Hello everyone,
recent activity on the mailing list and issue tracker suggests that our community lacks a public space for causal talk among users.
The issue tracker is the time-tested workbench of Genode's developers. As a tool for organizing work and discussing deeply technical topics, it is not conductive for uninitiated people who wish to get engaged with the project.
Our mailing list is an adequate medium to get technical questions answered, discussing the road map, or to publish announcements. But its somewhat formal character is inappropriate for causal conversation about topics merely tangential to Genode.
The subreddit /r/genode is pretty much deserted. IRC lacks persistence and structure.
Recently, I got repeatedly asked for my opinion about creating a Discourse forum or for unlocking the forum functionality of our GitHub project. I would leave the latter unconsidered to keep our dependency from GitHub features at bay. But I'm wondering, would it be worthwhile to consider opening a forum at Discourse [1]? It is open source and can in principle be self-hosted. Unlike proprietary SaaS products, all forum data is portable.
Our small team of Genode Labs is not able to carry the additional burden of operating a self-hosted Discourse instance today. But we'd consider purchasing a forum at discourse.org and cover the expenses.
As the forum would be a place for users, it should best be operated and moderated by users, not the Genode developer team. This way, the forum won't have any corporate smell, everyone can be on eye level, and the core developer team won't be consumed by additional responsibilities.
This brings me to the following question:
Are there volunteers among you who'd like to contribute by assuming the role of administering and moderating of such a forum?
Cheers Norman