Discourse has certainly worked pretty well for the Uk CCIO network.
Any objections to us giving it a trial, perhaps initially for 'general
discussion' and 'community news' tracks.
Picking up on Bert's earlier suggestion, is there room for a
'professional' membership category, costing just under 100 euro per
annum? Essentially the same as individual membership but giving very
small commercial entities, the ability to post news of software and
educational events.
Ian
Dr Ian McNicoll
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As Diego has suggested, discourse can be used in news server mode both to receive and respond to posts. That is mostly how I use it for the uk ccio lists.
Sure. But then I still have to _go_ and read the post.
With a list the notify IS the post.
And I can't archive posts (say, by topic), entirely delete
posts, read posts offline, ...
(Note that I am mainly talking about the established lists,
as Pekka seemed to be suggesting moving to an all-forum
approach -- for announcements, a forum may be fine.)
And here is the forum that the Discourse team uses for its own software: https://meta.discourse.org/ It’s notable as it has a good example of a Marketplace area which can be used for software announcements of the kind recently discussed.
In the main it works pretty similar to a mailing list (in that new postings can be notified to users via email, just like people are used to) except there is also a web interface for the forum which provides a nice way of browsing content, especially older content.
It’s fairly configurable, and there is quite a lot of flexibility to create special interest areas/lists. The notifications are user-customisable so it’s easy to unsubscribe yourself from notifications if you’re getting too many.
I agree with Ian’s suggestion to trial the forum and see how well it works for this community.
“Push” communications (eg e-mail) are much more effective at reaching people than “Pull” communications (web sites forums, etc.)
I have seen the “views”/“eyeballs” drop off significantly when communities move to forums such as Discourse… in particular the “views” of those who are not so active in these communities. They indeed don’t have the motivation to go browsing.
As all research in internet marketing will tell you, e-mail is the most effective way of reaching people.
I have no experience with Discourse, I cannot judge how it works. Some people, I see, like it.
Important is the push-effect. I read the openehr mailing list because it is pushed to me. Else I would not read it.
Sorry for that, but my days are very filled up, it is easy to not do something.
I am a member of some forums, became a member because I needed some advice, and there are people on a forum posting all day.
But as soon as my business on a forum is done, I forget to go there.
> Picking up on Bert's earlier suggestion, is there room for a 'professional' membership category, costing just under 100 euro per annum? Essentially the same as individual membership but giving very small commercial entities, the ability to post news of software and educational events.
Thanks Ian for picking up and I agree with how you reformulated the idea.
Again, for announcements (which started this thread) a
forum/"marketplace" may be fine, even better if it can push
posts to subscribers. OTOH, that's exactly the place where
Karl's insight into marketing really does matter ...
Also, such an announcement list is typically read-only
(answers are not really to be expected).
IMO we are over-engineering things that can be solved by agreeing on a set of rules. We even have two lists technical and implements and there might be just one.
The active members of the community that participate in these channels is low. Adding more communication channels will just disperse the community.
I agree that there are some lists which can be combined to technical, as you say, technical, implementers and ref_impl_java.
That is indeed over-engineering.
But I don't agree on the second part because I think announcements must be read-only, as a courtesy to the announcer.
And another argument, for example, when you offer a small service, writing archetypes, giving education, or you write a modeling tool, or even a book, that kind of things, I don't see that fit in a technical or clinical mailing-list.
It makes it also easy to search the archive for services or products.
Personally I don’t like one-way communication channels. I prefer to receive feedback, questions, etc. and leave those questions and answers open for the community, so others can come in and contribute.
For small communities is better to have few channels, under the same platform, open and bidirectional.
We are thinking as engineers here, we should think as community managers and community members.
I agree that the channels need to be well thought but i also think the community needs the best available platform for communication. I don’t find the current solution inviting to new members at all. Web archive lacks a good search and replying to old threads is not possible trough web archive.
That is in the end what implementers will do. When the specs don’t explicitly cover something they will search for information on how others have done the same thing and ask if required - this should be super easy and usable.