There have been several threads on ROS-Users looking for ways to improve our communications. There have been requests for topics on the mailing list as well as the archives are not browsable or searchable.
After reviewing many options and talking to other projects we have found that Discourse seems to be a good mechaism for facilitating dicussions within open source communities.
We have setup http://discourse.ros.org for the ROS community. However now we have an empty forum with no users and no experience administering it.
From learning about other projects migration experiences, it is usually a good idea to start with a subgroup of the community and slowly migrate existing services over. It’s easier to coordinate and learn at the small scale and those lessons can then be transferred to new members as more and more topics get converted to the new forum.
Unfortunately some group has to be the first adopter and I’m asking that you, the ros-sig-java, be the first group. Ernesto has recently become more involved in rosjava and is hoping to build up some momentum and I hope you will be interested enough to join the conversations he’s already started and will be continuing to instigate. And at the same time try out the new forum.
For a migration path we have already setup fowarding from http://discourse.ros.org/c/rosjava to ros-sig-java@googlegroups.com, which is likely how you got this message, and expect to make the mailing list read only soon to “encourage” people to switch to the new forum.
Please take a few minutes to checkout the discourse server and provide any feedback.
Allow me for a couple of questions (hoping this thread could serve as a meta discussion, irrelevant from rosjava…):
Is there any discussion log for this change (that could help the conversation in the same MoveIt! thread etc.)?
Are we going to customize either welcome message or community guideline to include the difference between answers.ros.org, or navigate to the ROS support guideline wiki page?
Thanks for pointing out the guideline/FAQ I’ve updated it to refer to http://answers.ros.org as well http://wiki.ros.org/Support. Which welcome message are you referring to? I’ve updated the top level pinned message. Everything is editable, we just have to find it in the UI. And as people gain reputation they will be able to edit more too.
We’ve done a bunch of internal experimentation inside OSRF with a test site enough that we are confident in the technology behind the site. And research with other different projects, including some discussions at the GSoC Mentor Summit this fall suggests that it’s the best solution available.
It’s unfortunately not really possible to test a new site without actual usage so we’re asking that this group be the trial group and from here we can move forward to other SIGs and eventually to ros-release@ and ros-users@.
Sorry, I just started documenting the migration process and found out that I’d not setup the filtering settings right in this post: ROS SIG Migration Method I hope that new messages outside the watched category no longer go through to the mailing list.
The yellow pop-up on the bottom-right hand side. Looks like a link to the community guideline is already included now.
So the existing categories won’t be visible at the top page of http://discourse.ros.org/ unless you either select category tab, or click on the pulldown menu at the top? Is there any way to list the categories somewhere on the top page (I see blank space on left and right)? Although I instantly liked this discourse system with its usability and flexibility, it took me 10 minutes to get the idea of category, in contrast to the traditional mailinglist concept.
Sorry, we updated the email return address and it was not getting through the google groups filters. If you get this it should be fixed now for ros-sig-java.