Talk:Forum Policy: Difference between revisions
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= Discussion Area = | |||
I’ve been meaning to argue against the public forums a little bit, but kept putting it off [http://forum.opensourceecology.org/discussion/257/this-solar-fire-steam-stuff-is-going-ahead-as-is-thens until reading this yesterday]. I’m not sure who remembers, but I jumped in to help put out some raging flames on the blog almost 2 years ago. (These are very mild in comparison.) Unfortunately, volunteers can easily get bent out of shape, and some like to vent in public forums or blog comments. Fortunately though, we don’t have to enable such waste! Competent people can use the wiki/Talk pages to vent, and more competent people can refractor those discussions into something more concise and useful over time. That’s one of the famous lessons of WhyWikiWorks (where other mediums including email lists fail). To be clear, (and I’m quite sure not everyone will agree), I don’t see much value in the public forums, and think they just take significant time and effort away from the wiki where it belongs. If there was a way to put a time limit before deletion of forum threads (with an email warning that important info to keep should be moved to the wiki), I think that might work well, but I’ve never yet seen that feature in forum software. I do see the value of a private archived discussion areas for core team like Highrise (service level) -- also independent of our main server infrastructure for continuity. Not everything needs to be public IMHO, (and especially discussion about people can be inappropriate). --[[User:Jeb|Jeb]] 10:10, 6 June 2011 (PDT) | |||
= Previous Scratchpad = | |||
== Additional forum categories == | == Additional forum categories == | ||
Revision as of 17:10, 6 June 2011
Discussion Area
I’ve been meaning to argue against the public forums a little bit, but kept putting it off until reading this yesterday. I’m not sure who remembers, but I jumped in to help put out some raging flames on the blog almost 2 years ago. (These are very mild in comparison.) Unfortunately, volunteers can easily get bent out of shape, and some like to vent in public forums or blog comments. Fortunately though, we don’t have to enable such waste! Competent people can use the wiki/Talk pages to vent, and more competent people can refractor those discussions into something more concise and useful over time. That’s one of the famous lessons of WhyWikiWorks (where other mediums including email lists fail). To be clear, (and I’m quite sure not everyone will agree), I don’t see much value in the public forums, and think they just take significant time and effort away from the wiki where it belongs. If there was a way to put a time limit before deletion of forum threads (with an email warning that important info to keep should be moved to the wiki), I think that might work well, but I’ve never yet seen that feature in forum software. I do see the value of a private archived discussion areas for core team like Highrise (service level) -- also independent of our main server infrastructure for continuity. Not everything needs to be public IMHO, (and especially discussion about people can be inappropriate). --Jeb 10:10, 6 June 2011 (PDT)
Previous Scratchpad
Additional forum categories
Couldn't we have some additional forum categories for discussing topics not in the current scope, like:
- Earthen Construction
- Transportation (see p2pf: Category: Transportation and appropedia: Category: Transport)
- Health
- Household Items (things like how to make your own soap, your own toothbrush, how to clean things)
Other possible categories:
- General Discussion
- Partnerships: If you know a group which could be interested in a partnership with OSE, post your ideas here
- News: News and other interesting stuff
- Announcements: Official OSE announcements
- Discussões em Português: Discussions in Portuguese
- (we could also have discussions in Spanish, French and Russian - we have many visitors from Russia, for instance)
Rasmus: I totally agree with the category suggestions of "health" and "household". We have a page on the household cyclopedia (1881) by the way: http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Household_Cyclopedia