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 defer to @KenWhitesell and @nessita here
Thank you for including me in this conversation.
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?
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.
I wouldn’t be anti trying this… Sometimes a chat along side a thread would be appropriate, but I have never seen how the Discourse chat works
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?
Personally, I hope that is a “first-of”. I think there’s benefit in providing a place for the broader ecosystem to be more visible in a single place.
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.
Yes. +1
And I think there may be two separate sets of topics associated with that concept:
No need to argue - at least not with me. I’m with you 100% on this.
A quick note, that Adam just opened this thread
Which IMO would be better located in a “Packages” category
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)
Thanks everyone for the thoughtful discussion and feedback on bringing Django Commons discussions to the Django Forum. Based on the conversation, I wanted to summarize what I’m seeing and propose next steps.
Community Need: There appears to be a need for creating a dedicated space for package-related discussions, with support for expanding beyond just Django Commons to include broader third-party package development. See for example @adamghill’s Django Unicorn maintainer thread thread.
Moderation Solution: The moderation concerns have been addressed with Django Commons admins volunteering to moderate. @cunla from our admin team has offered to join the moderator team, and I would be happy to volunteer for moderation duties as well. We’re committed to active monitoring and notifications for the relevant areas. We would both need to be onboarded to the moderation workflows for the forum.
Category Approach: There’s consensus around starting with a top-level “Packages” category (as @carltongibson and @nanorepublica suggested) rather than limiting to just “Django Commons.” This would be more inclusive and could serve the broader ecosystem.
Scope: The expanded scope would cover:
@KenWhitesell @nessita - are you comfortable moving forward with this approach?
This aligns with what we discussed in our Django Commons admin meeting on August 1st, where the team was in agreement to move forward with this approach.
Looking forward to making package development discussions more visible and accessible to the Django community!
I don’t see any problems or issues with this.
For information purposes - if I were to rank my moderation activities.
Messages that have been typed elsewhere and copy/pasted into the edit box tend to trigger the “User has entered a message too fast” spam warning. I get a notification that this has happened - I read the message to confirm that it is not spam, and allow it in. (I think I probably see 5-6 / week in this category, but it does vary greatly.)
Deleting messages and users that are posting real spam.
Moving messages to the proper categories. Most newcomers will post their question in the general “Using Django” category. Those I try to categorize appropriately - not so much for them, but for those coming to search the site later. (Admittedly, a subjective judgement in many cases, and I know I’m not 100% consistent in some edge cases.)
Correcting spelling mistakes of key words in the title. (My assumption is that a specific question / answer is going to be easier to find if, for example, Query is spelled “query” in the title instead of “quary”.)
Provide guidance to new posters. I have a couple “canned” responses that I’ll use to try and help new members with asking questions here. The one I use most commonly is the one to use ``` to fence off preformatted text.
Finally - and it is the least-frequently performed activity - I will either flag, directly hide/delete, or respond to posts flagged by other members with an appropriate action. (In most cases, it’s to send a private message explaining why the post has been hidden/deleted. In very rare cases it’s to give someone a “time out”. (IIRC, I think there have been 3 individuals where I’ve needed to go that far - and that’s across 3+ years of being a moderator.)
Everything else I do here (attempt to answer questions, try to draw out more information from vague questions, recategorize old topics, etc) I don’t consider to be “moderator” duties.
[Addendum: This is a subjective off-the-cuff evaluation. I don’t actually track my activities in these areas. Other moderators / admins may have different opinions.]
Sorry for the slow reply, but yes, I am comfortably with this approach.
Let me know if you need anything else!