As long as the post volume is similar to what's in this email list or slightly higher, I'd be willing to be a moderator.
* Ran a small-to-midsize (~150 person) discord for my college board game club, so have some experience
* Willing to organize the forum, delete spam, direct conversation back on-topic if it veers, and deal with the very occasional bad actor
* Not willing to handle a large volume of posts or a contentious communinity (though it doesn't seem like it will be)
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
--
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs
Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden
Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth
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