[vtkusers] Idea: move from mailing lists to Discourse

[David Thompson]

Hi Bill,

Discourse is open source software; you can deploy your own discourse server. However, the discourse developers will also _host_ your discourse forum on their servers if you are open source on github.

    David

> On Mar 16, 2018, at 23:51, Bill Lorensen <bill.lorensen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> According to:
> 
> https://blog.discourse.org/2016/03/free-discourse-forum-hosting-for-community-friendly-github-projects/
> 
> Discourse is only available to GitHub hosted projects. VTK is a gitlab repo.
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something...
> 
>> On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 9:10 AM, Cory Quammen <cory.quammen at kitware.com> wrote:
>> 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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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Unpaid intern in BillsParadise at noware dot com
> _______________________________________________
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> 
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