RFC: Working Group Model

[boris]

You’ll see a a few new working-group categories popping on the site, mostly as #ecosystem categories for now.

This is a thread to document & discuss how this should work, and to start creating a pattern that people can follow.

I’ll present the #ecosystem:caa-wg as an example – the Content Addressed Alliance Working Group.

Here’s the about page:

About the Content Addressed Alliance WG category

The Content Addressed Alliance Working Group came out of discussions at the IPFS Thing 2022 event. We’re exploring coordinating and cooperating with many different companies and organizations of all kinds. Using these types of #working-group categories is new to the IPFS Discourse forum, so we’re trying different things. Everyone can view content in the CAA WG, but we’re asking everyone interested in actively working on the WG to join the CAA group. This will give you permission to post in th…

What I’ve noted there, is that working groups have a companion Discourse group. This gives groups a private PM channel to message everyone, plus various other features and functions by having a group.

In the case of the CAA, I’ve chosen to set permissions so that everyone can read the category, but I ask that people join the CAA group if they intend to contribute / post / comment.

This is all configurable. So for instance, maybe I’ll change it so that everyone can comment, but if you want to post, you need to join the group. Or, for sensitive discussions, maybe private, group only postings are appropriate. There is no one answer here, this is a function of settings on a per group, per category level, Discourse gives us a lot of default options.

So, what do you think about the Working Groups model? What are your questions? Concerns? Excitement?

( in this context, RFC == Request for Community )

[mosh]

I like Working Groups as model, mostly because it’s a pretty well-known standard. “BoF” is another similar term, maybe less recently popular.

On this forum, we could potentially rename the Ecosystems category to Working Groups.

We might want a tiered system, to differentiate between WGs that require nomination and/or approvals to create and/or join (such as specs maintainers or community wg), and WGs that anyone can (and should!) spin up to coalesce a subcommunity.