Projects category on forum

General
1

Hi all,

My experience from the OpenFlexure project is that our community grew incredibly when we introduced the OpenFlexure forum. I was wondering if the GOSH forum could provide this for smaller hardware (or hardware related projects)? I am interested in this for GitBuilding, I think other projects might be interested in this too.

I see that the Single Pixel Camera project is listed under “Communities”. I think that separating communities from projects would be helpful.

I suppose my questions are:

  • Should we have a projects category?
  • Who how to projects ask to be added to it?
  • Who decides whether projects are appropriate?

I will raise this at GOSH council, but I want to get a feeling of what everyone thinks.

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2

Hi! Thumbs up on the proposal :+1: I leave my thoughts below:

I think it is a good idea to offer dedicated forum spaces for smaller projects with high level of commitment, and/or thinking about using it for community support and discussions.

Holding that kind of “softer” project discussion in gitlab can be unwelcoming. Most project mates use Telegram, several post in the forum, but many of them barely visit the repositories.

It would also avoid burdening small projects with managing a discussion platform, and perhaps favor public discussion of the projects (or migration from private lists/chats).

I’d also expect projects with more difficulties or less commitment to stay in chat groups, and/or abandon forum spaces more readily, which would require some kind of moderation or auto-archiving.

We were planning on using the Boid category to host community and external collaboration discussions, starting with a CO2 sensor workshop. It is currently empty, though we hope to start using it before new year. Should such things be allowed? Or should it have been archived already?

Such are my thoughts, I hope they help!

Cheers

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+1 also - forum.goatech.org kind of does this and I think it works for young communities to get started.

4

I like the idea to have projects in the forum also… we used to had a list of projects on the old website but I think is much better if projects can be discussed here

I’m not sure who or how to decide wich projects but I think at least a project should have a:

  • name
  • short description
  • link to documentation/repo
    saludos
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I like this general idea for two reasons:

  1. Helps make the knowledge in this forum more organised and (maybe slightly?) more findable.
  2. Maybe eventually the projects category could be a place where we point other people to and say “Look at all these open source hardware projects!”. Nice exposure for the projects, GOSH, and open source in general.

Who decides whether projects are appropriate?

To me a higher-level question is how are we moderating this forum anyway? Have we been relying on everyone’s good faith so far which IIRC is true?

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For post moderation, yes. Forming a new sub category requires an admin to do something so their needs to be some kind of process. The process could be as simple as

If a project asks to be given a sub category any admin can grant it as long as they have:

  1. Name
  2. Short Description
  3. Link to documentation
  4. Link to source
  5. Link to license

I expanded on @nanocastro’s list to add licensing.

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Hi all, I was following this discussion and went ahead and created a projects category on the forum. Check it out here.

1 Like