Hi everyone,
Thanks to some personal connections and the support of ASF Infra, Apache
CouchDB now has GitHub Discussions enabled on our repository:
https://github.com/apache/couchdb/discussions
Right now, we're beta testing this (in conjunction with MS/GitHub and
the ASF) as a new user support channel. You may have already seen us
move a few Issues over to Discussions, where they now belong.
We're hoping that this gives people a friendlier way to build community
around CouchDB, one that doesn't require mailing list membership or
joining a possibly-intimidating Slack channel. Please feel free to use
the Discussions to ask for help with CouchDB, share ideas, show us what
you've done with CouchDB, offer thanks to the team, or post things you
learned and want to share with others.
One key feature is that we hope to give more recognition and affordance
to our non-committer contributors through the Discussions platform. Stay
tuned for more info.
As more Discussions features become available, we'll make use of them to
customize our space there, including linking to our project
"bylaws"/rules and code of conduct.
Two caveats: Right now, there is no webhook availability for
Discussions, which means we can't mirror activity there to our user@
mailing lists. We've been told this will arrive around the time
Discussions leaves private beta.
The other: Please remember that all discussion of project *direction*
and *decision making* must occur on the dev@ mailing list. It's fine to
link to threads in Discussions to help start the decision making
process, just the same as we do with Slack, Stack Overflow, etc. today.
I hope this comes as welcome news to everyone. I'm pretty excited about
it! Special thanks to Jan Lehnardt, who helped get this enabled for us,
and Garren Smith, who started the discussion months ago about moving out
of the twentieth century for community building.
-Joan "I'm a woman. I can change. If I have to. I guess." Touzet
