[Bf-committers] Blender Development Forum Proposal

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

As some external feedback, we did exactly that move around the snapcraft.io
development process early this year, going from IRC+mailing list into
Discourse. Looking back it's easy to say it was an excellent choice.
Community participation increased significantly, and our own tracking of
conversations is also much better, which means agreements aren't lost as
easily and we can more comfortably review past discussions.

If you haven't used Discourse before, note that "forum" may provide the
wrong feeling about it.  Discourse is a bit of a bridge between a classical
forum, with conversations organized in topics, and a modern chat client,
with infinite scrolling and messages and edits showing up live as they
happen.

One important observation on the process, though: good part of the reason
why it worked well in our case is that the *team* participated in the
experiment. External developers and users will join in because they see
interesting activity on a daily basis, not because they are told that this
is the place to discuss subject. People are pulled into the forum by the
interesting content, rather than pushed into it.

That is to say, if the main stakeholders continue having the interesting
conversations on IRC, that's where people will go to.


On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:13 PM, Jonathan Williamson <jonathan at cgcookie.com>
wrote:

> To ensure nobody gets confused, let’s be clear that Campbell’s proposal is
> to use Discourse <https://discourse.org/>, the forum software, not
> Discord <https://discordapp.com/> the chat service.
>
> I think a developer forum would help ease the barrier to entry
> dramatically. IRC and Mailing Lists simply aren’t optimal in my opinion and
> are hurting new developer on boarding.
>
>
> > On Nov 21, 2017, at 11:14 AM, Danrae Pray <blink.ornitier at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks Campbell.  I think this is a really great idea.  While I don't
> have
> > any suggestions as to what specific tool (Discord or Phabricator/Ponder,
> > etc.) is best for the job, I think it's really important for this forum
> to
> > be a "searchable" Q&A format and not simply a persistent "chat" or
> "ongoing
> > discussion" format.
> >
> > Having something where people can search through previously asked
> questions
> > *before* asking their own question saves them time (if it's already been
> > asked and answered) and also the time of experienced blender devs who are
> > generously taking time away from their own work to help others.
> >
> > Moreover, being able to tag questions and answers with relevant blender
> > versions also saves ppl time, so people aren't looking for code in 2.7
> that
> > only exists in 2.8, for example.
> >
> > In the end, I completely agree that the goal should be to help people use
> > time as efficiently as possible when doing blender dev (considering the
> > limited time of experienced blender coders too).  That's why i think a
> > persistent IRC-like "clone" would not be helpful in the longer term.
> >
> > Thanks again for all you guys are doing to help get the community more
> > involved!  You guys are awesome :)
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Danrae
> >
> >
> >
> > On Nov 21, 2017 1:21 AM, "Campbell Barton" <ideasman42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Recently the possibility of using a forum was suggested
> > as a way we can help on-board new developers.
> >
> > A quick summary of the issues with current communication channels:
> >
> > - Realtime chat is too timezone sensitive *.
> > - Bf-committers mailing lists aren't setup for Q&A.
> >  while responding to some questions from interested dev's is OK,
> > noisy discussions are discouraged.
> >
> > I suspect some people might be too shy to ask questions on our
> > official mailing list too.
> > My impression is IRC is getting a reputation as having a higher barrier
> of
> > entry
> > with alternatives like Slack, Mattermost, RocketChat .. etc. gaining
> > popularity.
> >
> > In a discussion with the other admins we considered doing a trial run
> > of a blender-developer forum.
> > Unlike the old blender.org forums, which had too much overlap with
> > blenderartists.org
> > this would focus on people working with Blender's code, developer
> > tools and anything related to becoming a committer.
> >
> > User questions, feature requests - would be off topic, there are
> > better places that handle this.
> >
> > It's hard to know if this is really needed or how much it would be
> > used, there have been a handful of times
> > new developers have asked questions in bug reports, but further I cant
> > say for sure.
> >
> > When talking with Bastien Dalai & Sergey, our main concern is the time
> > needed to respond to posts,
> > that we end up in a similar situation to what we already have with patch
> > review.
> >
> >
> > Proposal
> > --------
> >
> > - Create a forum using discourse:
> >  https://www.discourse.org
> >  see rust-lang's forum as an example:
> >  https://users.rust-lang.org
> >
> > - Appoint someone to be responsible for triage, they can contact
> > maintainers if it's needed.
> >  The intent here is to take some pressure off maintainers for
> > handling day to day posts.
> >  It's possible it ends up being an unnecessary role, it's just to
> > avoid diffusion of responsibility
> >
> > - Maintainers who already spend time helping others should not need to
> > spend more time doing this.
> >  As a rule of thumb - time helping others on the forum can replace
> > some time helping out in IRC.
> >
> > - This is to help people who are serious about getting into Blender
> > development
> >  anything else can be redirected to the appropriate site or closed if
> > it's really off topic.
> >
> > - Trial run for a fixed time-frame (3-6 months for eg).
> >  if it's not working well after we've made a reasonable effort, close it.
> >
> > Thoughts and suggestions welcome.
> >
> > ----
> >
> > * Newer online chat systems support stored scroll-back,
> >  making real-time chat work better across time-zones, even so,
> >  switching away from IRC is a different topic and not part of this
> > proposal.
> >
> >
> > --
> > - Campbell
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Bf-committers at blender.org
> > https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
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> > Bf-committers at blender.org
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>
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>



-- 

gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net