In a recent admin meeting for django commons, we were discussing how to improve our community out reach. One of the suggestions was moving our discussions into the Django Forum. We’d like to get some feedback on this idea and understand what concerns there would be.
Most of the topics would be related to package maintenance, community building and then some around Django Commons governance / operations. The existing set of discussions can be found at django-commons · Discussions · GitHub
In theory there could be a Django Commons channel. (Maybe Packages to be more inclusive, or Django Commons and Packages, or…)
The main issue is moderation. Maybe some commons members could join the moderators team, just to add bandwidth there. (I suspect it’s not a big one, but more hands is always better at small scale.)
What about a … channel then? — Just me, I don’t really see a problem being quite liberal there, within reason.
Makes sense. If some of the admin team, say 2 to 3 of us, committed to turning on notifications for the relevant areas and moderate the conversation there, would that cover the concern?
Yup, yup. No qualms there. Folks can subscribe to those, threads will bubble up to the forum’s landing page and avoids us having to prefix titles with [Django Commons]. That should work.
I’m a little lost about what a channel in this context would be, per my searching there is no such concept within Discourse? I only found this search result but it really seems like it’s a chat? If we have chats, what’s the role of Discord?
Spin off about chats
I've been saying for a while that I'm not a fan of Discord for various reasons, the most prominent being that it requires being logged in to read conversations, and the almost-impossible task of linking to specific messages for use in tickets or elsewhere. If we could replace Discord with a chat option within Discourse, I’d be very much in favor and would happily push that crusade. (There are tons of advantages, but I’ll get into those if we consider this a feasible plan.)
Chipping in here, my thoughts would be to have a more generic Packages area as Carlton mentioned, but then Django Commons members naturally taking the lead by moving their discussions here and helping with the moderation seems like a good move to me.
This would in my mind start to mirror the Discord channels (there is a #packages channel)
That’s just me, misusing terms from too many social thingies. I meant Category I think. Like either Packages or Ecosystem or … @nanorepublica says, perhaps under Django Internals (or not) is what I was trying to suggest.
Not sure I have standing for a valid opinion here (not that that has ever stopped me before), but this raises the question in my mind of whether this is a “one-off” or a “first of ‘n’”. As a “one-off”, I think “Django Commons” could be a subcategory of “Django Internals”.
If it’s a “first-of”, then perhaps a higher level category may be more appropriate (e.g. “Ecosystem”), and “Django Commons” resides in it. But then what else would be a candidate for that category?
I agree - but it’s more a question of what discussions are to be held there.
We already host general “User-questions” in “Using Django”. We have the “Show & Tell” for announcing new packages and tools.
From what I can see, that leaves the type of “design discussions” that “Internals” is targeted at - but honestely, how many third-party packages are sufficiently active such that they warrant a discussion area here? (Especially since most of them appear to use the github issues for that sort of thing.)
Personally I would like to see us experiment here. My approach would be to have it has a top level category to begin with. It simply existing might prompt new discussions by the space existing.
However if it’s still quiet after a period of time (say 6 months), then we can move the category to a more appropriate place.
Hi, I am happy to join the moderators’ team - assuming the load is not too heavy (1-2 posts a day is fine).
I would need an onboarding to the mod-team - I am not very familiar with all features in discourse.
What if we expanded the scope of those discussions to people who want to create third-party packages as well? It’s marginally more, especially when compared to discussions of how to use Django. But I’d argue, those discussions (how to wire into Django) don’t entirely involve the internals of Django either.
I looked for a Packages (or something similar) category before posting to General! (also happy to move my post somewhere more appropriate if that’s the consensus)