EaaSI Community Forum - Soft Launch and Feedback

[Ethan Gates]

Greetings all!!

I'm pleased to announce that the EaaSI Community Forum is ready for interaction and feedback. I invite everyone on this list to register for an account and start exploring, posting topics, and using the Forum to report questions, bugs, and issues encountered with the EaaSI platform.

Starting from today, and continuing until the February 2021 start of the SPN Hosted Service Pilot (whose participants will use the Forum as a primary space for communication and posting responses to activities), we'll consider this a "soft launch" period. Though registration is open, we will not start publicizing the forum for general interaction beyond the EaaSI Network until February. That gives us some time to bootstrap the forum together, getting some conversations going and allowing myself, Oleg, and the rest of the EaaSI team to figure out which of the forum's features will best help organize and streamline our support work.

I'd particularly like to highlight The Support Center section of the forum, which will become our primary space for bug reporting, moving away from this Google Group and GitLab issues (in most cases - please look over our full Support Guide for policies moving forward!)

I will continue to keep an eye on this list and respond to questions and problems during the transition, but invitations will be closed to new members and I'll encourage migrating posts/questions to an appropriate spot in the forum. We'll give plenty of notice before closing or moving this Group's content to read-only, and will continue to investigate whether the threads here can be exported and translated into the Community Forum - we know there is plenty of great information in this knowledge base that you've helped us build up over the past two years, and are committed to making sure it stays accessible!

The EaaSI Community Forum is built and hosted on Discourse - if you are new to Discourse, here are a couple overviews to help you get started!

• https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-new-user-guide/96331
• https://blog.discourse.org/2016/12/discourse-new-user-tips-and-tricks/

And of course, feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions. If you have any ideas for how we can better take advantage of Discourse and the Community Forum - more categories or sub-boards, plugins or functionality we should investigate, etc. - please let us know in the "Site Feedback" section!!

See you there,

- Ethan