Refactor top-level sections of the community discourse to reflect Jupyter subprojects

[choldgraf]

I propose that we re-factor our community discourse structure so that top-level sections all map onto sub-projects. This would make it easier to know "what belongs as a top-level section" while roughly following the practices we've already been following. The steering council of each subproject would then have the authority to dictate whatever sub-categories exist within their top-level category.

Next steps

• Share this proposal in our community forum
• Wait for feedback and see if there are any major objections
• If there are no objections after a reasonable period of time, implement this change

Links

• The proposal for forum structure in this forum post

[jasongrout]

I like how this structure roughly maps onto audiences in Jupyter. I'm happy to experiment with the structure of Discourse. Some questions:

1. Is there a way to grant subprojects some autonomy over their top-level category, i.e., would they be able to create subcategories themselves?
2. Does this break any links to individual posts? Or potentially to the category pages? I don't think it breaks category links, since https://discourse.jupyter.org/c/jupyterlab/17 and https://discourse.jupyter.org/c/asdflkj/17 seem to go to the same place, i.e., the "jupyterlab" in the url seems just for convenience.

[choldgraf]

Quick answers:

1. We can experiment with this but I'm not sure. I guess the question is whether there are "category-specific moderator roles". But at the very least, we could just tell subprojects "we'll approve any change you request within your subproject category if you ask a discourse admin". There are a lot of things you can change (e.g., you can restrict categories to select from a subset of tags, and this might be better than having many sub-categories).
2. I don't think so, thus far I've found that Discourse does pretty nice re-directing when you move things around. Note that there's no category information in the slug of a post: https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/connections-and-synchronizations-between-notebooks/35417

[Ruv7]

The Media Strategy working group should weigh in here as they oversee that platform. Not sure why but I'm unable to tag Andrii, Jake, and Sylvain. Can you do that?

[jasongrout]

Not sure why but I'm unable to tag Andrii, Jake, and Sylvain. Can you do that?

This is because this repo is in a separate github org where those individuals are not collaborators. You can manually tag anyone, though the autocomplete won't automatically complete their names.

[willingc]

Perhaps it would be better to discuss this on Jupyter's discourse so all may weigh in and be tagged.

Also, I think that it would be beneficial for clarity and announcements that all governance groups should have a category set up. Whether the group (foundation, SSC) uses it for announcements only can be up to the subgroup. I believe that it makes more transparent that the three subgroups comprise the governance, and this reinforces that structure.

Rest looks fine. I would give the community 1-2 months notice that the structure of the Discourse categories may change.

[choldgraf]

@willingc thank you for that suggestion! Two quick responses (tl;dr I agree with both of your points)

re: getting broader feedback from the community, @Ruv7 suggested a similar thing yesterday in the JEC meeting in addition to above, and I agree w/ both of you. I looked around yesterday for an "issue tracker" for the media strategy working group, but didn't see anything. So my plan will be to cut the content here and paste it in a Discourse forum. I can also provide more detail about the sequence and timing of actions so folks know what to prepare for.

For your second point re: governance, I was also thinking the same thing! My plan will be to create a top-level Governance and Project Leadership category, and create a sub-category for Executive Council, Software Steering Council, and Foundation Board. Then a broader change of top-level categories can wait until after the conversation above has played out.

[choldgraf]

I've moved the bulk of the content here into this community forum post and we can use that for asynchronous feedback or suggestions on whether / how to structure this. I've also tagged all the JMS folks, though couldn't find a forum account for jake-stack.