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Trustroots / community

Community stuff, public issues that you are welcome to help with
https://github.com/Trustroots/trustroots/wiki/Volunteering
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forum: discourse for meta/volunteering discussions? #20

Closed guaka closed 5 years ago

guaka commented 5 years ago

use this issue description as a wiki page

pros

cons

guaka commented 5 years ago

some mentions of discourse:

@simison Oct 13th

https://trustroots.slack.com/archives/D08SHP0P9/p1539447771000100 I’m a bit torn if to have all the code for a feature like that custom or rely on something like Discourse (which is very extensible).

Latter gives a lot of stuff for free, but gets quickly very complicated to integrate.

Probably because YAGNI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it), I’d go with custom code in our db.

@regenwasser Sep 10

https://github.com/Trustroots/trustroots/issues/681#issuecomment-419929865

@chreekat Sep 3

https://trustroots.slack.com/archives/C08SENA9Z/p1536002325000100?thread_ts=1535877424.000100

simison commented 5 years ago

I’m a bit torn if to have all the code for a feature like that custom or rely on something like Discourse (which is very extensible).

Might be worth doing a quick and simple experiment to see how it integrates, though.

nicksellen commented 5 years ago

In the linked thread @simison said:

let’s try to keep TR the platform (tribes) and TR the volunteering work discussions (slack) separate

I would second this (but maybe too late already, I think this thread is about both things already maybe!). To me the idea of discourse is for off-platform discussions about things concerning the trustroots platform, not part of the trustroots platform.

I am generally not in favour of integrating third-party discussions platforms into custom software. My feeling is it gets messy very quickly, and hard to maintain. I don't know of any good examples of it, but also did not look very hard. Would be interested if someone has a good example?

nicksellen commented 5 years ago

would someone want to host and maintain it for us, for free-ish?

Biggest time cost is initial setup, ongoing tech maintaince is not too high (we run https://community.foodsaving.world/ and one of us runs an upgrade ansible playbook whenever it pesters us for an upgrade). Could need community moderation work at some point, I suspect it would be possible to find that within the community though...

If you are up for ansible-izing the trustroots server (which can be very incremental) and there is someone in addition to me that is interested in that direction (philosophically and operationally), I would be up for it. For reference here is our yunity/yuca server config https://github.com/yunity/yuca.

another account

This isn't actually a downside to me if it's not part of the platform. A small hurdle to participate in the discussions shows at least minimal willingness to participate :)

simison commented 5 years ago

I am generally not in favour of integrating third-party discussions platforms into custom software. My feeling is it gets messy very quickly, and hard to maintain

💯 agreed

Biggest time cost is initial setup, ongoing tech maintaince is not too high

I'm suspicious even about the maintenance part, especially if it's something that integrates with Trustroots (and isn't just separate instance with its own accounts). Updating is one thing, keeping up with compatibility between the two systems is another.

I'm torn between the two approaches because I'm not sure which is more work:

I also would like some clarification between "volunteer discussions" vs "tribe/community discussions" to make sure we're talking about the same thing.

If you are up for ansible-izing the trustroots server (which can be very incremental) and there is someone in addition to me that is interested in that direction (philosophically and operationally), I would be up for it.

YESSSSS 💪 Both myself and @guaka have been wanting this for a while already but never seem to find time for it. I think between 3 of us we can get it set up in no('ish)-time.

nicksellen commented 5 years ago

I'm suspicious even about the maintenance part, especially if it's something that integrates with Trustroots (and isn't just separate instance with its own accounts). Updating is one thing, keeping up with compatibility between the two systems is another.

Yup, everything I said is on the basis that it's a standalone independent vanilla discourse installation.

Regenwasser commented 5 years ago

I agree with @nicksellen and @simison that we should keep volunteering and the broader community separate. However, I still think there would be value in creating a platform for user feedback and communication.

The thing is, this is usually difficult as someone has to go through that all - and be responsible to constantly interact with people and tell them our stance on issues (that we sometimes even have to discuss before) or just answer question. Which is why I rather would like to setup a feedback program to include more user voices instead of a public forum about it. Reddit/FB is enough for users to discuss meta things.

I think this suggestion by @guaka doesn't necessarily mean that we do a more "volunteering for everyone" forum. Or was this the idea? I understood it more that it would be more or less the same like it is now, but just another platform.

Integrate Trustroots login with discourse, so people who want to volunteer can easily join our volunteering group where all discussions would happen (The advantage here is that volunteers don't have to sign up on Github and Slack at the same time - and where certain volunteering might be easier to manage VS a Slack with random google documents and links to Github).

The advantage is more structure and everything at the same place. Not two repos, not a lot of dev "noise" or random chatter in between.

My feeling is it gets messy very quickly, and hard to maintain. I don't know of any good examples of it, but also did not look very hard. Would be interested if someone has a good example?

Some here probably: https://www.discourse.org/customers

I'd also be for that:

let’s try to keep TR the platform (tribes) and TR the volunteering work discussions (slack) separate

guaka commented 5 years ago

I updated the issue title to reflect that we only consider DIscourse for volunteering discussions, not for tribe discussions.

This the ansible issue: https://github.com/Trustroots/trustroots/issues/221

chreekat commented 5 years ago

Adding notes on my experience:

We have a discourse open to the world (community.snowdrift.coop) that uses our main platform for single sign-on (SSO).

The SSO implementation is pretty short, and for a mainstream language like JavaScript, I bet there's already a library. The maintenance burden on the platform is therefore near zero, and we can easily associate platform users with discourse users.

Within discourse, we have a restricted section for team members. This basically takes the place of Slack for our team (although we also use IRC and Mumble). The restricted section and its membership is all managed from within discourse. Imho, discourse has more potential for engaged, on-topic discussion than Slack, thanks to its much more sophisticated moderation tools -- particularly things like splitting threads into new topics!

Trustroots has already put a lot of energy into slack, however, so I don't think converting to discourse would be wise unless there was a pressing need for it.

Maintaining an open forum would indeed be a heavy ongoing burden, due to the need to moderate. Who would be available and well trained for it?

Maintaining discourse itself is "easy" thanks to the official releases generally being high quality. Upgrades can be managed from within discourse.

Some plugins require mucking around on the server terminal to install.

Discourse is a big ugly pile of Ruby/docker/shell scripts that I would hate to maintain. Fingers crossed that the upstream project is robust and long lived.

For snowdrift, switching to discourse was worth it. But our community is an order of magnitude smaller than trustroots.

On Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 05:11 Manuel notifications@github.com wrote:

But I agree with @nicksellen https://github.com/nicksellen and @simison https://github.com/simison that we should keep volunteering and the broader community separate. However, I still think there would be value in creating a platform for user feedback and communication.

The thing is, this is usually difficult as someone has to go through that all - and be responsible to constantly interact with people and tell them our stance on issues (that we sometimes even have to discuss before) or just answer question. Which is why I rather would like to setup a feedback program to include more user voices instead of a public forum about it. Reddit/FB is enough for users to discuss meta things.

I think this suggestion by @guaka https://github.com/guaka doesn't necessarily mean that we do a "volunteering for everyone" forum. Or was this the idea? I guess it still could be the same like it is now, but just another platform.

Integrate Trustroots login with discourse, so people who want to volunteer can easily join our volunteering group where all discussions would happen (The advantage here is that volunteers don't have to sign up on Github and Slack at the same time - and where certain volunteering might be easier to manage VS a Slack with random google documents and links to Github).

The advantage is more structure and everything at the same place. Not two repos, not a lot of dev "noise" in between.

My feeling is it gets messy very quickly, and hard to maintain. I don't know of any good examples of it, but also did not look very hard. Would be interested if someone has a good example?

Some here probably: https://www.discourse.org/customers

I'd also be for that:

let’s try to keep TR the platform (tribes) and TR the volunteering work discussions (slack) separate

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/Trustroots/community/issues/20#issuecomment-431574794, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAg3qsc0AGxVBIAnPV0a_FqO8GsLLCKKks5umxLfgaJpZM4Xx3W8 .

guaka commented 5 years ago

Thanks, @chreekat. Good to know.

Note that I didn't propose to replace Slack with Discourse (not anytime soon at least). I just feel that some discussions are better off elsewhere (not on Slack or GitHub).

chreekat commented 5 years ago

Gotcha, thanks for clarifying the discussion. :) Not that you were unclear to begin with! I mentioned the Slack-Discourse connection only because it makes sense to me that they share the same strategic purpose, and if I were building a community from scratch, I would start with Discourse. I totally agree that some discussions are better off elsewhere than Slack or Github. I apologize if my early-morning brain dump was a bit off topic, and I hope it provokes an improved understanding of the tradeoffs if we decide to go for it. :)

guaka commented 5 years ago

https://meta.trustroots.org/

we have this now, and all good so far :)