I thought it might help to organise our efforts and delegate if we discussed the things staff need to do to kick off the Discourse community. This is my first foray in to forum moderation/administration, so bear with me. Here’s a list of things that I see need to be done. Feel free to add/edit.
There may be a handful of newcomers today, some will gain an elevated level of trust (for access to this lounge, and so on). I reckon, it’ll be good for those trusted newcomers to see your thinking points but if you’re in doubt, please revert to the Staff category.
Although I have no problem with GitHub, not sure why in my heart I have some resistance to all these changes
So my first reaction is that there are so many topics open, not sure what to put where: on GitHub or on here. I am sure somewhere it was discussed and ‘categories’, but I didn’t read it and I won’t read it except if it jumps under my eyes
Anyway, regarding some remarks about the list items:
Invite GitHub OSD members.
Not sure what’s the plan here. We have lots of members, but I don’t think they should be invited / ported here. It was ok to be part of one organization, but having 2 places to be part of / invited might be too much.
So not sure what you mean by this point: do you plan to make a script and send invites to all current members? I think this should come organic. If there are interesting topics discussed / listed in Discourse, I think people will join. I don’t think manual invitations are required.
Update the OSD website
I think this is the most important part. We need to promote the ‘service’ and people will use it, if they see benefit, not because they’ve received an invite. So the website needs to list the ‘service’ and we should send a Tweet about it (not sure if you have other ideas in mind in the “Promote the forum” point).
Migrate GH Issues to Discourse.
Same thing on the migration. Not sure how will have the time to migrate them, and I guess things will get confusing. We should wait for the open ones to close, but decide that new items related should go here.
Decide when to open to the masses.
IMO this should go ASP. That was the whole reason for the forum. I see you want some kind of preparation, but I would just let people create content on it and use it.
Configuration
Is there a way to remove the “Suggested Topics” gadget at the bottom of each topic? I find it to crowd the interface and I personally just don’t care about it. I would prefer to have things simpler now, especially since I’m a bit overwhelmed.
Yeah, I agree with @evalica about opening this to the masses. I don’t see a very good reason about holding that off in any significant way. There’s no reason that newcomers to OSD wouldn’t be active and get stuff done right away (just look at @studiospring and @grahamperrin, who I would consider pretty new and are kicking ass so far). I get wanting to make the onboarding smoother, but we can figure that out along the way I think.
Organisationally, people are currently funnelled into GitHub and (to lesser degrees) IRC and Twitter.
Organisationally, I feel that this forum should be complementary, but I don’t know whether, or how, the complementarity should be expressed at /by-laws/ or /organisation/ or wherever.
Yesterday I read a few more of the topics at praise - Discourse Meta, there are very diverse use cases.
I reckon that here for OSD we can safely let people just go with the flow, for as long as feels good.
@evalica, I am in the middle of creating a script to get member emails, just to notify them of the existence of this forum. Only about 10% of members have made their emails public, so it will only be of limited effectiveness.
I also agree about organic growth, but to improve the odds of success, I don’t see any harm in boosting publicity to build critical mass.
@grahamperrin, I think everyone would appreciate some news on the development and reasons behind github_client_secret, if only to explain what is holding us up.
I’m hoping things will work out of their own accord, but you are right, it may require some discipline. Let’s see what happens. It may not be an issue and it is not really clear what is the best way to separate discussion.
I am very familiar with Discourse we use it at Nextcloud with quite a big userbase: https://help.nextcloud.com
All the interface elements are pretty standard, so I don’t think there’s anything really to school people about.
Regarding the issue: I just opened it in a private tab, the issue remains. But we can just see if it’s a timing issue.
Btw, can any admin change the title of the site from »open source design« to »Discourse – Open Source Design«? (Again, small things like this is why we should have multiple admins to prevent bottlenecks.)
Great to know that you’re familiar with Discourse.
As far as I recall: when I (too) found the issue after changing the preference at a site level, it was resolved immediately after changing the preference at my user level.
– migration can be performed very selectively. 
and are kicking ass so far). I get wanting to make the onboarding smoother, but we can figure that out along the way I think.
