Set up a Discourse for the JupyterHub community

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

I recently found out that several imaging packages use a centralized forum for people to ask questions of one another and generally communicate about image analysis. They use a tool called "Discourse" (https://www.discourse.org/) Here's the link to their forum:

https://forum.image.sc

I also know many other OSS projects such as Rust use Discourse as a place for their community to interact with one another (https://users.rust-lang.org/).

In lieu of more mailing lists, what if we set up a Discourse for the Jupyter (or maybe just JupyterHub?) community? As more people deploy JupyterHub for particular reasons, tools like these might make it easier to build communities of practice. On the other hand, it's also "another thing to keep track of" so we should only use it if the benefits outweigh the costs.

Anybody have thoughts on investigating this? I'm happy to give it a whirl if people generally like the idea of forum.jupyter.org :-)

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

cc @arokem and @freeman-lab as they thought this might be useful too!

minrk commented 5 years ago

One of the nice things about the Jupyter mailing list(s) being a google group is that you can use it as a forum. So I would say that we already have a forum for this. If we want to redirect folks to the forum view more prominently, I'd be happy with that, but I don't feel that duplicating it to another forum is an improvement. Additionally, I don't think that jupyterhub is high enough volume that it warrants a separate channel beyond the existing ones on GitHub and Gitter from Jupyter in general, since most JupyterHub questions tend to be generic Jupyter ones anyway.

What do you think are the benefits of a separate forum for JupyterHub from the existing forum for Jupyter, GitHub issues, and chats?

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

I think those are all reasonable points - I feel like the desired medium for communication is a really person-specific thing. I'll give some of my considerations below (though this is just my perspective, not saying these are Grand Truths):

re: Google Groups:

Groups are semi-unnecessarily silo'ed from one another. This means that if a person says "I want to be a part of all of the Jupyter groups" they have to sign up for several groups. This makes any one group less-discoverable and raises a barrier to people seeing what's going on in the community
I actually really don't like using email for this kind of thing, just because my email already has such a low SnR with all of these groups that I tend to just start archiving things.
Maybe this is a personal thing, but the interface just feels outdated and the product itself feels like Google doesn't have much interest in improving it. I know it seems silly but I feel like this plays a factor in whether other people use it.
(I think?) you need a gmail account to use google groups, which some may not want

Discourse thoughts:

It has a more user-friendly interface, and there's already a pattern of other open projects using it successfully (e.g, Mozilla, Rust, and scientific imaging projects all use it)
It specifically doesn't use email, so you can do things like "notify me only if this topic is discussed"
It's got "upvote / downvote" features for posts that I imagine could be useful for people using this as a reference
To that point, I think it could be more of a long-standing reference for people who have questions.
It has more rich text editing (e.g. code cells etc)
It puts more of a highlight on the people participating in conversations, and I believe has features that would make it easier for us to say "thank you" to community members who are particularly helpful
It gives us more control over the amount of silo-ing that happens. E.g., when we wanted to create a discussion space for "JupyterHub at shared facilities" we had to create a new group from scratch and email people to say "hey join this thing". If we had something like a forum, it would just be a matter of creating a new room which would pop up in front of people's faces when they went to the landing page, and the barrier to joining this room would be much lower IMO. It's much easier to advertise and remember "go to forum.jupyter.org for all async community conversations" rather than "sign up for one more google groups mailing lists"
It gives us more insight into the activity in each of these sub-commnunities via dashboards etc
It could act as a rough filter on top of GitHub issues. Ultimately I'd hope that users would turn to something like this to ask questions and get help and open a github issue once they knew this was the right thing to do (instead of opening an issue that is vague and needs a lot of background information, e.g. "my jupyter doesn't work, please help")
It's all open-source (we could run it on our own on something like DigitalOcean if we wish)

Just a few thoughts from my perspective!

Re: "Why do this in JupyterHub but not Jupyter?" I actually agree - mostly I'm just trying to see how this goes in a smaller community and, if it works well, suggest doing the same for the larger community.

Another option - TopicBox

Another option is to use something like TopicBox, which the carpentries now use. That basically wraps something like Google groups around a better interface with more controls for searching, filtering, etc.

Some links I found as I was looking into this

OpenDataKit debating moving from google groups to Discourse
The Julia Community discussing moving do Discourse. Not super thoughtful debate but people brought up some pros and cons.

betatim commented 5 years ago

One thing that I feel could be improved is discoverability of previously answered questions.

When I know there is an issue in a particular repository that answers my questions/is relevant I will try and find it through search on the GH page. Otherwise I find myself mostly frustrated by the search box, especially when it is cross repository/org. Gitter is also hard to search.

What has helped a lot is putting "reference" or "documentation" labels on GitHub issues.

Maybe discourse allows for better search than GitHub issues?

I think keeping the venue small so that it looks and feels busy helps when getting started. Too many slack communities have more rooms than members and they always feel like no one is around, which I guess furthers the idea that no one is around so no one hangs around. This would be a point against creating another place to discuss things.

Maybe having a better set of links/references/documentation that is linked to on GH, gitter, web pages as "this is the place to check if you have a problem, if you ask a question the first answer you will get 'check this source of truth' so do it now".

minrk commented 5 years ago

Good thoughts! I think prototyping the idea for a subset of the community such as JupyterHub makes sense. I'm wary since I think we currently have too many communication channels for discussion (gitter, github, stack overflow, mailing lists), so adding one seems like stretching people's attention even thinner, but it does seem nicer in a lot of ways.

So here are a couple of concrete questions for getting started:

what sort of topics should go on the discourse instead of existing channels?
how are we going to pay for / host it? We can run discourse ourselves, but I'm not sure who's planning to be the sysadmin for it, and we would still have hosting costs that we need to be able to invoice. Plus there's database administration, backup, etc. to do if we run our own.

ellisonbg commented 5 years ago

Thanks for exploring this stuff!

For communication channels, I think it really makes sense to have a more-or-less uniform approach for all Jupyter projects. I already have a tough time explaining to people where they should go for a given topic (incidentally, it may help us to create a decision tree for our users about which channel to use - that may help clarify the need for something like discourse)
...but I think it completely makes sense for subprojects to explore new approaches on behalf of the community to see what might work better.
My biggest concern mirrors what Min said - that we already are pushing too many communication channels. Because of that, I would love any exploration to answer the question - "which communication channel do we get rid of if we adopt discourse (or something else)?"

On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 9:43 AM Min RK notifications@github.com wrote:

Good thoughts! I think prototyping the idea for a subset of the community such as JupyterHub makes sense. I'm wary since I think we currently have too many communication channels for discussion (gitter, github, stack overflow, mailing lists), so adding one seems like stretching people's attention even thinner, but it does seem nicer in a lot of ways.

So here are a couple of concrete questions for getting started:

what sort of topics should go on the discourse instead of existing channels?

how are we going to pay for / host it? We can run discourse ourselves, but I'm not sure who's planning to be the sysadmin for it, and we would still have hosting costs that we need to be able to invoice. Plus there's database administration, backup, etc. to do if we run our own.

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choldgraf commented 5 years ago

I think that's all a good point - in my mind, the end-result of this is that (if Discourse seems to be a good option), the number of channels would go down rather than up. In the long term, we should choose between either google groups or Discourse, not both (that's what other open projects have done). In the future you don't say "go to this page to find a subset of google groups that you want to join", you say "go to forum.jupyter.org for all community interactions". We'd use github issues specifically for codebase-related questions (issues, bugs, etc), and we'd use gitter for synchronous communication.

This would be a pilot to see how it goes, and I think JupyterHub is a reasonable sub-team to start with, because there are lots of "JupyterHub for XXX" communities of practice popping up.

One proposal:

we create a Discourse focused around sub-communities within JupyterHub
The initial channels are "JupyterHub for Education", "JupyterHub for data analytics", "JupyterHub for research infrastructure", and "Binder"
We start suggesting to the JupyterHub communities to give a shot at using Discourse and we see if/how this grows organically.
It lives at forum.jupyter.org
If we like it, then we can always "just" add more rooms to that forum and begin a migration process for mailing lists

Re: @minrk 's comments about what it'd take to deploy, I think that's a great question. I can look into this and will ping other communities about how much work it is to do so.

willingc commented 5 years ago

Throwing my two cents in...we've been testing out Discourse for Python core development. Like every communication medium, there are highs and lows. The lows: another medium to check as we didn't deprecate any other mediums; fragments further an already very distributed community. The highs: prettier than Google groups/mailing lists (unclear to me if more functional). Does a nice job of highlighting new/unread conversations and messages.

FWIW, if I were to get rid of a communication channel for Discourse, I would use it to replace Gitter instead of the google groups since discourse does a much, much better job of threading discussions. One plus for Discourse over Gitter is that all Jupyter projects could be hosted in the same UI so there would be more opportunity to see what other projects are currently working on. In fact, by moving away from Gitter, the weekly Jupyter meetings would be less necessary.

willingc commented 5 years ago

As for infrastructure, Python has dedicated resources as well as a Discourse rep hanging out in the medium. We also access through discuss.python.org

willingc commented 5 years ago

It's got "upvote / downvote" features for posts that I imagine could be useful for people using this as a reference

I believe that it only has upvote.

ellisonbg commented 5 years ago

I haven't used discourse - does it have a user experience that is sufficiently real-time that it is a suitable replacement for gitter/slack/etc?

On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 1:02 PM Carol Willing notifications@github.com wrote:

It's got "upvote / downvote" features for posts that I imagine could be useful for people using this as a reference

I believe that it only has upvote.

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willingc commented 5 years ago

I haven't used discourse - does it have a user experience that is sufficiently real-time that it is a suitable replacement for gitter/slack/etc?

I would say yes based on my experience. You do need an account (as you do on slack/gitter) and you can auth through GitHub and others. Discourse does support categories and tags which is nice. They also have a demo site (which they clear daily) so you can try it out: https://try.discourse.org/

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

that's super interesting @willingc , I'd never thought about it as a replacement for Gitter (which I think is very "developer-focused" and probably turns away a lot of users).

ellisonbg commented 5 years ago

Cool, I will try to look at discourse. My only other comment about gitter is that in the past when we have not had channels like that, there were more private phone calls and emails. If we get rid of gitter (I am open to that) I want to make sure that we aren't creating a gap that is again filled by more private channels.

On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 2:21 PM Chris Holdgraf notifications@github.com wrote:

that's super interesting @willingc https://github.com/willingc , I'd never thought about it as a replacement for Gitter (which I think is very "coder-focused" and probably turns away a lot of users).

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minrk commented 5 years ago

If real-time is good enough for chat and that means we can replace gitter with something that's threaded, archived, and searchable, that would be truly awesome.

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

Another thing worth mentioning re: Gitter replacement (and google groups too but I think it's more obvious w/ gitter) is that Discourse is way, way more searchable than Gitter, and gets indexed by google. I can't tell you how many times I've wasted time needing to manually scroll backwards in time on the Gitter channel because I know we talked about something at some point but don't remember when.

Also a point of information re: cost

The Discourse install guide suggests that you should have 1GB of RAM for small communities, 2GB for "larger" communities. I have no idea whether Jupyter is large or small (though JupyterHub-specific is probably small currently)

Here is the DigitalOcean pricing:

Looks like it'd be something between $5 and $15 a month to run. It doesn't seem like a ton of work (at least, not much more complex than bootstrapping a JupyterHub on K8S :-) )

If we wanted to pay Discourse to manage an instance, here's how it breaks down:

$100 a month standard, BUT non-profits get a 50% discount, so it'd actually be
$50 a month, ALSO, if we can somehow be categorized as an "educational institution" (not sure how likely this would be), it'd be:
$15 a month (for educational institutions)

however I know that running our own will also require labor to keep it going. ping @Carreau who has run Jupyter infrastructure in the past and probably has a good idea of the hidden or non-obvious labor associated with it

arokem commented 5 years ago

+1 to the searchability issue that Chris just mentioned!

As someone who shows up to ask for help on occasion, I am often faced with a moment of embarrassment when I consider that someone may have asked the exact same question just half an hour ago, and there is no way for me to tell.

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 9:35 AM Chris Holdgraf notifications@github.com wrote:

Another thing worth mentioning re: Gitter replacement (and google groups too but I think it's more obvious w/ gitter) is that Discourse is way, way more searchable than Gitter, and gets indexed by google. I can't tell you how many times I've wasted time needing to manually scroll backwards in time on the Gitter channel because I know we talked about something at some point but don't remember when.

Also a point of information re: cost

The Discourse install guide https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md suggests that you should have 1GB of RAM for small communities, 2GB for "larger" communities. I have no idea whether Jupyter is large or small (though JupyterHub-specific is probably small currently)

Here is the DigitalOcean pricing:

[image: image] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1839645/47515709-71929480-d838-11e8-8580-0412003f868d.png

Looks like it'd be something between $5 and $15 a month to run. It doesn't seem like a ton of work (at least, not much more complex than bootstrapping a JupyterHub on K8S :-) )

If we wanted to pay Discourse to manage an instance, here's how it breaks down:

$100 a month standard, BUT non-profits get a 50% discount, so it'd actually be

$50 a month, ALSO, if we can somehow be categorized as an "educational institution" (not sure how likely this would be), it'd be:

$15 a month (for educational institutions)

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willingc commented 5 years ago

As an FYI, @Supermathie, Discourse, has been very helpful with CPython's recent usage of Discourse. In our exploration of Discourse as a Gitter replacement, I've sent a PM with some questions re: real-time chat, deployment / costs.

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

hey all - I chatted with @karthik today, who's been playing around with Discourse for a few communities he's involved with. It seems like something that could be a positive force in the Jupyter community, so I feel like it's worth giving it a shot (in a limited fashion). I also heard that deploying one yourself isn't a lot of work. Are folks OK if I try setting one up for us to play around with?

ellisonbg commented 5 years ago

I think this type of exploration is very helpful and I would love to participate (in the trial usage). Thanks for looking into this!

On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 7:27 PM Chris Holdgraf notifications@github.com wrote:

hey all - I chatted with @karthik https://github.com/karthik today, who's been playing around with Discourse for a few communities he's involved with. It seems like something that could be a positive force in the Jupyter community, so I feel like it's worth giving it a shot (in a limited fashion). I also heard that deploying one yourself isn't a lot of work. Are folks OK if I try setting one up for us to play around with?

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betatim commented 5 years ago

@choldgraf could we spin up a throw away discourse for a few days so people can try out the real time chat part? It would be super if we could find a replacement for gitter that is indexed, searchable, etc.

Do you know what the story/tooling around creating regular backups is? Is that something that comes as part of the DO instance?

Is discourse relatively stable from version to version?

Backups and upgrades are where I'd suspect we'd feel the pain of running it ourselves. If we think it won't be too painful, let's give it a go?

willingc commented 5 years ago

FYI - Sent yesterday in response to a prior reply:

@supermathie suggested that I send along this message to you since they are out of the office.

Hi We are considering Discourse as a Gitter Replacement for Project Jupyter (jupyter.org).

A few questions:

• Real time chat is important. Do you have any tips / best practices that you can suggest to use Discourse in this way? • We have limited available dev ops personnel. As a non-profit and academic research project, our funds are limited. What would be good options for deployment and cost management? • We currently have 5 or 6 orgs on GitHub. Is there a best practice for creating channels for each org and their repos (each repo roughly corresponds to a distinct project)? As an FYI, here is the discussion that the Jupyter Team has been having on GitHub https://github.com/jupyterhub/team-compass/issues/73

Thanks.

willingc commented 5 years ago

And Discourse's Responses:

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

thanks for asking them @willingc ! I liked reading the post they linked in your email about using Discourse w/ group chat.

It's still not clear to me exactly what the "right" split of communications channels might be. Are folks OK with us giving Discourse a shot in a controlled setting to see if this helps us figure out the way in which it should (or shouldn't) mesh with the Jupyter community?

A quick point of information: I also reached out to their open source projects person (they have a little google form you fill in for your project), and they said they'd be happy to host a free discourse deployment for us (they do it for a bunch of other FOSS projects too) at discourse.jupyter.org. This should cut down the maintenance of the deployment itself to basically 0, and it'd be free. The only restricting AFAICT is that we'd have to host it at discourse.jupyter.org.

A proposal:

Are folks +1 with the following plan:

We set up discourse.jupyter.org using the "free for open source" hosting plan w/ the Discourse team
We focus initial conversations around sub-communities within JupyterHub
- The initial channels are "JupyterHub for Education", "JupyterHub for collaborative analytics", "JupyterHub for research infrastructure", and "Binder"
We start suggesting to these sub-communities to give a shot at using discourse.jupyter.org and we see if/how this grows organically.
If we like it, we design around expanding the role of Discourse in the Jupyter world.

Lemme know!

ellisonbg commented 5 years ago

Carol, thanks for sharing that - the blog post they link to about Discourse + group chat is thoughtful and expresses things I have thought about vaguely.

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 7:43 AM Carol Willing notifications@github.com wrote:

And Discourse's Responses:

[image: screen shot 2018-10-29 at 7 43 28 am] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2680980/47657479-60a29580-db4e-11e8-8e19-6c1dae6cd40f.png

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ellisonbg commented 5 years ago

Given the names of the initial channels it looks like the focus is on different user communities? What about JupyterHub development?

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 8:54 AM Chris Holdgraf notifications@github.com wrote:

thanks for asking them @willingc https://github.com/willingc ! I liked reading the post they linked in your email https://blog.discourse.org/2018/04/effectively-using-discourse-together-with-group-chat/ about using Discourse w/ group chat.

It's still not clear to me exactly what the "right" split of communications channels might be. Are folks OK with us giving Discourse a shot in a controlled setting to see if this helps us figure out the way in which it should (or shouldn't) mesh with the Jupyter community?

A quick point of information: I also reached out to their open source projects https://blog.discourse.org/2016/03/free-discourse-forum-hosting-for-community-friendly-github-projects/ person (they have a little google form you fill in for your project), and they said they'd be happy to host a free discourse deployment for us (they do it for a bunch of other FOSS projects too) at discourse.jupyter.org. This should cut down the maintenance of the deployment itself to basically 0, and it'd be free. The only restricting AFAICT is that we'd have to host it at discourse.jupyter.org. A proposal:

Are folks +1 with the following plan:

We set up discourse.jupyter.org using the "free for open source" hosting plan w/ the Discourse team

We focus initial conversations around sub-communities within JupyterHub

The initial channels are "JupyterHub for Education", "JupyterHub for collaborative analytics", "JupyterHub for research infrastructure", and "Binder"

We start suggesting to these sub-communities to give a shot at using discourse.jupyter.org and we see if/how this grows organically.

If we like it, we design around expanding the role of Discourse in the Jupyter world.

Lemme know!

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choldgraf commented 5 years ago

Those channel names are just me spitballing :-) please do suggest others!

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

We can also add folks on this thread to the list of administrators so people can play around with things as they wish. I suspect that, if we do end up utilizing Discourse more generally, it'll take a bit of iteration to get it right anyway

ellisonbg commented 5 years ago

A bit of history - we used to have separate mailing lists for ipython-dev and ipython-users. We found that the separation was awkward and created too much distinction between users and developers. At the same time. We have seen the clear benefit of having google groups for different groups of users (education, research usage). At the same time, I am not sure those users groups should be hub specific as they often involve other parts of the jupyter ecosystem.

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 9:16 AM Chris Holdgraf notifications@github.com wrote:

We can also add folks on this thread to the list of administrators so people can play around with things as they wish. I suspect that, if we do end up utilizing Discourse more generally, it'll take a bit of iteration to get it right anyway

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choldgraf commented 5 years ago

I think it makes sense to me - how do you imagine the split between the dev parts of the forum (or the mailing list) and github issues?

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

Hey all - I set up the Discourse here in case people want to tinker and play around:

http://discourse.jupyter.org

we are not committed at all to this setup, it's just on a free trial right now.

I've invited everybody on this issue as well as all the members of the JupyterHub teams page. The site is in pure "skeleton" mode, so feel free to set up rooms, comments, etc.

willingc commented 5 years ago

I would initially start with less channels and add later if needed. It seems that very few were used in the first Python experiment.

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

What if we just had two rooms that mimic our current JupyterHub / Binder gitter setup: one for "JupyterHub discussion" and one for "Binder discussion"?

ellisonbg commented 5 years ago

I think it is a good start to have the Jupyter Hub and Binder rooms. I am not sure how to separate the GitHub communications from discourse though.

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 10:38 AM Chris Holdgraf notifications@github.com wrote:

What if we just had two rooms that mimic our current JupyterHub / Binder gitter setup: one for "JupyterHub discussion" and one for "Binder discussion"?

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willingc commented 5 years ago

Perhaps, as a start: [Edited with Brian's suggestions and Tim 10-30-18]

Gitter

general chat (quick questions between devs)
quick (one conversation) technical support issues (posting to Discourse the outcome if it will take > 1 conversation) May make sense to encourage users to migrate their questions to Discourse; answering quick questions synchronously has the benefit of building rapport with users
time sensitive devops
coordination (are you around to review my PR today, can I help with that?)
informal team building/trust

Discourse

Technical support requiring more than one discussion (moved from Gitter to Discourse)
Opinion polls
Discussions of controversial issues (process, workflow, project direction)
Discussion of GitHub issues that are broad in scope or where next actions are not well defined (Cross linking with the discourse-github plugin)
Discussions of topics not related to a GitHub item
How to contribute discussions
Events
summarization for a broader audience (GitHub is a firehose),
discussion of larger work efforts that span multiple issues or repos but are still within an area of the project
requests for feedback
other organizational and non-code matters.

GitHub

Enhancements, bugs, and triaged support questions that need development to resolve
Brief responses on well-scoped (actionable) GitHub issues
Review comments and suggestions for open PRs
Release milestones

ellisonbg commented 5 years ago

Great start Carol!

Gitter: coordination (are you around to review my PR today, can I help with that?), informal team building/trust

Discourse: summarization for a broader audience (GitHub is a firehose), discussion of larger work efforts that span multiple issues or repos but are still within an area of the project, requests for feedback, other organizational and non-technical matters.

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 2:10 PM Carol Willing notifications@github.com wrote:

Perhaps, as a start: Gitter

general chat (quick questions between devs)

quick (one conversation) technical support issues (posting to Discourse the outcome) May make sense to encourage users to migrate their questions to Discourse; answering quick questions synchronously has the benefit of building rapport with users

time sensitive devops

Discourse

Technical support requiring more than one discussion (moved from Gitter to Discourse)

Opinion polls

Discussions of controversial issues, prs (Cross linking with the (discourse-github plugin]( https://github.com/discourse/discourse-github#github-linkback)

Discussions of topics not related to a GitHub item

How to contribute discussions

Events

GitHub

Enhancements, bugs, and triaged support questions that need development to resolve

Brief responses on specific issues and PRs

Release milestones

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-- Brian E. Granger Associate Professor of Physics and Data Science Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo @ellisonbg on Twitter and GitHub bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

betatim commented 5 years ago

I like the split suggested in https://github.com/jupyterhub/team-compass/issues/73#issuecomment-434081563.

One thing that is unclear to me is: Discussions of controversial issues, prs.

Why not keep this on GitHub as we have it now? I can see the advantage for topics that relate to several repositories. For most other things my feeling is that having the discussion in one place and the work and discussion that generates in another place is going to lead to a lot of "as I said $overthere but let me repeat here" or people missing things. Discussing in GitHub has the advantages that it is easy to link to code, issues, PRs, it shows up when you search for it.

The threading and and such tools in a GH issue are only basic which together with a lot of short comments (me too! or great! etc) or switching to a related topic in the same thread leads to a bit of chaos. I'd prefer if we could solve that with more restraint in posting/creating new issues (as opposed to switching to a tool that is better at this) in order to keep the advantages of tight GH integration.

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

I really like @willingc 's breakdown above. A few highlights from me:

support questions that need development to resolve

I think this is a nice resolution to the question "when should we use github issues?"
re: do we force people to do one or the other. At least in the beginning, I'm in favor of seeing a conversation through on whatever medium it started on, and then after things have settled down, collecting that conversation, post it in the "right" channel for it, and tell everybody something like "Hey all, I've summarized our recent conversation and posted it in the Jupyter community forum so that others can discover!"
I also think this is something we should treat as a "work in progress" and I'd love to keep this conversation going as we start to learn more about how these different communication channels work.

So what I'll plan to start doing: In the JupyterHub / Binder channels, start casually mentioning the discourse.jupyter.org channel and collect conversations to put there. Suggest to people that they can treat this as a resource if it's useful to them without being too pushy. When I speak to people about things like "how do I deploy a JupyterHub for XXX", I'll start pointing them to the discourse as an option among others.

Does that sound reasonable to folks?

willingc commented 5 years ago

@ellisonbg and @betatim Great suggestions.

Tim, I agree that in my stream of consciousness yesterday that I wasn't specific enough on issues and PRs. I've reworded above to try to better define. Please feel free to edit the above as well.

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

this makes me think of something else: since it sounds like we've all resolved to "try out Discourse", what if I close this issue (for now), and take Carols' bulleted list above, and paste it into a new issue like "clarify Jupyter(Hub?)'s communication plan" and we can continue iterating there. I think that bulleted list is a really nice break-down and I don't want it to be lost in a long thread of github issue discussion!

willingc commented 5 years ago

@choldgraf Can we change from discourse.jupyter.org to discuss.jupyter.org? I think the latter better captures the goal: discussion and collaboration. It also allows an easy change if we decide discourse could be replaced.

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

@willingc we cannot do this if we want the "free for OSS" plan from Discourse. One of their terms for that is that we host the site at discourse.XXX.org. Perhaps we can rename if we decide Discourse is a good tool to adopt longer-term, and then rename / set up redirections if it goes jupyter-wide (in which case it's probably worth paying for anyway)?

willingc commented 5 years ago

Go for it. Sounds good @choldgraf.

willingc commented 5 years ago

Let's open a new issue for the list of things. Put discussion for refining the list on Discourse with a cross-link.

choldgraf commented 5 years ago

closing this in favor of #77 (see discourse.jupyter.org for this deployment)

jupyterhub / team-compass