Let's improve our communication: Discourse

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

Hi,

We have been trialing Discourse as a potential replacement for GNOME 
mailing lists in order to modernize our communications infrastructure 
and make contributing to GNOME more attractive to newcomers. If this 
goes well, then we should be able to shut down most of our antiquated 
mailing lists (with possible exceptions for announce-list and 
distributor-list(?)) possibly quite soon [1].

I understand that some lists have already migrated. However, until now, 
it has not been clear what to do with desktop-devel-list gnome org. We 
need this list for sending announcements that all (or at least most) 
developers will be guaranteed to see. But there is too much activity on 
Discourse to expect everybody to watch all activity there. Rather than 
attempt to drink from the firehose, I'd like to encourage developers to 
at least subscribe to the announcement tag [2][3]. You can do this by 
clicking on the notification bell in the upper-right corner of the 
screen, then selecting "Watching" or "Watching First Post." This will 
probably suffice to replace our use of desktop-devel-list for important 
announcements... I think. To test how well this works, I've posted two 
important announcements on Discourse now, under that tag.

The announcement tag might not be sufficient. We might, for example, 
want another category, e.g. a Maintainers category. Please give 
Discourse a try, provide feedback, and we'll see how things go. Some 
tips:

* You can use your GNOME LDAP account to log into Discourse, or create 
a separate account just for Discourse.
* [4] discusses interacting with Discourse using email. Configuring 
email notifications is very important. Be careful with mailing list 
mode; do not expect it to match the mailman behavior. Also note that 
some of the preferences have changed a bit since that guide was posted.
* Use [5] to suggest improvements to our Discourse instance.
* GNOME distributors, consider subscribing to the distributor tag [6] 
for notifications (equivalent to distributor-list)

Michael

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Initiatives/-/issues/18
[2] https://discourse.gnome.org/tag/announcement
[3] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/tags-and-watching/94
[4] 
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/interacting-with-discourse-via-email/46
[5] https://discourse.gnome.org/c/site-feedback/
[6] https://discourse.gnome.org/tag/distributor