forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Daniel Pocock]

While there has been a lot of discussion with a focus on Discourse's use
of JavaScript, I'd really like to hear feedback from other community
members about the high-level issues, such as those raised in my reply below.

One of the original suggestions was to have a series of face-to-face
discussions about this - maybe that could happen at FOSDEM or Kamailio
World[2], Berlin, in May, where there will be a lot of real-time
communication developers present, it is close to FSFE's office[3] and
just before MiniDebConf Hamburg[4]?

On a side note, would anybody like to volunteer for an FSFE booth or
talk at either of those events?  Kamailio World CFP closes 10 February.


On 17/01/18 08:33, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 
> 
> 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
> 

2. https://www.kamailioworld.com/k06/
3. https://fsfe.org/contact/contact.en.html
4. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/de/2018/MiniDebConfHamburg