On 10/12/18 12:11 AM, Brian (bex) Exelbierd wrote:

On Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 5:07 AM Justin W. Flory <jflory7@gmail.com mailto:jflory7@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Tonight, Marie and I had an in-person Badges sprint today and one of the
things we discussed was migrating the badges@lists.fp.o mailing list to
a new Discourse category on discussion.fedoraproject.org
<http://discussion.fedoraproject.org>.

I’d like to wait so we can get real data from commops. They just switched and are in a trial. Let’s see what they find out.

The motivation is to better improve our communication, make our discussion more visible, and prevent things from getting lost.

Before August 2018, the last activity on the Badges list was April 2017. Only four people (Marie, Justin, Brian, Miro) have participated in discussions on this list since April 2017. Marie did not receive the email with Brian's reply to the badges policy discussion (we really tried to find it after realizing it wasn't received, but couldn't figure out what happened). Given that core team members miss emails, it is also an issue.

If the Badges project were more exposed and a precedent was set for communication, I would advocate for waiting. However, since we are starting from almost nothing, if this works better for the people who are participating *today*, then I don't think this should be a blocker.

I'd like to know others' thoughts on this too. If there are no other replies to this thread, I feel like it confirms that the discussions here are not visible or do not solicit participation (at the risk of confirmation bias).

Hi Máirín, thanks for sharing this feedback. I appreciate the perspective you bring and I agree that for the bigger-picture problems of engagement and participation, it is a people-scale issue, not technology-scale.

I am still in favor of switching to a Discourse forum for three reasons:

1. Existing core contributors are not seeing these discussions 2. Pagure is more task-driven and is difficult to have big-picture conversations in tickets for existing Badges workflow 3. CommOps had good success in our month-long experiment in using Discourse to improve engagement (higher avg. of replies per thread)

The most significant issue is that core contributors are missing discussions and threads on the existing list. I believe our effectiveness is limited if core contributors are not seeing conversations and discussion. We need engagement from core contributors to address engagement from new participants. My original context for proposing the switch is mostly for this reason above all others.

Second, the Badges team is ticket-driven, but these tickets are for individual badges. Using tickets for bigger-picture discussions is difficult and it gets mixed in with other Badges activity, like an urgent request for an event badge. For someone who wishes to follow along with Badges activity now, they watch the Pagure activity and receive an email for every activity, which can be a high signal-to-noise ratio. I personally feel holding a discussion on the sustainability of the Badges project in a Pagure ticket is difficult and risks being overlooked by those who could add to the discussion. If it is hard for me already as a core contributor, I imagine it is doubly so for someone who isn't.

Finally, we took the plunge in CommOps to switch from our mailing list to Discourse. Like the Design Team, CommOps is mostly volunteer-driven. The qualitative feedback on the Discourse switch from our team was positive, including ease of access (for people who have email blocked on work networks), older conversations (>2 weeks) were more likely to be replied to, and we also noted more participation in conversations from people who are not in our team:

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/2018-10-31-minutes-appreciation-week-...

The quantitative feedback from September 2018 (mailing list) to October 2018 (Discourse) is below:

* [Sep.] # of threads: 33 [¹] * [Sep.] # of unique participants: 9 * [Sep.] Avg. replies per thread: 1.12

* [Oct.] # of threads: 10 * [Oct.] # of unique participants: 14 * [Oct.] Avg. replies per thread: 3.1

[¹] 10 threads were Fedocal reminders. Also, if a thread was started outside of September and there was a single reply in September, Hyperkitty counted the original thread and all replies as part of its count regardless of date. Timestamps for original threads weren't easily displayed so I didn't separate them out.

Combined, these reasons lead me to prefer Discourse for bigger-picture discussion and abstracting things outside of Pagure tickets. This is my view. If you still feel negatively about Discourse, then I won't pursue this thread further. But it does make it difficult for me, and I also believe others, to participate in bigger-picture discussions about Fedora Badges.

On 10/13/18 12:10 AM, Máirín Duffy wrote:

I have a lot of concerns about Discourse that I've shared elsewhere.

My biggest concern here - I am open to everyones input on the team here, but I do not have any intention to switch the design-team list to Discourse which might make it difficult for new design recruits (who tend to participate in both as badges are a great design task to get started with) to follow along in two different places and I am concerned it would fracture our team.

The Badges team is ticket driven. Discussions happen in Pagure. Newbies are oriented via the Design team new member process and are often pointed to the Badges Pagure queue to find an initial task to work on. Your observations about activity on the badge list, Justin, evidence this.

To move Badges to Discourse without dividing the teams would necessarily mean forcing design-team@ to Discourse. I personally am *not* ok with that.

I understand we have a mindshare ticket about helping recruit new designers and I'm assuming this is the context in which this well-meaning suggestion is being raised. Shuffling the chairs around on the communications infrastructure deck isn't going to solve those problems, though. They are people problems and as such require people, not technology. It's not a technology scale issue, it's a people scale issue.

terezahl just recently started as a design intern working on Fedora design team tickets. I have an upcoming UX design position I just got approval for this summer that I will be recruiting for soon. Bringing people to the team by *literally* bringing people to the team is how we push through our issues IMHO. We cannot exceed our capacity for mentorship via technology, the same way you can't throw laptops at a classroom and expect to somehow push 50 students to 1 teacher through with as meaningful and impactful an experience as 30 to 1 with no laptops.

Our team has been hit a few ways recently in terms of folks being able to have the time to show up. I can think of 5 distinct situations. Not a single one is due to mailing lists, IRC, etc. Nor do I think, having mentored a college or high school aged intern pretty much every summer for as long as I can remember, is there anything inherently wrong with MLs or IRC that means we are cutting ourselves off "from the next generation." Today young adults are growing up with a plethora of platforms and negotiate communication across and between them natively.

I like to quote Marshall McLuhan a lot esp wrt these specific types of issues. "The medium is the message."

MLs, Discourse, whatever forums, are cool (require interactive engagement) media, asynchronous, primarily text-based, in our case of an international niche audience. A shift from one to another would not be a revolutionary shift, just more of the same in a different package with the inconvenience of migration and docs updating and archices conversion and hassle for little gain on top. (A revolutionary shift would be moving to a medium closer to the synchronous end of the spectrum, or something more primarily visual, or a hotter medium - less interaction, more curation maybe like Fedora Magazine.) So I don't see some kind of fantastic positive shift in communication happening.

Note we're talking about communication mediums, *not* apps. We primarily deal, in Fedora, in the currency of features and tech and platforms etc etc. Communication channels are different environments. Don't conflate Discourse or Mailman the apps with Discourse or Mailman the communication media. I am not interested in the app-level issues, that shifts far too often to be worth trying to plan around.

Switching from ML to Discourse, the only difference that matters from a communication medium standpoint is that Discourse is primarily a polling based media (as are Twitter, FB, instagram, most timeline based social media) and MLs are a push based medium (the comms come to you where you are generally.) MLs approach poll w Hyperkitty for those who prefer that; Discourse approaches push for those who prefer that. But natively Discourse is poll and MLs are push.

For a volunteer based organization, poll doesn't cut it. Volunteers can have large gaps in time between attempts / the perfect alignment of energy and time and intention to participate. Push is more suited to volunteer engagement bc there are more opptys to remind you engage that don't rely on internal intention alone.

This team is primarily a volunteer-based team, unlike other teams. This is why my concern about Discourse for Fedora generally applies doubly so here.

I am happy to talk to anyone who will listen about my concerns but am increasingly worried they won't matter.

~m

On October 11, 2018 11:06:40 PM EDT, "Justin W. Flory" jflory7@gmail.com wrote:

Hi all,

Tonight, Marie and I had an in-person Badges sprint today and one of the
things we discussed was migrating the badges@lists.fp.o mailing list to
a new Discourse category on discussion.fedoraproject.org <http://discussion.fedoraproject.org>.

CommOps and a few other sub-projects have switched, and others like the
Fedora Council are weighing the possibility too. We hope it might make
discussions around Fedora Badges more visible and hopefully encourage
more people to participate (it wasn't until Marie posted to this list
that I realized it existed, or that I was subscribed to it).

What do you all say? Is anyone interested in trying this out?

-- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.