2017 Winter Project Week/UpdatingCommunityForums

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  Projects List

Key Investigators

• Andrey Fedorov
• Andras Lasso
• Mike Halle
• Steve Pieper
• Isaiah Norton
• Tina Kapur
• Teodora Szasz
• The COMMUNITY

Project Description

Objective	Approach and Plan	Progress and Next Steps
Discuss the procedure for reaching consensus and making decision for the infrastructure issues that will have effect on large number of users Consider mailing list proposal to move Slicer and possibly several related discussion forums to the Discourse platform. Discuss new community-interaction possibilities such as Gitter. Consider the long-discussed proposals to move to github hosting for the web site	Breakfast breakout discussion - Tuesday 8:30am - Ron is confirmed to join! Document the procedure for reaching consensus and making decision for the infrastructure issues that will have effect on large number of users Discourse Assess Discourse with broader community. Identify funding mechanism. Logistics to move if chosen: Hosting: fully-managed service? vs DigitalOcean or other provider? Domain name: 'discourse.slicer.org'? SSL certificate for domain: can use Letsencrypt after host and DNS record are configured SMTP service: included in hosted option. For self-hosting: strongly recommended, and mandatory for email-only signup and mailing list mode; not mandatory if using only oauth provider (GitHub/Google/etc.) GitHub Identify remaining action items to complete the long-awaited move of Slicer source hosting to GitHub. Web-site Organize web-site content on github Consider moving hosting to github	Discussion took place about general principles of the decision making process (outlined below) Participants: Ron, JC, Steve, Andras, Isaiah, Csaba, Andrey Specific to mailing list to forum migration, Ron's main concern is that with recurring payments there is a possibility of things falling through the cracks and potential interruption of the service Gitter in a small group discussion, decided against using gitter for Slicer community at least for now; although it would provide an advantage of having a place for developers to chat in real time and get quick help, we cannot guarantee critical mass of experienced developers participating, and it would not replace mailing list or forum to support project week communication, propose to use gitter channel under github NA-MIC community that JC already created (contact JC to join); we could use that community to discuss projects and connect people in advance of the next project week

Decision-making policy draft

1. Given the topic of interest, initiate discussion on the mailing list

2. Identify a small circle of community members that are interested to study the topic in more depth

3. Take the discussion off the general list, work on the analysis of options and alternatives, summarize findings on the wiki or similar

4. Announce the in-depth discussion of the topic for the Slicer Community hangout, encourage anyone that is interested in weighing in on the topic to join the discussion. If there is someone who is interested to participate in the discussion, but cannot join the meeting due to conflict, they should notify the leaders of the given project and identify the time suitable for everyone. (Note: we might want to advertise Slicer Hangout appropriately, include agenda in the announcement email directly, and advertise the event to Slicer users as well as developers)

5. Hopefully, reach consensus at the hangout and proceed with the agreed plan.

Background and References

• Discourse discussion / proposal on the Slicer mailing list
  • http://slicer-users.65878.n3.nabble.com/Starting-Q-A-Community-on-StackExchange-tp4031469p4031496.html
• Discussions of GitHub hosting:
  • http://slicer-devel.65872.n3.nabble.com/Slicer-binary-download-is-extremely-slow-consider-github-for-hosting-packaged-binaries-td4036985.html
• Discourse and Slack (or other group chat apps like IRC, HipChat, Gitter, etc)
• https://www.slicer.org/wiki/Documentation/Labs/DocumentationImprovments
• NodeBB - like Discourse https://nodebb.org/pricing
• https://experts.feverbee.com/t/discourse-vs-nodebb/1384/6
• Comparison of forum software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software
• NA-MIC community on github: https://github.com/NA-MIC

Requirements

• [high] Get email notification about specific themes (releases, announcements, sub-community, such as shape analysis, RT, ...)
• [high] Import existing users
• [high] Code highlight
• [high] indexing by Google
• [medium] Authentication with github
• [medium] Option for yearly billing
• [medium] Polls (vote on features to be developed, collect community feedback for decisions, etc)
• [medium] Permalinks of thread for easy sharing by email
• [low] Answer posts through email
• [low] Vote for good answers, mark accepted answer
• [low] Support cross referencing of Github issues