We are starting to use discourse in our company as a means for communicating with user groups. No real experiences yet other than configuring the platform. Discourse offers some appealing options, one of the best is the option to react directly by mail. So you have the possibilities of a forum wrapped with the ease of use of an announcement list. Alternatively you can have categories on the forum completely act like a announcement list like this one.
During our market survey it seemed the best (down to earth) solution for managing our small community of users.
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.
Thanks for the input everyone. My feeling is that Discourse is worth a
small experiment but we will discuss at the Mgt Board meeting in a
couple of weeks.
Ian
Dr Ian McNicoll
mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859
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skype: ianmcnicoll
email: ian@freshehr.com
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Co-Chair, openEHR Foundation ian.mcnicoll@openehr.org
Director, freshEHR Clinical Informatics Ltd.
Director, HANDIHealth CIC
Hon. Senior Research Associate, CHIME, UCL
Please, Ian, also discuss an announcementlist for free and open source software (my favour is read-only, announcements only), and, also your own suggestion, to have a low fee membership for single person or low income business
Bert,
I would suggest that anyone who is not yet really running a business or generating income from openEHR just become an individual member.
- thomas
My issue is that for people running incidental business or incidental income, maybe only a few thousands a year, 650 Euro is really a lot of money. Of course for real business, with employees and so on, 650 is nothing.
Those people running incidental business could possibly want to announce services or software on a announcement list (which is still to setup.)
I think people matching this description would just be individual members, at €15 p.a. I don't see any reason to prevent anyone from announcing software projects or products, services etc on the (to be created) announcement list.
Discourse will allow a number of things to happen that you can’t have at present:
online forum with email notifications and reply-via-email function built in
any combination of public, login-only, and private forums that is needed by the openEHR community
‘announcement’ lists can be made ‘read-only’ by locking the post straight after posting
nested subforums
wikified sections of text which can be updated by any logged-in user
embedded, inline documents, googledocs, images and videos
private messages (useful for when wanting to contact someone whom you know of but don’t have an email address for)
‘accepted answer’ to a question can be marked and thereafter a direct link to the accepted answer is displayed right in the post asking the question (a little bit like Stack Overflow, not quite as rich, but good enough).
and lots of other stuff
I’m happy to set an instance up for the community as long as we have a few people who’ll help maintain, moderate and manage it.
For those that don’t like online fora, the email-based experience of Discourse is similar enough to a mailing list not to be an issue (for most)
The absolute key and killer feature of fora vs mailing lists is that with mailing lists you only really have a history of the topics in your email, going as far back as when you joined the mailing list. With fora, you have the entire history of everything, saving duplicate posts and repeated asking of the same solved questions.
