Well, I think the Ohio team would be a good group to test with since our forum presence has been moribund in excess of 18 months. I'm quite willing to consider an outright freeze & lock-down of what we've got on the forums in favor of a shift to discuss.ubuntu.com.
Stephen Michael Kellat, MSLS Point of Contact/Leader, Ubuntu Ohio On Sep 10, 2013, at 9:31 PM, "Jorge O. Castro" <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > Over the past few months we've been playing around with a piece of > software called Discourse: http://discourse.org > > The idea is that discussion on the internet could use a reboot, and as > a bonus, it's Free Software. So immediately we set up a prototype and > started kicking the tires: > > - http://ubuntu-discourse.org/ > > So far we've spent the last few months figuring out deployment issues, > capturing best practice in the charms, and the sort of due diligence > on what it would take to make this an Ubuntu resource available to > all. We had a session at UDS and things are in motion to launch the > site as discuss.ubuntu.com. > http://ubuntu-discourse.org/t/uds-session-on-discourse/959 > > So what does this have to do with local teams? As it turns out > Discourse needs a few things sorted out, mostly, how can it support > nested categories? How can it scale? Well I've had some talks with the > upstream project, the Forums Council, and the LoCo council and we feel > that LoCo teams would be the perfect place to rock this. Here's what > the LoCo section looks like: > http://ubuntu-discourse.org/category/local-teams > > And here's a currently empty example with Vancouver: > http://ubuntu-discourse.org/category/ubuntu-vancouver > > The idea would be to move interested LoCo teams that are NOT using the > forums for support to Discourse. We would do this on a volunteer basis > to see which teams are interested in driving this feature forward. > Here's why I think $your_local_team should check this out. > > - Nesting all the LoCo teams inside of a LoCo section is currently not > implemented in Discourse, the volunteering teams would help drive > feature development of this feature with upstream. > - Since Discourse is Free Software this isn't just about your > discussion forum, there are integration points we can do like > integrated discussions on the loco portal, your loco blog, and even > your individual member blogs. Think of Discourse as not only a forum > but a Free Software replacement for Disqus comments as well allowing > you to tie it all together in a hyperlocal location. To me this is a > big opportunity, your Discourse category could be used to tie in > different parts of your infrastructure together to help form a more > cohesive community. > - In light of all the discussion about reinvigorating teams; getting > our teams on a slick modern discussion platform is a better way to > engage with users instead of nerdy mailing lists. :) > > Gotchas: > > - Right now Discourse supports a "hybrid" model, of being a web > discussion platform first with email integration. This wouldn't > replace your existing team mailing list, though I would expect that > some point in the future it would be one platform to handle > everything. Replacing your team mailing lists isn't a near term goal. > Though I suspect if your team is engaging with more non-geek users > that they'll dig Discourse. > - Migration - There isn't any from vbulletin to Discourse. Your team > would have to make decision to freeze your old subforum on > ubuntuforums.org and start fresh. > - Multi-language support. We could do multiple languages but right now > the software itself is deployed in English, and we'd have to deploy > subsites for different languages to give native languages in the > software itself and so forth. Given the maturity of the site I'd like > to punt this to a later goal; I think for now having native languages > in the LoCo category itself is fine, and we can work out the details > about translating the UI later. > - We've obviously not launched the site in production as > discuss.ubuntu.com, this is ongoing. > > We don't really know what this would look like in the software, the > idea is to get interested teams signed up, and then get you working > with the Discourse folks to kick the tires; we then iterate quickly. > > So with that, I'm looking for a few gutsy teams who want to help form > and drive our future discussion platform .... discuss! > > -- > Jorge Castro > Canonical Ltd. > http://juju.ubuntu.com/charm-championship - Share your infrastructure, > win a prize! > > -- > loco-contacts mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts -- loco-contacts mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
