[Overload-sig] Experimenting on real-world groups with potential solutions

[Donald Stufft]

> On Jun 23, 2016, at 9:59 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> (Note that I would personally happily participate in the Discourse
>> experiment -- I'm just asking whether this would appear like a fork to
>> current python-ideas subscribers or more like some kind of alternate UI
>> they can ignore -- the way I ignore GMane.)
> 
> This is I think the biggest concern with adopting new forums: fracturing of
> the community.  What happens when a decision is made on Discourse that mailing
> list members didn't see?  I know this happened to me years ago when a decision
> was made on a Roundup issue that I somehow missed until it was too late.


So I definitely think that long term we should not have parallel forums like both
mailman *and* discourse. For a short time period I think it’s fine to try and test
the waters, but long term we should pick one tool, whatever that tool is, for this
kind of discussion [1] and bless that and get rid of anything else. Whether that’s
mailman or discourse or something else.

I realize now that I didn’t fully parse what Guido was asking though. If we tried
discourse it would essentially be a fork as I don’t think they have a way to mirror
that information back into Mailman or provide a two way interface between the two.
In my searches it appears that the discourse folks are split on what a project should
do if moving from Mailman to Discourse. Some of them suggest that the data models of
the two are divergent enough that there’s not a good way to import without it
appearing ugly and they suggest closing down the MM list but leaving the archives and
starting fresh. However some of them also seem to suggest closing down the MM list
and importing past discussions, and they’ve provided a tool to import Mailman’s mbox
files.

It appears that there is a one-way sync being added via a Mozilla grant so that
discourse can act as a read-only front end to an active list, but that won’t allow
people to post to the list via discourse, only read it.

It appears the Wikimedia foundation is going through a similar question as documented
by https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Discourse. It looks like they have a discourse
instance setup as a pilot phase and they go over some of the pros/cons between the two
systems as they see it.

In looking at the MOSS grant, which they’re targeting for completion in July 2016 it
appears the main focus was to implement the features required to allow people to use
Discourse entirely from within an email client and never need to use the web UI. Details
of that grant can be found at https://meta.discourse.org/t/moss-roadmap-mailing-lists/36432


[1] E.g. real time is fine to have somewhere else, but we shouldn’t have two sort
    of async long form topic based communication mechanisms.

—
Donald Stufft