For new coders, non-coders, and in general everyone who is not an older/established member or prospective member of our community, the structure for communication is seems antiquated at best, daunting and inaccessible at worst. Resources are fragmented among multiple sites, poorly optimized for search engines, disparate and unkempt - while communication channels are globally incohesive, hard to find, and usually outdated. I'm not here to complain - I've been brainstorming and researching this a lot, and I'm here to help fix it. I'm a web designer and FSF member.
First, we have the mailing lists. * 20 years ago, the go-to paradigm for a project's communication was the ubiquitous pair: a mailing list + IRC channel. Fast forward to today and things look... pretty much the same. * The mailing list is good for long, slow conversation, the IRC channel for fast, shallower conversation. Real, productive conversation, however, doesn't necessarily play into this dichotomy. * Mailman, the software usually used for mailing lists, shows its age, with an unnecessarily clunky, under-designed web interface. * More importantly, the mailing list concept has proven bad for scaling. With tiny projects, the notion of "automatically subscribe me to every new post to every new thread" for a topic or a slew of topics might make sense or at least be harmless. But when a community booms, many find it unrealistic to manage all of the emails in the mailing list. * The best mailman can do is roll up messages into a "digest". This makes it harder to reply quickly, and while it might solve growing pains at the couple-of posts a day scale, it's still useless above that or for people who don't want another daily email. But the biggest anachronism of mailing lists is that they really only have one interface: email. Those of us that already get too much email, yearn for some sort of forum, something that lets you quickly jump in and see all the discussions at once, or even lets you reply right in the thread you're viewing (perhaps with this fancy new thing called HTML). Now don't get me wrong - a lot of forum software is pretty old and clunky too, and has it's own problems. Using one of those would not really be a step forward. But all over the web, the case is being made against age-old mailing lists (better than I make the case) so I trust you'll understand by now the issue I'm raising. However, I recognize that I'm talking to a potentially incompatible audience - namely, the very people who actually use mailing lists, and by extension, make such use of email. I'm aware of the possibility that many of you very much *prefer* to use email for everything. But that's fine, because I'm looking to something that will let us keep that ability. My suggestion in this regard is a piece of libre software called Discourse<http://www.discourse.org/>. I apologize if this has already been suggested elsewhere. Discourse is likely the only forum software today with an attractive, modern design. It's optimized for readability, and innovates around all the most annoying features of traditional forums (like pagination). If you haven't heard of it, I encourage you to check out the website, http://www.discourse.org/, and I'll refrain from extolling it's virtues here. What's relevant here, especially for those afraid of change, is that while Discourse may be a "fancy web forum", it can [now] be completely interacted with via email, putting it near feature parity with mailing list software. This means hardcore mail-list-ers and web users can peacefully co-exist - and more importantly, one can easily glide between the two. Not only will Discourse be a boon to the LibrePlanet community, it will be able to handle the growth as well! I highly encourage you to check out the forums of our fellow software project MaidSafe, which provides an excellent example of a vibrant discourse community. https://safenetforum.org/ SAFE Network Forum<https://safenetforum.org/> safenetforum.org The main discussion forum of the SAFE Network community. My suggestion is to host the Discourse instance on official FSF servers (it's trivial to manage) and then use the included import script to seamlessly convert the mailing list. What would be even cooler is if they hosted a Discourse farm for all libre software projects to make an instance on, which would give the software freedom community a leg up on places like Github and Reddit that are currently popular among such projects (but have non-free code server-side). Again, the goal is to maintain the ability to interact purely via email, perhaps even in the same way, while still upgrading the entire experience online. Finally, we have the LibrePlanet wiki. The wiki in its current form is a bit of a mess if you peek under the hood. Look at the list of categories, orphaned pages, etc. to know what I mean. It also seems to be stagnant, with almost no recent changes and almost no recent mailing list activity. I will now make a formal accusation: The LibrePlanet wiki's mission is a bit too narrow. Libreplanet.org is used host information about local user groups, and a lot of effort has been put into making that scalable. To that end, though, it's quite empty. There just aren't many groups right now, and that's been the case for a long time. Perhaps we can grow this following by providing a richer set of resources. The wiki has the benefits of decentralized, collaborative contributions (anyone can edit) while at the same time having the benefits of official management and moderation (FSF admins, permissions). Why not use it for *all* of our free culture resources, by default? Rather than just managing sparse user groups, why not use it as the place for all things software freedom? The name "libreplanet" is already unassuming. Even the annual conference by the same name is hosted off-wiki (https://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet:Conference). Why? almost any features we need from a modern web page can be incorporated into a Wiki page, with the wealth of MediaWiki extensions. Then, you benefit from the crowd-sourced information. Most of the philosophy of the Free Software Foundation is not found on the website of the Free Software Foundation, but linked to pages on the website of a particular free software project (gnu.org/philosophy). Is that justifiable? Sure, but it's still a discontinuity. Why not host a more expansive, neutral, and comprehensive version of this information right on the LibrePlanet wiki? LibrePlanet.org has a stock MediaWiki feel, which will immediately illicit mental hints of Wikipedia, a place where huge masses of people are already comfortable exploring new topics. Imagine we made a great article on GNU/Linux to counteract the glaring issues of the Wikipedia article "Linux". We could flesh out a whole glossary of the Terms To Avoid with their own pages, using redirects from the bad terms to the good ones. Using Semantic Mediawiki, we could create an always-updated list of privacy/other offenses by proprietary software companies, which could become the most comprehensive case for free software around. On the Main Talk page, someone was asking where a general discussion topic might go - unrelated to any page. And that brings me back to Discourse. Thanks for listening, and I'll be ready to address your responses. I hope this community is open to drastic improvements and there might even be some who will want to help me with it. Cheers- Connor _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
