GitHub Discussions - Thad's perspective thus far

[Thad Guidry]

I've been poking around seeing other projects using GitHub Discussions and getting really good feedback from their user community.  Along with all the bells and whistles with essential reactions (github emotes), simple up arrow voting, Q&A, categories, Search, etc. along with moderation to marking comments as answers, lock discussions, convert to an issue.  Those with Triage privileges on our repo can perform moderation on Discussions.

A few examples:
https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/discussions
https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/discussions/new 

https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions

https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions/new (interesting Select Category)

https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/discussions
https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/discussions/new (interesting Select Category)

I know we are constantly worried about splitting the community conversations, but I really do strongly feel that it would bring together the community.  (not to mention the free markdown support builtin...no more messy email syntax snafus for many users)  We want to grow our user community and I think this would help bring different user groups into our fold, and also help liaison better with Wikidata since we could have Categories dedicated to "Wikidata extension", "WP Commons integration", etc. as the OpenRefine Community needs evolve, without muddying the waters of our mailing list or issues.

The other nice thing is that individual discussion threads can be easily unsubscribed as well as the entire discussion.

And I think Owen would probably enjoy it much more from a support perspective.

On our Readme we could highly encourage users to search or start a GitHub Discussion, and that we also still have the mailing list  (we could optionally remove the Stackoverflow link).

The only thing holding us back would probably be this issue, to subscribe to all new discussions on a repo.  Once they add that into the Beta then I think we should give GitHub Discussions a try:  https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/47

Thoughts?

Thad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/

https://calendly.com/thadguidry/

[Thad Guidry]

I'm circling back to this discussion (that had no responses)

I think since we are getting more and Wikidata questions on the mailing list...and that we might indeed get the grant opportunity where we will likely expand users for Wikidata extension...

Instead of making another mailing list for openrefine-wikidata perhaps we might use GitHub Discussions and create a category for that and a few for other used extensions?

Thoughts?

Thad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/

https://calendly.com/thadguidry/

[Antonin Delpeuch (lists)]

Hi Thad,

I'd rather try to avoid vendor lock-in (with GitHub) and use an external
discussion medium instead. I think we floated the idea of a Discourse
instance a while ago, I think it would still be interesting to try this
out. But as a complete replacement of the existing mailing list(s), not
as an extra discussion platform.

Antonin

On 07/05/2021 04:30, Thad Guidry wrote:
> I'm circling back to this discussion (that had no responses)
>
> I think since we are getting more and Wikidata questions on the mailing
> list...and that we might indeed get the grant opportunity where we will
> likely expand users for Wikidata extension...

> Instead of making another mailing list for *openrefine-wikidata* perhaps

> we might use GitHub Discussions and create a category for that and a few
> for other used extensions?
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thad
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/

> <https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/>
> https://calendly.com/thadguidry/ <https://calendly.com/thadguidry/>

>
>
> On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 10:47 AM Thad Guidry <thadg...@gmail.com
> <mailto:thadg...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I've been poking around seeing other projects using GitHub
> Discussions and getting really good feedback from their user
> community.  Along with all the bells and whistles with essential
> reactions (github emotes), simple up arrow voting, Q&A, categories,
> Search, etc. along with moderation to marking comments as answers,
> lock discussions, convert to an issue.  Those with Triage privileges
> on our repo can perform moderation on Discussions.
>
> A few examples:
> https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/discussions
> <https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/discussions>

> https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/discussions/new

> <https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/discussions/new> 
>
> https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions
> <https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions>

> https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions/new

> <https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions/new> (interesting Select
> Category)
>
> https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/discussions
> <https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/discussions>

> https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/discussions/new

> <https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/>
> https://calendly.com/thadguidry/ <https://calendly.com/thadguidry/>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "OpenRefine Development" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
> an email to openrefine-de...@googlegroups.com
> <mailto:openrefine-de...@googlegroups.com>.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openrefine-dev/CAChbWaOR54b_5eQ9F2E%3DLapjpfMgZtd92pEMa6Ly3bMq%3DZxHTw%40mail.gmail.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openrefine-dev/CAChbWaOR54b_5eQ9F2E%3DLapjpfMgZtd92pEMa6Ly3bMq%3DZxHTw%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.

[Thad Guidry]

Thanks Antonin,

Yes there is vendor lock-in with GitHub, and something that I worry about also.

Hosting with GitHub is free and alleviates the maintenance burden of our already small team.

I don't know how much maintenance burden there is with Discourse, but willing to give it a try.

It looks like Discourse also offers a Google Groups importer as well.

So if we tried it, we would just need to agree on some hosting options.

Looking at their own hosting at $100 a month (server + maintenance) seems expensive since the requirements are a very small server.

But then looking at what is really needed in the install instructions, brings their cost into perspective:

1. Discourse Server (does not include an Email server)

2. DB maintenance

3. Email server  - to send out notifications

Thad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/

https://calendly.com/thadguidry/

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to openrefine-de...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openrefine-dev/f364256f-599c-47f4-60ac-2d7117f453ba%40antonin.delpeuch.eu.

[Thad Guidry]

I'd like to again propose that we try enabling GitHub Discussions...(instead of trying to roll something of our own with Discourse as suggested earlier in the thread by Antonin)

The reasoning is that often user discussion like what happened yesterday in issue #3929 where a hypothetical bug or questionable bug that needed lots of general discussion, then morphed (erroneously by me) into an enhancement request, where we later closed that discussion (hiding as an issue in GitHub), to finally arrive at the real issue #3948 that someone could develop an enhancement against with clear details (without all the discussion threads).

As you can see we had 1. a discussion 2. a clear issue to work on.

So I'd like to propose that:

1. GitHub Issues are created by developers

2. GitHub Discussions are used by everyone!

In enabling GitHub Discussions, we might:

1. promote health discussions by having good categories (the defaults are nice to start with but we might even have some categories )

2. On Issues, disallow creating a new Bug or Enhancement issue and reserve this for only some roles (administrators and maintainers) if that's possible. And tweak our issue templates so that they make sense for those roles.

3. Point folks in our Readme, docs, wiki pages, to discuss things on GitHub Discussions

Planning, chatting, and discussing can all be part of GitHub Discussions.

In fact, the whole reason that GitHub created the Discussions space was to solve the headaches that maintainers have like the unclear evolving morphing issues like the one above.

And in the future we might decide to:

1. end our mailing lists

2. end our Gitter