#1

Rather than duplicating ironically, I’m going to link to this mailing list post for details. In summary, though, we plan to move Fedora Council discussion here, to make it more visible and to encourage greater participation. Looking forward to talking more with you all here!

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The future of real-time (chat) discussion for the Fedora council
#2

Alanis and I are disappointed in the lack of irony.

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#3

I have nothing else to add than “yay!”

Although we might want to add some guidance for Council members on how to ensure they get all notifications by default (I was scrolling through the forum and just happened to see this post, but I am now enabling email notifications for this entire category).

We could also set up a fedora-council group, set it up so group members always receive email notifications for all posts in a category, and add Council members to the group. I think if we do not get the email settings right, it will be a harder migration than it has to be. :grinning:

Happy to talk about this more on a Council meeting sometime. I have come up with my own recipe for enabling discussions on Discourse forums, especially for people who are more at home in their email inboxes than a web browser.

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#4

Not to be a Debbie Downer but is this forum really that popular over the ML? It seems very confidential and not very used by the community at large. I hardly check it myself over standard ML.

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#5

Hey @eclipseo, thanks for weighing in.

I don’t have mailing list stats, but I do have stats for this Discourse site:

Screenshot of quarterly metrics of pageviews, signups, topics, posts, daily engaged users, and new contributors
Screenshot of quarterly metrics of pageviews, signups, topics, posts, daily engaged users, and new contributors1139×864 113 KB

Screenshot of 30 day, 7 day, yesterday, and today metrics for pageviews, user visits, time to first response, and likes

It is a mostly default configuration. There are many creative ideas we could try out to make this forum more interactive and better organized. I think we could do more to configure this site to be more engaging.

But this is one place where we could take more feedback, on how we could make this more useful for folks. Since we are one of the First teams to go all in on this migration, we can help model to other teams on how to do this in a healthy/sustainable way.

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#6

I would say: in terms of activity, this site is much more active than the Council Discuss mailing list, which is what we’re talking about moving at this point.

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#7

Generally, that is the case. I don’t exactly know why the move to forum is
being pushed here. It didn’t work out well for Commops, which was the “guinea
pig”, but then it was pushed anyway.

#8

The Magazine is using the new forum, and our experience has been 2-3x the engagement and conversation. We have also seen a healthy uptick in contribution which for us was the key result we sought. I’d encourage the Council to decide what key result they’re looking for, and set a time after which they want to assess the impact.

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#9

I said I didn’t want to repeat, but I guess I will. :slight_smile: Neal asked what we hope to gain from the move on the mailing list thread, and here’s my response:

  • more visibility
  • more participation
  • easier involvement for new users
  • @ mentions and very customizable notifications
  • :heart: to highlight popular/interesting comments
  • markdown formatting
  • edit typos / fix formatting
  • ability to include cat pics
  • easily move off-topic posts to the right category
  • other easier moderation (if you’re the admin of any Fedora mailing list,
    you see the spam deluge I’m talking about)
  • possible integration with Fedora Badges in the future
  • Matrix integration!
  • encourage other parts of Fedora by example
  • me being on fewer mailing lists and getting less email in general!

… and while there are some tongue-in-cheek ones there, I hope obviously, a lot of it is serious, and makes a pretty good benchmark list.

image

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#10

Also worth mentioning, lest people forget… we have a RSS feed. I find it very useful to scan new topics. If you’re interested in something, you can just click on the subject and it opens the post on Discourse.

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#11

You wrote that the idea is to have greater participation. At the same time a thread that I created here about constructive feedback on the agility of the Council was closed with a justification that 10 posts/24 hour are too much. This is not seem to be much for a mailing list discussion. This makes it appear to me that the move from mailing list to this forum is used to suppress discussions instead of encouraging it.

#12

A post was split to a new topic: Forum group titles (e.g. “Leader”) are misleading

#13

Hi @till, I appreciate you weighing in and adding this perspective. I am looking for your suggestion on what would be a better course of action.

I took the personal decision without consultation to close the Black Lives Matter thread for three days. That particular discussion has come with added emotional stress (and sometimes, external harassment) to both me and @riecatnor. While not to detract from the urgency of that issue, it has honestly burnt us out.

Since it deliberately came up in Council discussion last week and we are going to address it now (i.e. I am writing a reply in the public Pagure ticket right now), I felt the right decision was to put pause on this discussion. Especially over the weekend, when some people have more time to be on the computer and some people have families or other responsibilities to take care of.

So, I am really curious to know your idea on what went wrong specifically and how we could do better. This is not a rigid process, it is not defined, and it is not permanent. :slightly_smiling_face: So, please let us know your thoughts on what would have been right there.

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#14

Justin, another tool that Discourse gives is Slow Mode. This allows posting, but with a timeout between posts to help ensure that responses are considered and thoughtful.

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#15

Agreed, and I brought this issue up on the mailing list side of this
conversation.

*My apologies for the thread getting split, it looks like my mail client
didn’t properly include In-Reply-To, and I’m not getting emails from the list
for some reason.