Re: Better tools for community cohesion?

On 24/07/2013, at 23.08, Erik Huelsmann <..hidden..> wrote:

Hi Mikkel, Chris, Marjan, Chris,
My view on the matter is the following: We have really no idea about the size of the LedgerSMB community. Even if that may be reasonably big or growing, the number of active contributors seems to be stable and limited.
While I appreciate the fact that different people like to use different channels of communication and collaboration, I don't think it's wise to spread the efforts of these contributors more thinly.
As examples of how hard it can be to stimulate new contributions: neither the new ledgersmb.org site nor my book effort have spurred new content contributions. As a consequence, I'm more inclined to want to concentrate than to disperse communication. By the wat, to mitigate the problem of "answers getting lost in history", there's a google searchable archive at http://archive.ledgersmb.org/.

Well, that is pretty much also my sentiment. I would like to replace the current forums with Discourse, which, at least in my opinion, is a vastly superior user experience, and has all sorts of clever tricks for encouraging participation.

My secret hope would then be that the community might get to like Discourse so much, that it could eventually displace the mailing lists altogether :)

Let my reaction not discourage you: please let it be an invitation to start a new initiative and manage that to great success. Implicitly that will increase the size of the actively contributing community, if nothing else at least by 1.

Just my 2ct.
Bye,
Erik.

Hi Mikkel;

Thanks for your comments and offer for help. The forums are actually run by a contributor named Chris Bennett who I am CCing for your convenience. The two of you might be able to talk about how best to manage things. Even if you don't move to Discourse, perhaps a good first step would be look at how to market the forums to attract new users. I would be happy to collaborate on such.

I do agree that some users will prefer some mailing lists and some will prefer forums. I think there are a lot of reasons however why forums don't get the traction one might expect. In a lot of cases, collaboration feels more natural on an email list than a forum. So I don't see forums ever replacing email lists for core collaboration. What they can do is provide help for new markets we are not serving well, and as such they provide an opportunity for folks such as Chris and yourself to try to expand our community offerings and build presence in the community generally.

If the forums are targetting new users, this really is an opportunity for consultants and would-be consultants to push them and thus improve their own presence in the community. I don't really see us moving core functions off email lists any time soon. I don't think this should stop you, though and if it is successful enough I could see gradual integration into more things in which we do, and such would certainly bring more visibility to those involved.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 4:40 AM, Mikkel Høgh <..hidden..> wrote:

Hi LedgerSMB people,

I'm mostly a lurker here, but I'd like to see LedgerSMB get more traction.

I think one of the great barriers to building a larger community is the tools currently in use.

The main channel of communication is the mailing lists. However, mailing lists are a bit usability challenged. It's hard to keep track of what's going on, and harder still to chime in. It depends a lot on the user being able to configure filters in his e-mail client, enable treading, etc.

In addition to that, there are the forums at http://forums.ledgersmb.org/ which seem to be used very sparingly.

In short, I'd like to suggest replacing both with Discourse: http://www.discourse.org/

A few salient points:

1. It's much more friendly to new users (single click login, helpful tips when posting, etc.)
2. It can be used much like a mailing list (subscription, replying via e-mail)
3. It can be configured to send out digests to users who have not been logged in for a while, giving them a quick overview of what happened since they checked the last time.
4. Much better handling of images, code samples, and multimedia. Makes it much easier to support users.
5. It has a great search, and it is very search engine friendly, making it much easier to find earlier answers.
6. A healthy open source project with a large community. Widely (and successfully) deployed. Take a gander at http://discuss.howtogeek.com/ http://meta.discourse.org/ or http://meta.discourse.org/t/please-visit-our-discourse-forum-directory/3102 for examples of existing communities.

I could go on, I think Discourse is one of the most interesting open source projects and an awesome tool for building communities. If you want to know more, check out http://www.discourse.org/about/ or Jeff Atwood's keynote from ForumCon: http://blog.discourse.org/2013/06/forums-are-dead-long-live-forums/

For the practical side, I'm willing to handle hosting, sysadmin'ing, etc, as well as conversion of the existing forums.

--
Kind regards,

Mikkel Høgh <..hidden..>
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Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

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