Should we track topic-specific communities and local meetups in this site?

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1

Iā€™m trying to figure out the right home for

I lean towards putting this stuff in discourse under a categroies like ā€˜Communitiesā€™ and ā€˜Announcementsā€™ or, if a community is really prolific, give them their own category like ā€˜Libraries and Archives on IPFSā€™ or ā€˜Social Data on IPFSā€™

2

Discourse supports one level of sub-categories, so we are not limited to flat structure, but could think about grouping stuff like this:

  • Foo
    • Bar
    • Buzz

Apart from Categories, there are Tags which enable poster to provide additional metadata and give us browsable views such as: https://meta.discourse.org/tags/tagging

The nice thing about tags is UX: topic creator can create new tags and already existing ones are autocompleted.

Tags are disabled by default, but can be enabled in /admin:

I feel Tags could be useful for grouping cross-category discussions related to ideas such as ā€œIoTā€, ā€œmeetupsā€ or ā€œpubsubā€ ā€œjs-ipfsā€, ā€œgo-ipfsā€ ā€œipldā€, etc.

3

I created a Communities category and a Libraries, Archives and Museums sub-category. Letā€™s see how that goes.

Iā€™m fine with enabling tags. Not sure if anyone has ideas why we shouldnā€™t enable tags?

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4

Iā€™ve enabled tags and I created a new local community group for Philadelphia Users

If people want a category created for them, they can request it by replying in the topic Which other Communities want a sub-category created for them?

6

Tags is a good addition and helpful in many cases.

However, Iā€™m not overly sold on creating categories for everything. If we end up with one category for every possible subject, weā€™ll end up with many categories but few threads in each topic.

If we instead have a few selected categories and wait for more content before opening up new categories (organic creation of categories if you will), the forum will appear having more content.

So instead of having ā€œPhiladelphia Usersā€ as a category now, we should start with a ā€œIPFS Usersā€ category, and if we see that it make sense to create city-specific categories in the future, when the demand is there.

7

I think itā€™s important to allow these kinds of local groups to have conversations among themselves so that people can form local support networks.

The Philadelphia-Users category is an alternative to setting up some other channel for local communications ā€“ so no slack team, no mailing list, etc for the local group ā€“ discuss.ipfs.io will be the main place for all the local chatter, requests for support, discussions about planning meetups, etc. By creating a category thatā€™s configured to be excluded from the main landing page, we

  1. allow that local community to chatter among themselves without flooding the main channel
  2. make those discussions visible to anyone interested in IPFS who might be curious about local groups, without having to join a slack team, mailing list, etc.
9

I agree that itā€™s important to let people in local communities talk. But Iā€™m unsure about the level of activity at this point.

Wouldnā€™t it be the same to have a Philadelphia thread where people can have the conversation as well? And if we notice that itā€™s too much for one thread, then we create a new category.

Iā€™m not saying we have to apply that for Philadelphia community in particular, just a general rule. Iā€™m afraid weā€™ll end up with massive amount of categories with one topic in each otherwiseā€¦

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10

Perhaps a better approach, at least initially would be to rename ā€œPhiladelphia Usersā€ to ā€œUser Groupsā€?

Each group could start with own topic there, and we could see if there is a need for dedicated category (when the topic turns into tetris ;-))

1 Like
11

@lidelā€™s suggestion SGTM