[vtkusers] Idea: move from mailing lists to Discourse

[Matthew Brett]

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.

Cheers,

Matthew