FYI - I'm also obsessed with Discourse

This is more an FYI in case you want to follow the work of another organization that’s using Discourse. We’re also sociocratic so it could be fun. Here’s a living document of what we’ve been playing around with: Add team collaboration features to the Hub - Internal Comms - Youth Power Hub. I’m the Internal Comms role holder so this is all a work in progress — we haven’t really onboarded anyone yet, but it’s gotten pretty robust.

At another point I may ask for tips on things like how are you making the forum accessible for screenreaders, supporting different languages, etc.

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No kidding!

We’re using the Multilingual Plugin
@vernon.coffey in Software Development Circle, who is a ruby developer, is working (pair programming) with Angus of Pavilion who wrote the plugin to support some bug fixes since the project was sidelined by Wikipedia.

Though I’m not sure about screen reader access. There’s a bunch of threads on the topic on the discourse meta, it seems maybe the best way to support it would be to engage in and support development by discourse since that’s a pretty fundamental level feature. Based on some of the discussion there are some challenging problems, but also things are getting worked out.

My understanding is that often in open source projects there’s a challenging dynamic of people working on things they want (the shadow side of “be the change you want to see”), so sometimes a bit of advocacy and/or funding is needed for features which don’t have champion developers already.
EDIT: fixed typo bold above

That’s why SoFA’s sending someone to keep the Multilingual localization project alive! Thank you @vernon.coffey ! :slight_smile: And props to Angus from Pavilion for being willing to mentor as there’s a bit of a learning curve into discourse and the plugin itself, even for someone familiar with ruby!

Want to join forums or software development circle?! :grin:
@TedRau
Forums is mostly working on the content development right now tough, and a few simple development things at this point.

Looking at what you’ve got there it’s pretty great!
We’re just in the initial stages of exploring a wiki for SoFA’s collaborative documentation and policy manual rather than the forums platform. I did consider Discource but it didn’t quite seem like the right platform because of collaborative editing conflicts and a bit limited functionliaty.

Love Angus!

I’d like to make this happen. Our grand ambition is to host a Learning Library on YPC’S hub, which sounds like a fundable project.

Think of me more as a superuser and fellow Discourse fan!

I agree that there are some tradeoffs to having Discourse be our documentation site, but ultimately the benefit of being on only one platform is the overriding interest to me. Discourse itself did a good enough job of documenting their Policies on Discourse Meta via their Docs plug-in, so my hope is that we’ll get there eventually.

On collaborative editing conflicts, so far it’s working to just use the Wiki post function where people of a certain trust level can update the post. Some other times we just link from Discourse to a Google Doc that holds the policy if we need the policy to be printable or if it’s super long and therefore easier to talk about via Google Docs comments.

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Re: Funding & development
There was a typo in my message there, but yea… basically, sometimes people need to be convinced or funded to put the time into getting things done!
Creating open source software is a big gift, but still a lot of work!
But sometimes it’s also building capacity! Angus was pretty clear that: yes, they can do things for hire, but really money isn’t the thing it’s the resources, so he was more excited about people willing to learn than anything else! But even that often requires an amount of funding. Creative solutions! I bet getting funding to produce some functionality and train some people into ruby development to support the platform is a completely fundable project!
Maybe it could even be a SoFA collab! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: @TedRau

Fundraising circle is certainly scouting for aligned grantable projects, and if it’s a sociocratic tool…

Something along these lines was actually one of the ideas in the LOI we put together recently - a “toolkit for self organizing”, though it wasn’t the first pick.

Re: Forums/Software development circles
noted! :slight_smile: let’s geek out :smiley:

Re: Discource vs Another platform
It might be worthwhile for us to re-consider, we only just spun the wiki up real quick and aren’t too deep in yet…

Is the Wiki post function an extra feature? I kinda struggled to find documentationon it, but perhaps because it’s built in? I’ll look more carefully.

Oooo… How do I pay attention to this? It sounds like SOFA and YPC could definitely have opportunities here.

I would appreciate using Discourse instead of a separate Wiki site. I’m super techy and even I don’t want another SoFA platform.

Example of how documentation works on Discourse: Docs - Discourse Meta

Wiki post feature (built in): What is a Wiki Post? - users - Discourse Meta

Thanks for those links. The thing I was struggling with is how to get something liket that Docs page setup. But you’re pointing me in a few of the right directions, so maybe we can forgo the other platform after all :slight_smile: