Thank you all for your feedback and responses. I will try to get to them all,
but may be through several emails (due to time and length).
Regis:
Thank you for your thorough reply. I do greatly appreciate the effort
you put in to your response. For sake of clarity, I will quote just the
beginning portion of large sections, but my response will be for the entire
section.
1. First, before jumping to a tool, I would like that we discuss
globally the communication challenges that all those new tools bring for all
online communities - QGIS included.
Yes, I agree. I had a QGIS Open Day announcement and discussion that
happened a couple of months ago (you can watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrvTnkGNzSw). I wanted to not only "complain"
about the existing platforms, but also provide a solution. I had worked with
Tim Sutton on this Revolt server, and after it's "launch" at the QOD session, I
had some feedback from Amy and Alexandre.
---------------------------------------------------
2a. Mailing lists are dying...
Yes. It was actually shortly after the email I originally sent out,
that GNOME was dropping it's own mailing lists (GNU Mailman 2) and porting them
over to Discourse (as you mention later). Discourse is a forum solution (not a
chat solution) that many other organizations and project use. GNOME isn't
replacing everything with this one solution. They have 3 different platforms in
place for 3 distinct roles/purposes.
1. Discourse to replace Mailing Lists as the threaded discussion
platform
2. Matrix to replace IRC (which the Matrix room(s) are bridged to IRC)
for use as a chat platform
3. GitLab for all development, patches, feature requests, etc...
We could also aim for this kind of platform. It maybe worth while
discussing with OSGeo whether they want to migrate all the mailing lists to
Discourse instead (as Nabble is no more). (Discourse also has an email-able
interface to still have that "mailing list" experience for those who need it
(i.e. screen readers) or insist on it). Another "issue" with the mailing lists
are that we (as in QGIS) do not manage it. The mailing lists are handled by
OSGeo, so if we need anything related to mailing list administration, we have
to go through OSGeo for that. (For instance, I had to go through OSGeo to even
get me added to the mailing list in the first place as the sign-up didn't work;
and even now, I'm still not fully getting the proper emails I should for this
mailing list). Just a minor inconvenience with mailing lists, is the archive
does a hard break between months. This thread, for instance, spans two months,
October and November. One can't navigate to the October message from within a
November one with the previous message by thread link.
---------------------------------------------------
2b. And let's not forget that some people just don't want to use apps,
and would like to stick to mail forever.
Yeah, there will always be those people (see xkcd 1782). We are in a
technology field that is moving forward (thankfully we aren't all still using
GRASS CLI right?) We can't appease everyone. Usually in doing so, we end up
offending everyone. I would think that the people who insist on still using
mailing lists (and IRC) are in a vast minority. Our focus should be on the
community as a whole who would rather have a more user-friendly way of
interacting with this great community, than a few people who use Arch BTW,
emacs or vim, and live solely in the command line (this is a bit sarcastic and
humorous, and not degrading or insulting. I myself use vim (neovim) for
programming and do like the command line for certain things.) As mentioned
earlier, Discourse does offer an email solution for interacting with it for
those people. Also, bridges to exist to bridge platforms over to others (mainly
developed for those who do prefer to live in IRC). What I'm trying to say here
is that we have to way the pros and cons, and who our "target audience" is for
a community site.
---------------------------------------------------
3. Chats are fun, but messy, and they break our community in sub parts.
Yes. Chats are fun. It's great to be able to say hi to fellow QGIS
members, ask for help, show off really cool maps (i.e. we're in the 30-Day Map
Challenge right now). And yes, they can be messy, but organization is key. One
of the purposes for choosing a platform like Revolt (and this does also include
Discord) is the ability for multiple rooms for various topics to keep the
chatting more organized and less messy. This is meant to unify the various
groups under one umbrella (i.e. the various QGIS mailing lists are disjointed),
but yet have their own space (either by a single room to themselves, or a group
of rooms depending on the needs). In Revolt, all rooms are visible (unless you
specify otherwise for things like a moderator chat to discuss internal things
like disciplinary action against a user not following the rules). Matrix on the
other hand, not so much. As mentioned earlier, it would be nice to eventually
phase out some of the platforms in order to bring everyone together and keep
the fragmentation minimal and purposeful (some platforms like the Facebook
group would remain for the reasons why it was created and given official
status). I initially created a PSC chat that only members with the PSC role
could see and access. I later changed that such that only PSC members could use
the room, but gave the "general public" read-only access so they can see the
PSC discussion in transparency. The setup I have is not set in stone, and can
be changed and adjusted as we need.
---------------------------------------------------
4. Chats aren't efficient and generate too much traffic
This is really subjective. QGIS has a fairly large community (but not
as large as Blender for instance). Chat's have their purpose, and for the
purpose of replacing a mailing list, forums would be a better alternative
(Blender has an in-house forum, plus their Rocket Chat instance). Revolt wishes
that people not self-host in order for their users to be able to have one login
and one app for all their communities on Revolt. Maybe, OSGeo projects may also
want to join Revolt? That now allows one user to have one app and access (for
example) QGIS, GDAL, and GRASS all in one place (the Revolt app), similar to
Matrix with Element, but with more features and space. Servers and rooms can
also be muted in Revolt, so you only see or get notified for what you want.
With QGIS being as large as it is, there aren't that many QGIS Masters per say
that know everything in every part of QGIS. People who have expertise in
certain areas can focus on the rooms that relate to their expertise and help
others, and maybe even hop over to one they want to learn to expand their
knowledge.
---------------------------------------------------
5. Discord / Revolt are organized chats, with topics.
You're not the first to mention the search engine aspect. Honestly,
none of the current chat platforms are indexed by search engines anyways (maybe
Facebook, but you need a FB login). If we really wanted to, a bot could be
written to dump the chat out to something that can be search and indexed by a
search engine. Each room does have it's purpose stated, and the mods can keep
conversations on topic if they deviate. It's interesting that you think we have
too many rooms. I would like to hear your suggestions on what we should have
and what to remove. I made the various rooms mainly to show what we can do with
this platform.
---------------------------------------------------
6. We also have issues, Pull requests and potential GitHub discussions
to not forget here :)
GitHub Discussions are a relatively new feature to GH. Some projects
like their existing infrastructure (i.e. already existing forum sites). All of
the GH stuff (issues, pull requests, etc...) would obviously remain on GH
(maybe remove the QEP discussion room to keep things on GH). We could use the
discussions as a forum solution, however the feature is not enabled right now
(it might be a paid feature, but I don't know that much about it).
---------------------------------------------------
7. Adding a new communication channel without stating officially...
I totally agree with this. The PSC discussed the Revolt server, and
wanted to try it out before marking it as "official". This is both a blessing
and a curse. The blessing is that things can rapidly change, and even be
dropped under the reason of "We’re just testing it out". The curse is that it
makes people hesitant to use it since its existence is "unstable". As it is not
promoted officially, many don't know it even exists (hence the lack of use). I
believe if more "official QGIS people" used it, it would gain more traction
within the community. As for the source of truth, there is even a bigger issue
between the mailing lists and GitHub. There may be a discussion on the mailing
list, and another (and diverging discussion) on the GitHub issue/feature/pull
request/QEP/etc...
---------------------------------------------------
8. Side note, I didn't have a good user experience with Revolt
I'm sorry to hear that. Yes, Revolt is a bit young, and is still in
active development. Given time, yes it will mature.
---------------------------------------------------
9. Last but not least, after discussing this issue in the French OSGeo
local chapter and with open data groups, I discovered (yet) another option,
which is Discourse.
Yep (see response for 2a for details)
---------------------------------------------------
10a. Discourse as one organized and persistent place...
I agree. Discourse is a great replacement for the mailing lists and
provides a great forum experience.
---------------------------------------------------
10b. We choose on main chat tool for instant messaging.
I also agree that we should choose a platform. Matrix and IRC already
exist (but not managed by us, QGIS). Revolt gives far more feature and benefits
than Matrix. I also agree that we should prefer Open Source as the primary
choice. I disagree about the Discourse/Revolt overlap. They are very different
platforms with very different purposes. Discord, on the other hand, actually
implemented forums within a Discord server. However, as mentioned earlier, this
is not accessible from a search engine (a forum really should be).
---------------------------------------------------
10c We let community driven channels be impulsed by groups...
I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. There were some discussions
regarding creating a group of rooms for regional user groups within Revolt
where each user group gets just a single room (Open Street Map does this with
their Discord Server). This would be great for coordinating meetups and such
and have other QGIS users (who may not know about the User Groups) find out
about them. But, as I stated earlier, nothing is set in stone. These are
details that can be hashed out later and changed if they end up going south.
Thank you for your response, I really do appreciate it. I will get to the
others later (this alone took an hour to write).
Ethan Snyder
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