Is There Interest in Moving This Discussion Forum Away From Google Groups?

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wes.brown

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Jul 24, 2018, 8:05:39 PM7/24/18
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Greetings All,

Is there any interest in moving this forum (and other OpenLMIS discussion forums) to another provider?  While Google Groups is fine, there are other options that have additional features and are just easier to use. I would suggest Discourse as I have liked using it with other Open Source projects but I am sure that there are other good options. 

If you would like to switch to something else, please also suggest a possible option of what you would like to use instead.

Cheers,
-Wes Brown

Kaleb Brownlow

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Jul 25, 2018, 12:37:39 AM7/25/18
to wes.brown, OpenLMIS Governance

Hello Wes,


Welcome to VillageReach. I'm happy to test a new system and agree Google Groups can be a bit wonky to use. Checked out Discourse and looked interesting. Should we test with one of the communities before switching over everyone?


Kaleb

From: openlmis-...@googlegroups.com <openlmis-...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of wes.brown <wes....@villagereach.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2018 5:05:39 PM
To: OpenLMIS Governance
Subject: Is There Interest in Moving This Discussion Forum Away From Google Groups?
 
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Leitner, Carl

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Jul 27, 2018, 12:56:14 PM7/27/18
to Kaleb Brownlow, wes.brown, OpenLMIS Governance
Some of the DIAL folks (e.g. Michael) have a fair amount of experience with Discourse .  I would suggest we invite them to share their experience on an upcoming call.
Cheers,
-carl


Wes Brown

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Jul 27, 2018, 5:50:07 PM7/27/18
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Kaleb,

Thanks for the feedback. Testing with a single community seems like a good idea; once the initial heavy lifting of getting a new Discourse instance up and running is done the amount of work to add additional categories is pretty easy. Given the response by this community, do you think this would be a good place to start?

-Wes

Wes Brown

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Jul 27, 2018, 5:53:03 PM7/27/18
to OpenLMIS Governance
 Carl,

That is a great idea. My suggestion of switching to Discourse actually came from my experience with OpenMRS and I think that Michael was the person behind their switch from Google Groups to Discourse. I am not familiar with all the calls we have (there appear to be a lot, heh); do you have a suggestion as to which one would be appropriate to invite him to?

Thanks,
-Wes

Leitner, Carl

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Jul 29, 2018, 7:26:09 AM7/29/18
to Wes Brown, OpenLMIS Governance
The main governance call should be fine.
Cheers,
-carl


Craig Appl

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Jul 29, 2018, 10:23:14 AM7/29/18
to Leitner, Carl, Wes Brown, OpenLMIS Governance
Hi Wes,

There are four or five communication systems used by the community:

- Google Groups
- Slack - Real time short term communication (History isn't saved)
- Confluence Wiki pages - Comments in the bottom of pages as well as in document review, @mentions and meeting notes.
- Jira tickets - Ticket specific communication
- Email - All official things need to go through Email instead of Slack because the Slack history isn't being saved.

The value of Google Groups is that the barrier to entry is low. It allows anyone to join and post nearly immediately, assuming they have some type of Google account. All other platforms require an account request, creation and approval process by a community member.

Here are some questions:
- Someone has a technical question and is not a community member. Where do they go to ask their question? Does it require an account? Is that account creation automatic?
- Will discourse be able to replace other channels of communication?

Craig


On Sun, Jul 29, 2018 at 7:26 AM, Leitner, Carl <clei...@path.org> wrote:
The main governance call should be fine.
Cheers,
-carl
On Jul 27, 2018, at 5:52 PM, Wes Brown <wes....@villagereach.org> wrote:

 Carl,

That is a great idea. My suggestion of switching to Discourse actually came from my experience with OpenMRS and I think that Michael was the person behind their switch from Google Groups to Discourse. I am not familiar with all the calls we have (there appear to be a lot, heh); do you have a suggestion as to which one would be appropriate to invite him to?

Thanks,
-Wes
On Jul 27, 2018, 9:56 AM -0700, Leitner, Carl <clei...@path.org>, wrote:
Some of the DIAL folks (e.g. Michael) have a fair amount of experience with Discourse .  I would suggest we invite them to share their experience on an upcoming call.
Cheers,
-carl
On Jul 25, 2018, at 12:37 AM, Kaleb Brownlow <Kaleb.Brownlow@gatesfoundation.org> wrote:

Hello Wes,

Welcome to VillageReach. I'm happy to test a new system and agree Google Groups can be a bit wonky to use. Checked out Discourse and looked interesting. Should we test with one of the communities before switching over everyone?

Kaleb

Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2018 5:05:39 PM
To: OpenLMIS Governance
Subject: Is There Interest in Moving This Discussion Forum Away From Google Groups?
Greetings All,

Is there any interest in moving this forum (and other OpenLMIS discussion forums) to another provider?  While Google Groups is fine, there are other options that have additional features and are just easier to use. I would suggest Discourse as I have liked using it with other Open Source projects but I am sure that there are other good options. 

If you would like to switch to something else, please also suggest a possible option of what you would like to use instead.

Cheers,
-Wes Brown

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Craig Appl

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Wes Brown

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Jul 30, 2018, 9:32:07 AM7/30/18
to OpenLMIS Governance
Hello Craig,

Thanks for the thoughtful post! I really liked the way you organized the communication systems used by the OpenLMIS community, I think it helps to more easily plan where Discourse (or similar) could fit into the stack. My hope would be that Discourse will replace both Google Groups and most emails; with the email replacement being something particularly useful. Emails tend to be difficult for discussions, are inherently exclusive, and oftentimes unwelcome (we all get much more email than we would prefer) but a system like Discourse fits in well between email and the realtime-ish communication of Slack.

To answer your questions specifically:
  1. Discourse (or similar) would be the main entry point into the OpenLMIS community for new members
  2. The system should require an account but one that can be freely made by the user. User categorization can be used to denote users with more experience within the community (see OpenMRS Developer Stages).
    1. As a side-note, I wish that Slack allowed for self-registration and the lack of it is why I prefer similar solutions like Rocket.Chat (which is nicely open-source as well)
  3. I think that Discourse would replace google groups, much of the project-related email, and maybe a little of what goes into Slack
Cheers,
-Wes

Wes Brown

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Sep 5, 2018, 3:17:19 PM9/5/18
to OpenLMIS Governance
Hello All,

I wanted to update this topic in preparation for the next Governance Committee meeting so that we can hopefully make a decision about whether or not to move forward with Discourse. Please note that I have not heard of any other alternative to Google Groups aside from Discourse and am therefore only including those two options in the comments below. 

While Discourse is an open-source project, it is not free to host and the options to do so are varied:
  1. Self-Hosting: $20/month
    • We would likely want to use the existing Digital Ocean droplet which would cost roughly $20 a month, or more if our usage increases
    • Because we are hosting it ourselves there are no limits on page views or storage, we just have to pay more if the basic DO Droplet cannot handle the load
  2. Discourse Hosting - Standard: $100/month
    • 100k page views, 10GB storage, unlimited members, 5 admin accounts, "basic" plugins 
  3. Unison Hosting: $250/month (plus $1,000 Google Groups import and setup fee)
    • 1m page views, 40GB storage, unlimited members, unlimited admin accounts, unlimited plugins
    • Unison will import all Google Groups users and history (for all three OpenLMIS GG forums)
  4. Discourse Hosting - Business: $300/month
    • 500k page views, 50GB storage, unlimited members, 15 admin accounts, "advanced" plugins
Unison is a company run by Yaw Anokwa (the co-founder of the Open Data Kit) which came out of the work that he did in converting the ODK forum from Google Groups to Discourse. Google Groups does not provide an API to get user information or the historical topic information which makes getting that data imported into Discourse a significant challenge. If we think that there is value in being able to keep our Google Groups history and automatically create Discourse accounts then the Unison option is a very good one consider as we likely won't be able to put the time into doing this ourselves.

Yaw was also kind enough to review some of the questions that came out of our previous discussions regarding Discourse and I am including his thoughts below (with his permission):
  • Will a non-community member be able to benefit from this?
Yes! The forum is very SEO friendly, so if the site is public (you choose how public), you'll get a good amount of search engine traffic which will benefit non-community members. Naturally if someone wants to ask a question, they will need to create an account, but that takes basically no time and you can also login with your Gmail/Facebook/Twitter/Github/etc account.
 
Also, the bar is pretty low to account creation, but not too low. The forum has a notion of user levels that automatically gives more permissions to users as they interact with other users. Drive by users 
can't cause a lot of problems so moderators don't spend a lot of time fighting spammers.
  • Will Discourse replace other channels of communication?
Probably. For conversations that you need to find again, Discourse is great (e.g., compared to Slack). This is really important for
distributed projects where time zones are a problem. On ODK, we default to Discourse then spin off to other platforms when needed. So
for example, we discuss what a feature should be and when we get something closeable by a GitHub issue, then we file an issue. Y'all will have to find a balance that works for you.
You may get some pushback about how easy a mailing list is compared to a forum. I think every community has had this pushback when Discourse has been proposed, but it's never been a problem post switch because the diehards can Discourse purely as a mailing list. The vast majority will use it as a forum and love it. You'll see a big drop in repeat questions and a big spike in fruitful discussions.
  • Why Unison Hosting
 Most hosting services won't touch Google Groups because it's very painful. We wrote and maintain the guide to Google Groups migration that the Discourse community uses. Additionally, we've moved some of the largest open-source communities in global development to Discourse so we do know how to communicate the migration to your community and configure Discourse so it works great for you on day one. We handle everything. You tell us the date and that's it! 
  • Helpful Information
I've also got a quick write up at https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-did-you-know-you-could-be-successful-with-a-forum/92074/8 that might also be helpful.
And some of my favorite things to do with the forum that you can't do
easily elsewhere
 
As part of this decision making progress I also created a very basic decision matrix. I am not sure how valuable this data is as I came up with the values myself and they are quite qualitative but I will include it below in case it is helpful as a discussion point:
Community InvolvementFeature SetHistorical PostsHosting CostsOngoing AdministrationTotal
Value
(Higher is better)		1010555
Google Groups3255217
Self-Hosting7803321
Discourse Hosting7801420
Unison Hosting7850525

Overall, my feeling is that utilizing Discourse in place of Google Groups would give us a better alternative for non-realtime, community-based communication and would naturally attract some types of communication that is currently occurring within Slack or Email but not a good fit within those services.

Please let me know if there are any other questions that I should look into before the next Governance Committee meeting on Sept 18th.

Thanks,
-Wes

Wes Brown

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Sep 19, 2018, 3:44:42 PM9/19/18
to OpenLMIS Governance
The question about moving away from Google Groups for our discussion forums to something like Discourse has remained open for a while now and at this point we, on the core team, are ready to proceed and make the transition. Our anticipated plan is to pay for the setup and hosting of Discourse with Unison Hosting rather than manage the instance ourselves; this service also has the additional benefit of importing the historical data and users from the various OpenLMIS Google Groups. 

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns about this transition. If we do not hear any objections in the next week we will plan on starting the transition by the end of the month or in early October.

We are also very interested in hearing from the community about how they want this new service to be utilized. Our hope is that this service will not only replace Google Groups but also act as a natural repository for interactions that fall between the realtime communication of Slack and the more delayed/formal communication of an email. If you have any thoughts on how we can best do that, we would love to hear them!

Thanks, 
Wes Brown (on behalf of the core OpenLMIS team)
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