Re: Better tools for community cohesion?

On 02.08.2013, at 22:21, Erik Huelsmann <..hidden..> wrote:

Hi Mikkel,

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 10:00 AM, Mikkel Høgh <..hidden..> wrote:

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 :)

I've given the issue some more thought. Since you say you're targetting new users, opening Discourse forums would seem not to be cannibalizing the existing community: instead, it would be expanding into previously non-existing groups. Assuming great success of the Discourse forums, the existing community might (will) move (if and when those forums become the main channel of communication).

In other words: you may be wrong to think that opening Discourse forums will be splitting the community and - as shown by some of the reactions in the thread - the existing community may not be the group to target by asking them to move.

Well, my concern on splitting the community was more in regard to the currently existing LedgerSMB forums (ie. those found at http://forums.ledgersmb.org/ ). I don't think it makes much sense to have two forums :)

I don't know who decides on what the official forums are, but I don't think there should be more than one.

As far as the fact that mailing lists and other SourceForge resources are very 2000-technology, you're probably correct: some of the projects which newly started, have used Google Groups as their forum/mailing list software and GitHub to host the sources. However, I've seen very few projects with long SF history move to new infrastructure: after all, all the historic backlinks have built up to point to SourceForge. That's an important factor as well.