The question about moving away from Google Groups for our discussion forums to something like Discourse has remained open for a while now and at this point we, on the core team, are ready to proceed and make the transition. Our anticipated plan is to pay for the setup and hosting of Discourse with Unison Hosting rather than manage the instance ourselves; this service also has the additional benefit of importing the historical data and users from the various OpenLMIS Google Groups.
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns about this transition. If we do not hear any objections in the next week we will plan on starting the transition by the end of the month or in early October.
We are also very interested in hearing from the community about how they want this new service to be utilized. Our hope is that this service will not only replace Google Groups but also act as a natural repository for interactions that fall between the realtime communication of Slack and the more delayed/formal communication of an email. If you have any thoughts on how we can best do that, we would love to hear them!
Thanks,
Wes Brown (on behalf of the core OpenLMIS team)