Discourse as the default communication channel?

[Olblak]

Hi Everybody,

I am really glad to share that "Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc", the company behind Discourse
offered to sponsor the Jenkins project with the business "tier"
-> https://www.discourse.org/pricing

This is a very nice opportunity to "organize" discussions happening across the community.
Different people have different expectations so feel free to raise your voice and share your ideas.

What we want to achieve is better communication with the Jenkins community, at the moment a lot of valuable information is lost in the various mailing list, Gitter, IRC, etc.
By using Discourse it would allow to centralize questions in one place and regroup them by categories

At this stage, we are still in exploratory mode, so if you have any experience with the tool or just want to help
feel free to reach out so I can send you an invite.
The discourse will be one of the topics for today's infrastructure meeting.

The service is available on "https://community.jenkins.io".

The next steps are:

1) Delegating authentication to a third service, Github, keycloak, LDAP, etc...

My preferred approach would be to rely on Github SSO to authenticate with the tool. But we could still use our Jenkins account. Opinions are more than welcome.

2) Configure the right level of Categories, as a first iteration I would like to focus on Jenkins users but we could extend it to Jenkins contributors as well.

3) Identify a group of people interested to lead this initiative.

Cheers

[Bruce Becker]

Hi all.

long time lurker, but this is my time to speak up. I have maintained many instances of Jenkins, and just as many instances of Discourse - most recent one is defined here : https://github.com/EGI-Federation/community.egi.eu (I have since moved on).

It is imho the right choice for this, but there are good ways to use it and better ways to use it. Beyond putting my vote for what it's worth behind this decision, I would also like to volunteer my time where possible to help setting up and moderating, etc.

Happy to help in whatever way.

Thanks,

Bruce

[Oleg Nenashev]

Hi all,

Thanks to Olivier for starting this discussion and for confirming sponsorship for Discourse. This is definitely something we could use to address the current sprawl of Jenkins communication channels. Many channels like User Mailing list, some SIG mailing lists and many Gitter channels could be replaced by discourse. So I am +1 for starting evaluation.

> 2) Configure the right level of Categories, as a first iteration I would like to focus on Jenkins users but we could extend it to Jenkins contributors as well.

As Bruce said above, setting up a proper structure and moderation process is essential to the success of Discourse. Before we make it official, we should try it out and see how to better structure the communication channels. IMHO any interested contributor with Discourse expertise is welcome to participate in this effort. And thanks for stepping up Bruce!

My notes:

• I would recommend creating categories for SIGs, sub-projects and outreach programs right away.
• It would be great to create generic categories like "Jenkins Pipeline" or "Jenkins on Kubernetes". Plugins structure should be secondary there
• Some plugins and components may need sub-categories. Likely these would be tool integration plugins (e.g. "Git plugins")
  
• TBD: Creating a Governance category? It is feasible, but I am not sure how dit aligns with the current open governance approach through this mailing list and meetings
  

I am happy to be a guinea pig for some of the categories if needed.

> 1) Delegating authentication to a third service, Github, keycloak, LDAP, etc...  My preferred approach would be to rely on Github SSO to authenticate with the tool. But we could still use our Jenkins account.

I am -1 for using the Jenkins account. Last year we agreed that we want to move away from running our own user identity, and I believe it was a right decision. One of the interesting options would be using the Linux Foundation SSO so that the forum is aligned with the Linux Foundation identities. If technically feasible, this would be my preference.

Best regards,

Oleg Nenashev

P.S: My personal experience with forums is very limited. Fun fact about me: I was moderating a Lineage clan forum for a year or so. No, no further comments :P

[Matt Sicker]

I’ve never used Discourse outside of video games, but it seems easier to set up public communities on than Slack or other things we’ve tried here so far. While in theory I’d prefer something open like Matrix, I do agree that we should try to minimize the number of services to maintain ourselves.

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[Bruce Becker]

On Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 2:45:28 PM UTC+2 Oleg Nenashev wrote:

Hi all,

Thanks to Olivier for starting this discussion and for confirming sponsorship for Discourse. This is definitely something we could use to address the current sprawl of Jenkins communication channels. Many channels like User Mailing list, some SIG mailing lists and many Gitter channels could be replaced by discourse. So I am +1 for starting evaluation.

It is a really good idea to have some desired outcome for choosing a new tool. For anyone who has moderated or operated a Discourse instance, what follows is well-known, but this is a very flexible system. It combines the good parts of things we're already comfortable with (mailing lists, Q/A sites like StackExchange, Reddit). If configured appropriately, it can interface nicely with Slack, GitHub, and mailing lists. For those who like the feel of a mailing list, can be configured to act as such, (users receive messages or digests, and reply via email). It can make technical and community engagement by migrating topics off GitHub where they may originate, so that a true "discussion" can be had, while "work" continues on the issue. It can act as the comments engine in a blog or any web page. It can be used for customer support. There is probably a plugin for whatever may be desired: https://meta.discourse.org/c/plugin

but since it can be used as a replacement or an enhancement for many of the things already used, understanding the desired behaviour is key.

 

There is far more to be said about why this is a good way to communicate, but it is better to experience that than be told it. In my experience there is always some resistance, much of it understandable, when it comes to moving a community over to a new place on the web, so a lot attention should be paid to providing a welcome experience.

> 2) Configure the right level of Categories, as a first iteration I would like to focus on Jenkins users but we could extend it to Jenkins contributors as well.

As usual, less is more. The key to any community platform is engagement. If people engage, it will become apparent how they like to engage. Obvious levels of organisation should correspond to obvious entities in the real world or in the project. A good example is perhaps Hashicorp's community forum or Chef's . In any case, this can be easily changed over time, without impacting the user's experience (links remain in place, etc).

The best part of Discourse, for the community manager, is easily finding out who your community leaders are. There is a basic algorithm for unlocking privileges as members continue to engage in the desired way, similar to the StackExchange model. This is tunable, and requires a little bit of bootstrap, but is really a good way of finding out who is really involved and in what way in the community.

For example, right now you can't tell who reads every message, or is annoyed by every message except those pertaining to the thing they're interested in (say, the CasC plugin) with this mailing list. With discourse you can do that.

As Bruce said above, setting up a proper structure and moderation process is essential to the success of Discourse. Before we make it official, we should try it out and see how to better structure the communication channels. IMHO any interested contributor with Discourse expertise is welcome to participate in this effort. And thanks for stepping up Bruce!

My notes:

• I would recommend creating categories for SIGs, sub-projects and outreach programs right away.
• It would be great to create generic categories like "Jenkins Pipeline" or "Jenkins on Kubernetes". Plugins structure should be secondary there
• Some plugins and components may need sub-categories. Likely these would be tool integration plugins (e.g. "Git plugins")
  
• TBD: Creating a Governance category? It is feasible, but I am not sure how dit aligns with the current open governance approach through this mailing list and meetings
  

I am happy to be a guinea pig for some of the categories if needed.

> 1) Delegating authentication to a third service, Github, keycloak, LDAP, etc...  My preferred approach would be to rely on Github SSO to authenticate with the tool. But we could still use our Jenkins account.

Multiple identity providers are possible. I'm not sure what the hosted configuration options are, but since this is an open project, it would make sense to me to allow authentication via public identity providers.

If there are "internal" topics or categories, say for enterprise customers, or internal CloudBees discussions which may not be for public consumption, this is also possible.

Finally - I realise I'm just a quasi anonymous voice on the internet. Maybe my GitHub will make me a bit less so. I have been building on Jenkins since just after it was called Hudson and the only reason I don't try to contribute more is that I'm not what you would call "a Java guy". But this is my jam. I am heavily invested in Jenkins for $work and have built places for communities with Discourse before. I literally couldn't sit this one out! So, if I can contribute, this is my way :)

Thanks!

Bruce

[Gavin Mogan]

Matt. It's often a confusion point. Discourse is more like a form/mailing list type thing. Discord is realtime communication. Sounds like your describing discord.

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[Matt Sicker]

Ha, so I was. Oops!

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[Olblak]

Hi Bruce,

Thank you for stepping up, you already provided a lot of information here.
And let's not assume we all know everything about discourse as we definitely don't.
As you are interested to help with this project, I'll send you an invite to "community.jenkins.io".

As long as we don't have an agreement on the authentication mechanism, I'll work on invite-only.

Regarding identifying what we expected from Discourse, Bruce made a good statement that discourse is what we want it to be, so here what I would like it to solve.
I would like to easily identify and participate in discussion about topics that interested me across different sub-project. So as an initial step, Oleg suggestion seems right to me.

On my side, I'll investigate the different authentication options. Today during the infrastructure Oleg made a good remark, we would like to ideally move away from maintaining our Ldap service and we would like to offer more alternatives than just using a Github account so maybe using Linux foundation accounts would be better.

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/CACmp6kqdKH-k8Jzdzy-tEqTZJyRAdpZ2Fx5bJHGK%2BMVCWykxOw%40mail.gmail.com.
>

[Olblak]

For whoever is interested to participate to the Discourse project,
we started discussing over there as a way to test it and get more familiar with the tool.
-> https://community.jenkins.io/t/discussion-about-categories/27/12

Feel free to request an access as I didn't have the time yet to really investigate the consequences of the different authentication methods.

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/0dc7131d-6b5c-4b2e-9445-cfa60689b1b6%40www.fastmail.com.
>

[Slide]

I would like access please. Just a question, as I am very unfamiliar with Discourse. Is it a real time communication medium, a la IRC, or something more akin to a forum? 

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[Gavin Mogan]

The tech it uses can give you pretty live updates, but its designed as a forum.

I've sent you a DM on IRC with an invite link for now.

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[Mark Waite]

I'd like to be part of the test.

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[Olblak]

I would like to highlight the discussion about the different possible authentication with an option to vote

-> https://community.jenkins.io/t/authentication-method-used/36

I understand not everybody at this point will be able to vote directly from Discourse so feel free to either request access to be part of the evaluation process or just provide feedback here.

At this stage, Bruce, Gavin, Tim and I have admin access and can send invites.

Once further in the process, we'll reevaluate admin access.

Cheers

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[Oleg Nenashev]

I would be interested to particupate as the Events officer. I would like to experiment with language community channels and user outreach tools.

Thanks to everyone for driving this!

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[Olblak]

Hi Oleg,

Could you elaborate

> experiment with language community channels

> experiment user outreach tools

Do you have something in mind?

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[Olblak]

After additional testing, I decided to allow user registration, on community.jenkins.io.

I needed it to test the Github integration.

We can still revert that decision if needed

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[Oleg Nenashev]

experiment with language community channels

Creating sub-categories, e.g. for francophone, Spanish speaking or Russian speaking communities

> experiment user outreach tools

Do you have something in mind?

I would start from a call for topic proposals for the Jenkins Contributor Summit.

Later we can move many GSoC and Hacktoberfest discussions there

 

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[Oleg Nenashev]

https://community.jenkins.io/ looks really good so far. Thanks all!

[Oleg Nenashev]

FTR there is similar discussion about Discourse and YAGNI in https://community.jenkins.io/t/goal-and-purpose-of-community-jenkins-io-regarding-other-communication-tools-in-jenkins-community/70 . Feel free to participate!