Setup OSGeo Discourse for GeoNetwork Communication

[jodygarnett]

Email list no longer offers the best experience for community communication.

Proposal

OSGeo has a setup http://discourse.osgeo.org as an alternative to project mailing lists.

1. Create a ticket at trac.osgeo.org for the activity, choosing option for full mailing list migration.

2. Download mbox from SourceForge. To respect privacy only content is transferred, email addresses are anonymized.

3. System admin committee will setup the new categories (described below) with the content from the mailing list. The resulting category operates as a searchable archive.

4. Write a welcome message with guidelines, and how to subscribe as a mailing list (see example ).

5. Update the website with information on use of discourse and how to subscribe for mailing list experience.

6. Propose the following categories:

   • geonetwork category used as a folder for sub-topics
   • geonetwork/user Public sub-category, with content from geonetwork-users for user discussion and questions.
   • geonetwork/fr-user Public sub-category, with content from geonetwork-users-fr for French community
   • geonetwork/es-user Public sub-category, with content from usuarios-es for Spanish community

   Categories can be configured sensibly allowing questions to be marked as answered, duplicate topics merged etc...

7. The following will be transferred as a search only archive:

   • geonetwork/devel category used to provide a searchable archive of geonetwork-devel history

8. The following mailing lists will be dropped:

   • geonetwork-commit - github offers full commit history and the ability to subscribe to notifications if you enjoy content

9. The following category will be new:

   • geonetwork/geonetwork-ui Public sub-category for users of the geonetwork-ui project. Optionally a "geonetwork-ui" group can be added attached to this sub-category - requiring participants to register before posting.

10. Replace use of geonetwork-devel with GitHub Discussions:

    • Enable GitHub discussion to replace use of geonetwork-devel.
    • Top-level organization discussions for project communication and PSC discussion
    • Optional: geonetwork-ui could enable repository discussions for project specific communication

11. PSC members added as moderators to allowing greater topic control (if we have the responsibility for code of conduct we need the tools to manage topics).

Why this is important

Public email list no longer sufficient for engagement due to user experience.

Proposal Support

This is a community lead proposal without financial / fundraising component.

Voting

PSC Support:

• [x] Jo Cook
• [ ] Jose Garcia
• [x] Paul van Genuchten
• [x] Florent Gravin
• [ ] Simon Pigot
• [x] Francois Prunayre
• [ ] Jeroen Ticheler

Community support:

• [x] Jody Garnett
• [x] Olivia Guyot

References

• Moving your mailing list to OSGeo Discourse
• Moving PHP internals to GitHub
• QGIS discourse example of a top-level category with sub-categories for user lists in different languages

[jodygarnett]

+1 community support

[fxprunayre]

+1 for the move to discourse (for point number 9, I would wait for the datahub proposal)

[fgravin]

+1 for the whole proposal, thanks Jody

[pvgenuchten]

+1 here

[jodygarnett]

@ticheler I got some clarification on https://discourse.osgeo.org/t/how-would-you-like-to-add-new-categories-for-projects-or-committees/28330/2 about structure of discourse categories.

The current setup is <project>/<group>. But they have since learned that three levels is possible as a configuration setting.

So the opportunity to advocate committee/<name>/<group> and project/<project>/</group> please do so.

[jahow]

@ticheler this proposal looks to be in a good way to be approved by a majority of the PSC. As mentioned before, we're still lacking a communication channel for GeoNetwork-UI; it would be great news if there was a green light of the PSC to move forward and at least create the gn-ui list on discourse (according to the structure explained in the proposal by Jody).

Thank you!

[jodygarnett]

@jahow the proposal covers that in step 9 -I wish the proposal to cover what we want to happen (so we can refine as needed).

Aside: update from the system admin committee is that they can enable "three levels" - which may be a neat idea for geonetwork-ui user "list"?

• geonetwork/devel
• geonetwork/devel/ui

Then subscribers of /geonetwork/devel would get email updates from topics covering both :)

If that approach is of interest please let me know.

[jodygarnett]

I think I am ready to write up the instructions this week, when there is a PR with instructions we can start the transition, and then merge the PR to publish the instructions etc...

[jahow]

Aside: update from the system admin committee is that they can enable "three levels" - which may be a neat idea for geonetwork-ui user "list"?

• geonetwork/devel
• geonetwork/devel/ui

I would be more in favor of having a "geonetwork/geonetwork-ui" list like you originally proposed, see the arguments I gave on the original discussion (on the mailing list, how meta):

The main reason to create a new ML is that GeoNetwork-UI is a project with its own life cycle: releases, major evolutions, roadmap etc. The ML would then be used to communicate more specifically on UI topics, upcoming releases, features that need funding, users looking for help, these kind of things.

Also "geonetwork/devel" seems to be more of an archive than anything else, since development-related topics will be redirected to github discussions as much as possible.