While there has been a lot of discussion with a focus on Discourse's use of JavaScript, I'd really like to hear feedback from other community members about the high-level issues, such as those raised in my reply below.
One of the original suggestions was to have a series of face-to-face discussions about this - maybe that could happen at FOSDEM or Kamailio World[2], Berlin, in May, where there will be a lot of real-time communication developers present, it is close to FSFE's office[3] and just before MiniDebConf Hamburg[4]?
On a side note, would anybody like to volunteer for an FSFE booth or talk at either of those events? Kamailio World CFP closes 10 February.
On 17/01/18 08:33, Daniel Pocock wrote:
On 16/01/18 16:29, Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
I don't know if packaging the JS into Debian would be enough. If I recall correctly, Discourse depends on client-side JS, so the issues are more immediate in the client-side where the client is the one more vulnerable.
There are other things that I didn't have time nor knowledge to check yet, like if Discourse has progressive enhancement.
In any case, the original intention of this thread was to look at the impact these tools have on the way organizations evolve and achieve meaningful goals, especially free software organizations or those organizations who ask for help from free software experts.
Many people in the street would cite facebook as an example of a good communications tool and some people even use facebook groups to run their organizations. But do those organizations achieve anything? Or do they just attract narcissists or even worse, sap the energy of good volunteers who may have been able to make a more meaningful contribution if they hadn't got stuck in this tool?
Just looking at this thread, we already have an example of the "tool", which is email, impacting the discussion as Adonay brought up the possibility of a CC to system-hackers. In the other thread about the model for local groups, Max suggested moving the discussion to another list: once again, the tool (email) is impacting the discussion.
People tell me that with Discourse, we could @mention somebody from the system hackers or coordinators groups: but in just about every Discourse community that I know of, there are a core group of people who get most of the mentions and answering all of the mentions is just as impossible as answering everything in their email inboxes.
Bug trackers take this a step further: they allow issues to be prioritized so that developers may only look at two or three bugs each week. Could a similar strategy be used in a tool like Discourse, for example, to prioritize which mentions somebody really needs to look at or to give the community feedback?
Another good thing about bug trackers is that they let you see the backlog of things to do and in a company, that might be used to justify hiring more developers. With tools like Discourse, there isn't really a lot of automatic reporting to highlight which individuals or teams are overloaded, people just get frustrated that they are not getting answers or whatever.
Regards,
Daniel
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/17/facebook-dark-side-study-...
2. https://www.kamailioworld.com/k06/ 3. https://fsfe.org/contact/contact.en.html 4. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/de/2018/MiniDebConfHamburg