On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 4:32 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Hi all. At today's Fedora Council "virtual face-to-face" meeting, we decided that it's time to move our discussion from this mailing list and IRC to more modern platforms: namely, Discourse via https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ and Matrix via ... something yet to be determined, but probably initially a channel on element.io and then eventually our own server.
What do you hope to gain from moving Council discussions to Discourse?
Some Fedora Teams, like the Magazine, have already moved from the mailing list, and noted a significant increase in visiblity and participation. The fact is, even those of us who proudly self-identify as "old school" are reluctant to sign up for yet-another-mailing-list these days. It's a serious barrier to project entry.
And IRC ... it's served us well, but... it's also not kept up, and it's *long* been a problem we've seen in attracting new contributors. More and more new projects turn to Slack or Discord for their real-time discussions. I'd like us to move to something open source while such things are viable, and hopefully by doing so help them stay competitive. Since we don't have a Matrix server up and running, this is a little further off, but I wanted to mention it here.
In any case, we plan to:
Bridge IRC and Matrix, so that you can stay on IRC and interact if that's your preference. Freenode isn't going away anytime soon!
Plan to port zodbot to be a Matrix-native bot, so we can have logged meetings, cookies-with-badges, adamw "firing" people, etc.
Retire this list for new posts (tentatively, starting December 1st), and instead direct conversation to https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/project/council-discuss/60
Set up a bot to automatically post summaries of discussion from that category to this list, so that long-term subscribers aren't left out
Note that unlike a "BB"-style web forum, you can interact with discussion.fedoraproject.org via email, including getting individual new posts and responding in your mail client. It isn't quite a first-class experience, though -- there are many features which are web only.
Any questions about any of this? Anything I haven't thought of?
I would strongly not recommend promoting the email features of Discourse. They're pretty terrible to work with from an email-workflow perspective. Personally, I'm fortunate that I don't have to discuss with the Council too much, or this might actually be a huge problem for me.
The intent to move to Matrix, however, is quite welcome. I'm looking forward to helping there wherever I can.