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.
