[CoLoCo] (Fwd) LoCo teams and discuss.ubuntu.com

[Neal McBurnett]

Jorge Castro just send out an intriguing message.  Read it below.

You may first want to read his original post on how cool the new forum/discussion software named "Discourse" is.  It comes from the brilliant minds at Stack Exchange, and is fully open source.

Let's Reinvigorate the water cooler - Jorge's Stompbox
 http://www.jorgecastro.org/2013/05/31/reinvigorate-the-water-cooler/

I also highly recommend the post about Discourse itself from Coding Horror:

Coding Horror: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit
 http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html

Would anyone like to take on this idea?  Sounds like some cool opportunities to reboot our loco.

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/

----- Forwarded message from "Jorge O. Castro" <jorge at ubuntu.com> -----

Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 21:31:28 -0400
From: "Jorge O. Castro" <jorge at ubuntu.com>
To: "Ubuntu local community team (LoCo) contacts" <loco-contacts at lists.ubuntu.com>
Subject: LoCo teams and discuss.ubuntu.com

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!

-- 
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loco-contacts at lists.ubuntu.com
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----- End forwarded message -----