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Potential New Categories for migrating ros-users and ros-release

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#1

We have the SIG migration topics

However as we gain more experience with this forum we plan to move toward moving our larger mailing lists onto this discourse instance.

In particular there are two main mailing lists we use for the ROS ecosystem, ros-users and ros-release.

The exploration that lead us to use discourse was started with a request to ros-users in this thread where topics for ros-users were requested.

From that discussion a few categories were proposed. And cross referencing with our blog categories I’d suggest we setup the following categories for ros-users to be recategorized.

  • Jobs (A place for job openings to be announced and archived)
  • Events (Events can be announced, with reports and updated provided in the thread)
  • Community Announcements (a place to announce new products, submit CFPs etc. )
  • General Discussion ( a category for general discussions similar to ros-users in the past)
  • ROS announce (a low volume channel for official announcements from the core team and major release announcements etc)

And for ros-release we can have a catch all for generic maintainers, and sub-categories for each rosdistro if there’s something distro specific.

  • ros-release
  • indigo
  • jade
  • kinetic

Above is a strawman, does anyone else have suggestions for categories?

One thing I’ll point out is that migration guides typically suggest keeping the category count low until there’s demonstrated demand otherwise everyone will get tripped up in trying to categorize vs just getting involved.

About the Packaging and Release Management category
#2

In keeping with the idea of keeping categories low to start with, how do the following sound:

  • ROS announcements (for official announcements from the core team and major release announcements, etc.)
  • Other announcements (for jobs, events, etc.)
  • General discussion

Plus the release categories.

We don’t see a huge number of non-official announcements so I can’t see much benefit yet in splitting up events, jobs, etc.

#3

Good point about keeping the announcements together events and community. I’d argue to keep the jobs segregated as it’s a category that is commonly something that will want to be browsed side by side and is only of interest to a subset of people, that changes over time. And it is a non-trivial amount of the volume for which there has been complaints.

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#4

As a part of the Slack experiment I made a plethora of channels with very broad robotics-related, e.g. “perception”, “planning”, “drones”, as well as tools-related channels, e.g. there was a whole channel dedicated to Rviz for some reason. These were very popular, although you could argue that broad robotics-related categories aren’t very relevant to ROS Discourse.

#5

Indeed, though many of these are already SIGs so I think as they migrate in the topics will get filled in.

We can also turn on tags in discourse too, but I’m not sure how to best suggest using them.

#6

+1 for keeping the community and “official” announcements on one list. I think it’s good that even the newest or enthusiast individuals in the community have an opportunity to make announcements in the same category as everyone else if appropriate.

+1 for keeping it simple to start. It’s always harder to recombine categories than to create new ones.

#7
  1. Can categories be nested, or must everything be flat under a category?
  2. Does Discourse treat them as a tree or a graph, or is a graph relation just for tags?
#8

Categories can be nested. It’s a tree structure with subcategories.

#9

A thought occurred to me, would the News Group be for interviewing local / national ROS ( and related such as ROS Industrial ) groups for awareness and recruiting people to those ROS groups.

An example of this is, currently there is a Silicon Valley ROS Meetup Group that is a volunteer led based group. And this group can be interviewed to as what they do as a support group to show what works and does not work (best practices, if you will) as a volunteer group to grow and /or sustain the group. Ultimately having a periodic interviews, and go from w/ the idea.

What do you think?

#10

@surfersol, I don’t quite understand the point of your post. Are you suggesting we share strategies for growing our respective communities/groups? If so, we are very interested. Growing the ROS-I developer community is a priority for us over the next year…the sooner the better. I’d like to propose a faster method of communications, online meeting, etc… vs discourse since I feel like there is a lot of discussion to be had and discourse won’t be that efficient.

#11

Hi Shaun,

Yes if we can share strategies for growing respective communities / groups in your proposed ideas of communications, online meeting, etc.

When would you like to meet ( online ) and what online communication would you like to use?

I am in the east coast ( time ).

Fernando

#12

Hi Shaun,

Not sure if I sent you my email communication correctly to you ?

This is what I replied to you -

Hi Shaun,

Yes if we can share strategies for growing respective communities / groups in your proposed ideas of communications, online meeting, etc.

When would you like to meet ( online ) and what online communication would you like to use?

I am in the east coast ( time ).

Fernando

#13

Since we’re starting to get job postings here I’ve created a jobs category: http://discourse.ros.org/c/jobs

I put the overview here About the Jobs category I’ll move the existing posts into that category.

Maidbot is looking for a Robotics DevOps Engineer!
#14

Is it now safe to unsubscribe from ros-users and do I still receive all conversation from discourse?

Looks like I get duplicate emails for any post on discourse, one from discourse and another from ros-users. I remember @tfoote mentioned somewhere that we would receive duplicate but can’t find it. If migration for all existing mailinglist is done I’m thinking to unsubscribe from ros-users.

#15

Yes it’s recommended to unsubscribe from ros-users@ since October: ROS Users welcome to discourse.ros.org

All content on ros-users@ is notifications for a forwarding user on https://discourse.ros.org. If you have an account here on https://discourse.ros.org you can now setup your own notifications at any level of granularity and filtering based on tags categories from your profile.

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