forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

On 16/01/18 16:29, Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
> I don't know if packaging the JS into Debian would be enough. If I
> recall correctly, Discourse depends on client-side JS, so the issues are
> more immediate in the client-side where the client is the one more
> vulnerable.
> 
> There are other things that I didn't have time nor knowledge to check
> yet, like if Discourse has progressive enhancement.
> 

In any case, the original intention of this thread was to look at the
impact these tools have on the way organizations evolve and achieve
meaningful goals, especially free software organizations or those
organizations who ask for help from free software experts.

Many people in the street would cite facebook as an example of a good
communications tool and some people even use facebook groups to run
their organizations.  But do those organizations achieve anything?  Or
do they just attract narcissists or even worse, sap the energy of good
volunteers who may have been able to make a more meaningful contribution
if they hadn't got stuck in this tool?

Just looking at this thread, we already have an example of the "tool",
which is email, impacting the discussion as Adonay brought up the
possibility of a CC to system-hackers.  In the other thread about the
model for local groups, Max suggested moving the discussion to another
list: once again, the tool (email) is impacting the discussion.

People tell me that with Discourse, we could @mention somebody from the
system hackers or coordinators groups: but in just about every Discourse
community that I know of, there are a core group of people who get most
of the mentions and answering all of the mentions is just as impossible
as answering everything in their email inboxes.

Bug trackers take this a step further: they allow issues to be
prioritized so that developers may only look at two or three bugs each
week.  Could a similar strategy be used in a tool like Discourse, for
example, to prioritize which mentions somebody really needs to look at
or to give the community feedback?

Another good thing about bug trackers is that they let you see the
backlog of things to do and in a company, that might be used to justify
hiring more developers.  With tools like Discourse, there isn't really a
lot of automatic reporting to highlight which individuals or teams are
overloaded, people just get frustrated that they are not getting answers
or whatever.

Regards,

Daniel




1.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/17/facebook-dark-side-study-aggressive-narcissism