Planned changes to the OSRF Discourse(s)

[gbiggs]

Dear Community,

We are excited to announce a new chapter in discussions for the OSRF’s open-source projects! To foster collaboration and communication between projects, we have decided to consolidate the disparate discussion forums used by our projects into a single Discourse instance. This transition aims to create a vibrant, unified space where all involved in any of our projects, in any way, can engage with each other, share ideas, learn from each other, and work together for the good of all OSRF projects.

As part of this process, we will be reorganising the categories we use in Discourse to organise discussion topics, in order to better reflect the needs of the projects and of the community. As always, our goal is to ensure that everyone feels welcome to participate actively (and constructively) in the community, and can find the discussions that matter most to them.

This work is expected to begin in June, 2025. If you have any questions or feedback about this plan, please respond to this post, or reach out to community@openrobotics.org. The sooner you get your feedback to us, the faster we can integrate it, but in general feedback should be provided by the 1st of June.

1. What will happen

1. The ROS Discourse instance will be transformed into the Open Robotics Discourse.
   1. New categories will be created to restructure the topics for all projects (see section 3, below).
   2. Existing categories that will no longer be used will be archived, although some may have their content moved to one of the new categories.
   3. The topics with a matching sub-category under the ROS category (see section 3, below) at the Open Robotics Discourse will be moved to that category.
2. The Gazebo Discourse instance will be closed down and its content will be migrated to the Open Robotics Discourse (former ROS Discourse). We are working with the Discourse migration team to make this happen, so the timeline for this is not yet set. However, it will not happen any earlier than the 16th of June.
   1. The topics with a matching sub-category under the Gazebo category (see section 3, below) at the Open Robotics Discourse will be moved to that category.
   2. The remaining topics will be placed into the Gazebo/General category, ensuring that they remain findable and can still be posted to, if the conversation is on-going.
3. The Open-RMF Discussion page at GitHub will be closed to new topics.
   1. We are still working on possible solutions for archiving the conversations at this page into a read-only and searchable form outside of GitHub, as GitHub does not itself provide this capability in an easy-to-use way.
   2. If it is possible to do with reasonable effort, we will copy the existing topics at GitHub into the Open Robotics Discourse. However, this is a best-effort and non-urgent task due to the amount of effort potentially required. (If you know of or are interested in writing us a script to do this copying, please speak up!)
4. The existing Discourse subdomains (discourse.ros.org and community.gazebosim.org) will go through automatic URL rewriting so that an existing external link to a topic on the ROS or Gazebo Discourse will be directed to that topic’s new location on the Open Robotics Discourse.

There will additionally be some changes to how we moderate the forums.

1. The existing moderator teams from the disparate forums will be merged - since they are very nearly the same people anyway. We will be posting an introduction to your moderators shortly after the Open Robotics Discourse has been set up.
2. Each project category (see section 3, below) will additionally have one or two people from the project’s PMC who are moderators, in order to provide more contextual moderation when necessary - particularly in the PMC discussions area.
3. As always, we will heavily rely on community flags rather than proactive moderation by patrolling guards. If you see something that you feel is against the community guidelines, or just not good for the community in general, flag it! This will bring it to the attention of the moderators, who can then review it and take any appropriate action. If enough people flag a post before a moderator gets to it, the system will also take automatic action.

2. When will it happen

These changes will be made in stages throughout the month of June, 2025. The changes to the ROS Discourse to transform it into the Open Robotics Discourse will be made first, in the first two weeks of June, followed by migrating data from the Gazebo Discourse, and finally shutting down the other discussion forums.

The migration of content from the Gazebo Discourse will be performed by the Discourse migration team, which is a contracted service. For this reason, the timeline of this task is not yet pinned down. We do not plan for it to happen any earlier than the 16th of June.

The changes to the ROS Discourse should be the least disruptive, as the Discourse instance itself will not be removed, just re-configured. You will hopefully not need to update your bookmarks if you are used to going straight to a particular category, as the URL rewriting should take care of that.

3. Proposed categories at the Open Robotics Discourse

The following categories are going to be created.

• One category per project (ROS, Gazebo, Open-RMF, ROS Controls, and Infrastructure), containing:
  • PMC Discussions
    • For PMC Members and Committers to discuss ongoing work beyond the scope of GitHub issues and PRs.
    • This category can be viewable by anyone, and in general anyone can reply to topics (so that the whole community can participate in discussions), but only PMC Members and Committers will have access to create new topics.
  • Announcements
    • For the posting of project news (new releases, upcoming deadlines, weekly updates, etc.) and PMC meeting minutes.
    • Replies to the news posts by anyone will be allowed, but starting topics will be restricted to news posters.
  • REPs
    • A category to discuss proposed REPs (or what will replace them later this year - watch this space!) relevant to this project.
  • Packing and Release Management
    • For public discussion of packaging and release management
    • Only created for projects where it makes sense.
  • General
    • For general discussion relevant to this project, for topics that don’t fit in one of the above categories.
  • For the Infrastructure project only:
    • Buildfarm
      • For discussion of use and maintenance of the buildfarm.
    • Mirrors
      • For discussion by maintainers of mirrors.
• OSRA Announcements
  • For the posting of TGC minutes and other announcements by the OSRA.
  • Anyone can reply to a topic, but only OSRA officers will be able to start new topics.
• Community News
  • A category for news about and from the community.
  • News posters will be able to post new topics.
  • Everyone will be able to reply to topics.
  • Anyone will be able to post a new topic about some news from the community they wish to share; the new topic will initially be hidden. News posters will review each topic and approve those that are relevant to the Open Robotics Discourse and the community for public publication.
• Projects
  • For anyone to post about something they’ve built using OSRF projects. Tell us about your awesome robot gardener project, so @gbiggs can build one, too, and finally have plants that don’t die!
• TurtleBot
  • For discussing working and learning with any of the OSRF’s TurtleBots.
• Jobs
  • For posting job advertisements relevant to OSRF projects.
• Local User Groups
  • One subcategory for each local user group, created on request.
  • Intended to be used for discussion in that user group’s preferred language.
  • The existing local user group categories will be moved here.
• Community Groups
  • One subcategory for each community group that wants one, created on request.
  • Intended to be used for discussion relevant specifically to that community group’s topic.
  • Some of the existing categories (such as maritime robotics and Nav2) at the ROS Discourse can be moved here. We would like to know that they are wanted, however. If you are involved in a community group using an existing category on the ROS Discourse, let us know!

If you see a problem or think of a missing category, now is your chance to let us know by replying to this topic, or contacting us at community@openrobotics.org.

Update 2025/05/14: We no longer plan to create project-specific sub-domains. There are concerns about causing confusion for people not familiar with Open Robotics, and we want to focus on URL rewriting for discourse.ros.org.

[smac]

@gbiggs

Some of the existing categories (such as maritime robotics and Nav2) at the ROS Discourse can be moved here. We would like to know that they are wanted, however. If you are involved in a community group using an existing category on the ROS Discourse, let us know!

I would like to have the Nav2 category in the new structure please I think keeping the high-traffic community projects in Discourse is important for discoverability and announcements that impact a large chunk of the userbase.

I also love the idea of consolidating all of OSRF’s projects in one place - it makes … discoverability () of changes and features in Gazebo, Open-RMF, ROS Control we would want to highlight to the community easier.