[vtkusers] Idea: move from mailing lists to Discourse

[Cory Quammen]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 11:23 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 2:58 PM, Cory Quammen <cory.quammen at kitware.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I have collected some data on the impact of moving to Discourse for both
> the ITK and Slicer communities. Using average monthly posts as a proxy for
> community engagement, the data suggests the move has been very positive for
> increasing engagement:
> >
> > For ITK, monthly messages to the itk-users and itk-developers [1] list
> averaged 148 while on Discourse the average has been 297.
> >
> > For Slicer, monthly messages to the slicer-users and slicer-developers
> list averaged 274 while on Discourse the average has been 639.
> >
> > It looks like activity has doubled or more for both projects, a positive
> sign for both communities.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Cory
> >
> > [1] Messages to the ITK community mailing list have been excluded as
> most are copied to the itk-users or itk-developers list. I have not
> accounted for double counting where messages are sent to both users and
> developers lists.
>
> Those numbers are very surprising to me.   Can you say whether you
> have seen a near doubling of the amount of people mailing the list /
> using the interface?  Or are the same people sending more emails /
> posts?   Are they the same length?  I ask, because one of the nice
> features of email is that, typically, people put more work into
> writing an email than they do a chat in, say, Gitter, and this makes
> the content more substantial and less distracting.
>

I did not analyze the posting activity at that level of detail, but those
are interesting questions. I do not have access to the number of users of
the mailing lists to compare before and after the transition to Discourse.

With regard to message length, note that Discourse is a forum, not a group
messaging service like Gitter or Slack, so I would anticipate that messages
would largely be similar to what people post on the mailing list (for
better or worse). I have sampled some discussions on
https://discourse.itk.org/latest and https://discourse.slicer.org/latest
and this seems to be the case - I invite you to take a look to see if you
agree with that assessment.

Best regards,
Cory

-- 
Cory Quammen
Staff R&D Engineer
Kitware, Inc.
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