We are looking at ways to improve the online community around Mender, to get more people involved, and to make it easier for everyone - especially new users - to find the information they need and ultimately to contribute back to the project.
Currently, most of the general discussion around Mender happens on our mailing list, but we are considering moving that discussion over here to Mender Hub.
This is just a proposal at this stage, we want your feedback as to whether you think it’s a good idea or not. We want your thoughts.
Why a forum?
While setting up Mender Hub and playing with Discourse, we found lots of features we liked that we think would be great for a general Mender discussion forum. Easy and powerful searching, tagging of posts, upvoting replies, the ability to mark questions as “solved”, automatic suggestions for similar posts when creating new topics. We think such a forum could really encourage discussion and make information more findable than the current mailing list discussion.
Discourse does have an option for you to use it in a “mailing list” mode too - with a little adjustment to your mail settings, you can write and receive forum posts and replies by mail. People have used Discourse this way on other projects, so if you are a fan of mailing lists the same functionality can - more or less - be replicated. We can go into more detail about this option later!
We also think it would benefit everyone to have all Mender discussion in one place: whether it’s about board integrations, general discussion around Mender, OTA, Yocto, or even a place for you to tell us about the exciting projects you’re using Mender for!
So what now?
This is a proposal, so please let us know your thoughts. What do you like/dislike about the mailing list? What do you like/dislike about Mender Hub? Would you communicate more or less or just the same if the discussion were here? Have you used forums, or specifically Discourse, before on another open source project - and did you like it?
If the feedback from you - the community - is encouraging, we will continue with the next step which would be to create a beta ‘general Mender discussion’ category here on Mender Hub.
Let us know your thoughts either here, on the mailing list, or via our contact@mender.io email by Friday, December 21st.
Thanks!
