Hi All, At yesterday's meeting I suggested that discussion forums might be useful for managing tension in communications and increasing the visibility / popularity of the Solr project. At the time this didn't seem viable due to the centrality of mailing lists to ASF's communications but Eric suggested that if other projects where using forums that Solr could as well.
*(ASF Projects Using Discussion Forums)* I did some research and discovered that a number of ASF projects are using forums: - Airflow <https://airflow.apache.org/community/>, Pulsar <https://github.com/apache/pulsar/discussions>, RocketMQ <https://github.com/apache/rocketmq>, ShardingSphere <https://github.com/apache/shardingsphere>, StreamPipes <https://github.com/apache/streampipes>, and Doris <https://github.com/apache/doris> are all using GitHub Discussions <https://github.com/apache/airflow/discussions>. - TVM <https://tvm.apache.org/> uses Discourse <https://discuss.tvm.apache.org/>. - OpenOffice.org <http://openoffice.org/> uses phpBB <https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/index.php?sid=b4a0ff493ecb816d6a05cceaeee19283> . *(Refined Role Proposal for Discussion Forums)* Understanding better the fundamental nature of mailing lists to ASF projects I'd like to suggest a more tightly scoped implementation of discussion forums for the Solr project: - As an adjunct to, not replacement of, mailing lists. - With a focus on answering questions that users/developers have that are informational rather than decision making. - And perhaps some early stage idea discussions before they are ready for a serious proposal. (*Advantages of Discussion Forums to Solr Community)* I think this would offer the Solr community a few different advantages: - *Visible Vitality *- The Solr project has vitality but it isn't entirely visible. An active forum (discuss.elastic.co) can provide this visibility. - *Redundant Question Reduction* - Forums provide a way for users to find answers to questions that might otherwise be asked repeatedly in Slack chats or on the mailing lists. - *Content Creation* - Users create valuable content (which is indexed by search engines) through their discussions. - *Noise Reduction* - If at least some informational / idea discussions were occurring in the forums the volume of emails on the mailing list would be reduced. *(Recommended Implementation)* While GitHub Discussions would be the easiest to implement I would recommend Discourse. GitHub is developer-centric and as such would likely exclude most (non-dev) users. Discourse (the org) offers Discourse (the software) as a hosted service for free <https://blog.discourse.org/2018/11/free-hosting-for-open-source-v2/> to open source projects. I'm happy to help if this is something the Solr community would be interested in. Thanks for taking the time to read and consider. Sincerely, Dave Mackey
