moving OpenRefine mailing lists and Gitter to a Discourse forum
Sandra Fauconnier
Hello OpenRefine community!
tl;dr We consider moving OpenRefine's mailing lists and Gitter
to a web-based Discourse forum, and invite your feedback.
This message is also published
on OpenRefine's blog.
For quite a while, some active OpenRefine community members (Antonin, me, and the OpenRefine advisory committee) have been talking about ways to make OpenRefine’s community more lively, active and diverse.
As one step, we consider moving the current main community communication channels (the user mailing list, developer mailing list, and the Gitter chat) to a public, web-based forum, using the Discourse software. After the move, we will not delete the mailing lists, but keep them read-only as a public archive. We feel inspired to move forward to this, because in our latest user survey (held in April-May 2022), a web-based forum was the most popular option when we asked you for your preferred means of communications.
Our choice would be a hosted web-based Discourse forum, on a URL like forum.openrefine.org or similar. We would go for Discourse for many reasons. First, because it is well-designed and widely used open source forum software, but (among other things) also because it allows much more diverse discussion on 'smaller' topics (e.g. translation of OpenRefine's interface; discussion about larger feature requests; threads in languages other than English...). Discourse offers mailing list / email modes for people who prefer this as their main mode of communications.
We collected many considerations and pros/cons in this document, including the other options we could consider. We invite your comments and feedback there, or here on OpenRefine's mailing list. Also, if anyone is interested in helping with the move, please let me know (previous experience with setting up a Discourse forum would be extremely valuable!) :-)
Tentative timeline for the move (our team is small, so this may
be slower, or faster if a few of you volunteer to help!):
* Today - OpenRefine’s community is informed about this plan; you
can respond and comment for two weeks (and longer if we notice it
is needed)
* Week of Oct 3, 2022 (or later) - Decision go/no go based on your
feedback
* If there is general consensus: around the first weeks of
November (depending on availability of Antonin, Sandra and
volunteers) - start of actual migration to Discourse
* If there is general consensus: end November 2022 - OpenRefine’s
community uses Discourse for communications and mailing lists are
now read-only!
Looking forward to your comments and feedback!
All the best,
Sandra
-- Sandra Fauconnier (she/her) Project Director, OpenRefine https://openrefine.org Subscribe to OpenRefine's user mailing list: https://groups.google.com/g/openrefine
Sandra Fauconnier
Hello all!
It looks like there are no major objections against a move from
our mailing lists to Discourse! On the contrary, the main feedback
I've heard so far (both here and via other channels) seems very
positive.
If any of you still have objections or major comments, this is
your reminder to please voice these via any channel you feel
comfortable with :-)
In the longer document, there is a remark about easy, 'quick informal chat, instant messaging style' communication, which we currently have on Gitter and would miss on a web forum like Discourse. We can also totally keep our Gitter channel open for this purpose; the main bottleneck is that it's not very actively tracked/watched at this moment (we'd welcome people to help if they want!). Does anyone have strong feelings about it?
If we don't hear very strong opinions in the next few days, I suggest we go ahead with a small group of people and create a test Discourse forum to play around. Let me know if you want to join this test phase - help is very welcome :-)
All the best!
Sandra
Sandra Fauconnier
Hi everyone,
Seems like we have green light. Let's follow up on this! Exciting!
I have created a GitHub issue where the group of testers can
co-ordinate the first steps of testing the new forum. As soon as
feasible, I suggest we can move our 'meta' discussion there too.
https://github.com/OpenRefine/openrefine.github.com/issues/118
If you want to help with the test period (we'd welcome helpers!!) please indicate so in the GitHub issue: https://github.com/OpenRefine/openrefine.github.com/issues/118
Anyone interested in the process can also follow along and comment there.
All the best!
Sandra
Thad Guidry
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