks like tag creation is open to any trust level 3 individuals in the community and it turns out I have trust level 3 and can create tags. There’s no vote or anything, its just a thing people with enough trust can do. We may want to gather round all the trust level 3 people at some point and do review to clean up some tags in the future.. but right now I don’t see a problem with adding another tag to help people with a particular interest coordinate with each other.
I’m gonna give this topic a day, just in case someone has qualms that we need to talk through. But I think that’s unlikely and yall should anticipate me or someone else with trust level 3 creating this tag for you in the next few days. If for some reason the tag doesn’t exist by Monday. poke me in the eye about it.
Ask an admin to make a tag, that is the only established rule.
I’m sure it will be fine with the team, but Matthew used to do it, and had some rules about the naming conventions. Not super strict though, so take a look at the existing tags and you should be able to work it out.
I say go for it.
If you want to loop in the team then @moderators will do that, but the system won’t let a lowly TL3 such as myself summon them with the tag.
I think we are pretty generous with the tags. The main reason to restrict tag creation is to avoid duplicates and going too granular, so that we don’t have separate tags for every request.
Other than that, SIGs are actually encouraged to create tags instead of mailling lists
The complex bit is of course the bikeshedding regarding the name. And the important part is a choice between two approaches:
a tag for a topic as in “installer”
a tag for a team as in “workstation-wg”, “packaging-sig”, etc.
Both approaches have merit and essentially if is up to the SIG - to clarify their intent with the tag. Do they want it to be more open - to contain everything related to the topic, or to be more process-driven - have a tag for specifically SIG business - team discussions, meetings, workflows or decision making.
I think at the beginning if SIG doesn’t have too much of internal process yet, it is ok to have a topic tag, rather than a team tag and split later, if needed.
Please stop. Creating tags on the Project Discussion category is intended to be very restrictive, which has proven to be useful in the past.
Please do not just randomly create tags without reviewing how things work and why they are implemented the way they are.
For good reasons, Project Discussion tags are restricted to Site Admins, and actually even site admins find out (hopefully) there is an implication that also creates an entry barrier for them.
“Just doing things” in site administration has brought us to the point that no one wants to make changes because nothing is documented and many people just implemented things they wanted to test and such. Now we have an instance so complicated that even Discourse warned us already about it.
Surely this is just about tags, but discipline begins already with them And the tags on Project Discussion have proven to be a core element in keeping the discussion there focused (compared to other categories).
Sorry, I used a wrong link. Updated → Making sure you're not a bot! (I just recognized that we have already a second ticket there, although I opened that repo just today and thought the last one is still mine:)
That was not a mod decision or so, but a FPL decision (back then, Matthew). Follow the link I provided. It contains another link to a discussion in which Matthew summed up the major point.
There should be older topics with more information actually. But I don’t have the links off the cuff and not the time to search through the Discourse
Getting stuff documented to avoid the need for that is one of the reasons to get the repo ^^ Get stuff decided in an organized way, and then documented. But also avoid that people accidentally break rules (or infra) ^^ … or at least work with the same rules
If a SIG has proven to have sustainable activities, or if the Council or Fesco supports them, I suggest to open a ticket. Then it can be reviewed there. And there it can finally be forwarded to a site admin.
Just a side note, until recently, creating tags in Project Discussion has been a privilege to the FPL Just to illustrate what I meant with “restrictive”
There is “create randomly” and there is “create a tag for the SIG”. From my perspective the second type of request is not something controversial. And it has been justified and implemented for a long time.
There is - “we need a better documentation/process” and “we delay an innocent SIG request which we have approved multiple times before, because we need a better documentation”.
So while you are right calling out my and others too lighthearted approach in the comments above, I think this particular request (tag for the new SIG) should be implemented before we dive deeper.
No, not in the Project Discussion category. Actually, you will not find a tag there that is not FPL created. And in a restrictive way.
This category gives people an overview through tags, of what the actual active SIG and teams are, who are persistently active and shape the community. This has proven useful, and confirmed by feedbacks. We don’t know of the impact of tag inflation / massively lowered barrier. And I suggest to not do that without strategy. In that category, agency is closely linked to tags, by intention.
We have just created one I linked to the repo. It’s suitable to request tags, and to rationally and carefully consider implications etc. I don’t say they shall not get one.
The thing is that it is me who advised Scott to create a thread here, following the recent similar discussion:
Creating new rules on the go, without any announcement and ability for people to learn about them is not nice to the user making request.
I am all for improving the processes, but let’s be a little bit more careful in how we communicate changes in the process then. Holding people hostage and changing the rules in front of them is not really fair.
There is no new rules about this. And it’s actually lowered. As I said, that used to be FPL only decision. Now we start to work towards other site admins also learning to do things.
If you want to do it as it was improvised in the topic you refer to, which itself was the result of many hours people searching for how and who can do it (in matrix and other channels), I guess you need to find Matthew As everyone else needs to work themselves into this, as trivial as it sounds. And it would be good if the first time they do this is also the last time, to save and respect their time: no one except Matthew did this before, and you read in the topic, Kevin was also reluctant about how that is organized
At the very minimum you say - now we require a ticket in a different system. While the before process was that the thread in the forum with a ‘request’ tag was a ticket on its own, a request.
It is a change, it is not expected and forum users like me have no chance to know about it. I think such changes need to be announced.
I also think if you want to track request elsewhere you should remove the ‘request’ tag from the forum.
And the tags on Project Discussion have proven to be a core element in keeping the discussion there focused (compared to other categories).