On Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 05:39:28PM +0000, Ankur Sinha wrote:
I'm not so sure. I think Discourse works well for team
discussion, but
we don't do a lot of that here. The list here is generally used for
announcing information/opportunities for newcomers.
To me, the forum-like interface of Discourse seems more friendly to
newcomers than a mailing list, and we can do things like make sticky posts,
have graphics, etc.
Most of our discussion happens on Pagure tickets.
That's the way Design works too.
Do we want absolute newcomers to go to Discussion.fp.o? Even with
categories, Discourse doesn't have the clear boundaries that mailing
lists do. Muting categories to opt-out is the opposite of explicitly
subscribing to mailing lists. So, there's so much happening there---do
we want newcomers to dive right in?
Hmmm, yeah, I see upsides and downsides to this. It can certainly be a
little intimidating. On the other hand, I kind of do want to say that it'd
be _ideal_ if newcomers feel like they can dive right in.
I think we currently try to prevent this in the Welcome-to-Fedora
system. We first get newcomers to learn the high level bits on Fedora
and only when they're comfortable enough do we direct them to teams and
tasks.
... and this is clearly working, so I don't want to break something that is!
Here's an example ticket:
https://pagure.io/fedora-join/Welcome-to-Fedora/issue/76
(On a related note, the magazine, as a public facing official Fedora
platform, is obviously very attractive to new contributors. It works as
an excellent contribution gateway but do we have some info on whether
magazine contributors stick around and get involved in other regular
Fedora community development related activities: technical or otherwise?)
I can't (immediately, although there are some ways to look at this I should
play with) speak to magazine -> other activities, but I was just talking to
Paul about this and his sense was that using Discourse was creating a lot
more "stickiness" of new contributors. Previously, there were a lot of
one-off "hello" posts and 95% of those didn't stick around. Now, while
there's still some of that, it's noticably better.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader