Hi folks! I’d like to propose an idea for how we can better organize some key areas within our project discussions.
I think it would be beneficial to create three new subcategories under the main “Project Discussion” category:
Community Ops
DEI (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion)
Fedora Apps
While our current tag-based system is good, I believe using subcategories for these specific teams offers a new level of ownership and flexibility. It would give these teams a dedicated hub to manage their communications.
More importantly, subcategory owners can manage the tags used within their own sections. This means a team could have its own curated set of tags, which is a powerful feature that complements our site’s existing workflow. This approach allows us to delegate control of specific forum areas to the teams that know them best.
The action for site admins is to create these subcategories.
I think for Mindshare teams like your proposing it makes sense, but engineering teams, I wonder how it would scale. Tags are inherently lack a strong hierarchy (good and bad thing).
Considering the OrgChart and different teams, I want to say I’m not against saying “hey for these teams, let’s try it!” and see how it goes, but something to ponder later.
Also - I tried the Discourse mail feature while at flock to share comms with someone and I really enjoyed that, just a call out.
I think it is a good idea, because it is not clear how to follow ‘tags’, and because DEI and Commops are currently only visible on Matrix (which took me and takes some others a long time to get on to. Discussion Forums is the place that is most visible to new users.
We already tried it, just would like to remember to the time when ask and discussions have been separate instances. On both Instances we agreed that a to deep category structure makes the whole thing more difficult to manage.
An example was also the test of separating languages in different sections in ask. First of all it was not so popular because of missing helping hands, answering in this languages, and translate everything which documented it, into this different languages to. Second, the visibility in a smaller sections was not so great because of the overall participation, while some of them, just created duplicated topics, in different sections.
And the main actors behind this moving/tagging around are for the moment TL3 and TL4. Which I believe should first get some care and instructions/attention how to deal and work with this growing workload. Before doing any re-structuration of the existing layout we have now.
Ask Fedora has between 20 and 60 new posts per day. It moves so quickly that any post only remains current if it is continually discussed.
I really like the idea of an Events section. Currently events are not often posted here. We could put things like local meetups, conferences Fedora is in attendance at and online events. Centralising events for Fedora will increase visibility.
I remember a few months ago Chris was setting up a Switzerland meetup, and only he went. I wonder how much bigger a London meetup could be if it was posted in an Events category linked from the front page of Discourse?
More mods are coming online as the forums get more users - the difficulty with modding seems to me as a problem with a minority subset of users, not site structure.
The areas Justin raises are super important to Fedora, I want to highlight their visibility. I believe having such categories as Events and DEI (DEI is focussing on regional development these days) and Commops will enhance organising and community in Fedora - things which are paramount to Fedora’s existence 10 years from now.
My perspective from Join SIG and working with DEI and community aspects is that it is difficult for new people to get into hardcore technical work straight away - so we need channels to retain users and build a development culture to ensure Fefora’s future is full of people.
Could you define what goes into those subcategories? Will all topics fit into one of those three areas? If not, why these three in particular and what are the criteria for creating a new subcategory?
I’d really like to avoid creating more categories that don’t have a strong functional distinction.
If this is the main feature desired, note that there is also the concept of subtags. You can define a set of tags which can (and/or must) be used after a primary tag is selected.
At the same time, tags aren’t unique to a category. This is why we have the awkward -team, and -sig tags in Project Discussion. That means you can’t really “manage the tags used within their own sections”.
Alternately, if there are specific workflow things (stuff that isn’t primarily Project Discussion), Team Workflows is specifically there for that, and I’d have much less opposition to creating categories there.
There is an events tag meant to be used in News & Announcements, but that category is pretty restricted. We could either have an Events subcategory — or maybe just a better[1] process for posting things to News & Announcements.
As mod, I don’t have anything to say against this. For me, all posts, no matter where they are posted (Category, subcategory, tag, team, sub-team, sig, etc) needs to adhere to the CoC and will be enforced as it’s right now.
I understand that too deep of a hierarchy is difficult to manage and discover content. At the same time, too broad of a hierarchy also makes it difficult to drill down. I think having more top-level categories than nested sub-categories makes this easier. If you start going more than two levels down, it gets complicated and messy.
One of the challenges I have with Fedora Discussion today is that the merging of Ask Fedora with Fedora Discussion made it significantly harder for me to engage with Discourse in Fedora as a whole.
Categories for languages makes sense as complex, because there are soooo many languages in the world. I think it is possible to come up with a list of sensible, top-level categories that might be easier to navigate, particularly in the Project Discussion category.
I’m often finding it difficult to filter out for the information that is most relevant and important to me. I usually discover content on Fedora Discussion today because I post it, or because someone else points me to the thread in some other medium (e.g. Matrix). And then I get latched onto the topic with notifications and emails.
I’d like to have a way to do this with specific “filters” under Project Discussion, and I see categories as one of the most helpful ways of doing this.
Could we possibly have more systems of delegation for “stewarding” a category? In forums I used to moderate, we sometimes had category moderators who were essentially the stewards of content in that category, and also were the go-to contacts by other members of the moderation team when there was an issue that required more coordination or discussion.
This made it easier to have a select few admins/moderators who covered the forum wide but shallow, and a few moderators who covered the forum narrow and deep. This could potentially be an easier way to scale leadership of certain “categories” of discussion on Fedora Discussion?
I like these teams having separate categories underneath Project Discussion because it makes them easier to discover and filter for meaningful content on Fedora Discussion. It is something I currently struggle to do with using tags. The way that Fedora Discussion is set up makes a lot of sense to me from a “StackOverflow” user Q&A and support perspective, but I don’t think it scales the same way for Project Discussion discussion.
I know at least a few others who are not well-represented on Fedora Discussion but do a lot of work in Fedora also feel similarly too.
These are good questions. No, I do not think all topics will go into these areas. I chose these three because they represent some teams that I work in particularly closely, and I can better represent the perspectives of those teams here. From my recent posts in sharing meeting minutes, they are also the teams I am trying to strategically make more visible in Fedora Discussion, because they are not so visible today (as @theprogram pointed out earlier in the discussion).
There is probably a discussion to be had about what criteria should be in place for making a subcategory. I think we could use the Fedora org chart as a starting point. Maybe it could be more sensible to have a “Mindshare Teams” category and an “Engineering Teams” category underneath Project Discussion. I think something like this would satisfy my needs of being able to filter down on the conversations that are most relevant to me, without getting lost in the noise.
I also particularly liked @theprogram’s idea of having an “Events” category, because this is something that is really hard to discover today. I have seen feedback from others that it feels like the only events that Fedora gets to do are events that are supported or backed by Red Hat, and it would be nice to have a more dedicated place to have events-related discussions to show all of the things our users and contributors are doing around the world already, with or without Red Hat support and funding.
How do you have your tracking set up currently? I suggest:
Only watch tags, never categories
Only watch the tags you really are interested in
Only watch all posts for tags you’re very interested in; otherwise, “watch first post”.
Watch/unwatch individual threads as you like (possibly tweak the threshold for time to auto-subscribe.)
You may also want to mute the Ask category, and make sure “Notify me about topics in categories or tags I’m watching that also belong to one I have muted” is unchecked at the bottom of tracking preferences.
I confess that I came around to your advice and I have muted a lot of categories that I do not engage in. I feel this is problematic in my role as a site admin, but this is probably a topic best discussed elsewhere. This has helped me manage the notifications I receive, but does not address the issue of discovery that I am still challenged by today.
This is exactly how I have things set up. However, this only works for content that I am actively following. Often, there is content that I want to follow, but I only discover it once someone tags me or shares a link in Matrix. I find it difficult to navigate the existing categories at the level of detail that I would like.
Perhaps the better suggestion would be “Mindshare” and “Engineering” categories, because this better captures what I am looking for. Not all of the Changes Proposal topics are relevant to me, or they are only relevant at specific times and intervals.
My issue is that I am not able to independently discover content by browsing the site; I only discover content that is tagged correctly and I have subscribed to those tags, or because someone shares a specific link in another channel and then I am able to subscribe/follow that topic.
A semi-related question. Even though I have muted Ask Fedora, I see all the categories for Ask Fedora whenever I go to make a new post, and my new posts always default to Ask Fedora. Even though I have muted that category, is there a way I can change this behavior or hide the category when composing new topics?
Thanks for the answer. Admittedly, this is not what I am looking for, because sometimes it takes me a moment to remember the right keyword for the category I want to post in. I never post in Ask Fedora categories, but I always have to scroll past several when I am authoring a new topic.
I guess now you understand the main reason, why make more than one Discourse instance.
To learn, train new admins/moderators and also to make a flat simple structure, which is fast accessible
However, last Tip of mine.
Beside of your avatar you have the (Hamburger menu)
There it has a overview, of your categories you joined to observe, and it also shows you what is to read.
There you can do some more sorting (click on the pen in the category window).
You know, when you are in a category you like to write a topic, it selects it automatically when click on “new topic”. This is also a shortcut you can make use of.
My biggest issue I had with the Category list was, when opening discussion.fp.o that the half of the screen was spoiled with this big colored category list. I just wanted this out of my way. I got the Tip here, to use the U-block Origin add-on in the Browser, to remove the html sections I do not wanted to see. Now I am happy again, even if I do have to configure it on every new installation. But fedora is easy to update, so the pain ins small
(Hamburger menu)