[vtkusers] Idea: move from mailing lists to Discourse

[Mathieu Westphal]

I never used discourse, but if StackOverflow or bbs.archlinux.org are able
to reach high quality content on a forum, if think we can as well.

Best,

Mathieu Westphal

On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 5:10 PM, 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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