To be clear, I'm not on python-dev and am not advocating we replace that list with Discourse.
I'm just making the case for why Discourse would be a good candidate for the other discussion venues we've been talking about in this thread (e.g. packaging, python-ideas), where people are open to trying out a new medium.
The basic idea is that investing in a better medium and better tooling fosters better discussions, which benefits Python the community and ultimately also Python the code base. I wouldn't call that a circus activity.
But then again, I'm relatively new to the Python community; perhaps most people on here find this kind of meta-discussion unproductive.
It should happen on occasion, just not regularly. :)
Keeping an open source project running is part technical, part social (which makes it part political :). That social bit means having to occasionally evaluate how we are managing our communication amongst not just long-time participants but also new ones. This means we have to sometimes look at what kids in university are using in order to entice them to participate (heck, even high school at this rate). For instance, Barry has mentioned NNTP as part of his solution to managing his mail relating to Python. But go into any university around the world and ask some CS student, "what is Usenet?" -- let alone NNTP -- and it's quite possible you will get a blank stare. This is why I don't call it comp.lang.python anymore but
python-list@python.org (same goes for IRC, but it's probably known a lot more widely than Usenet). What this means is we occasionally have to evaluate whether our ways of communicating are too antiquated for new participants in open source and whether they are no longer the most effective (because old does not mean bad, but it does not mean better either), while balancing it with not having constant churn or inadvertently making things worse. Toss in people's principled stances on open source and it leads to a heated discussion.
For instance, people have said they don't want to set up another account. But people forget that
every mailing list on
mail.python.org requires its own account to post (I personally have near a bazillion at this point). And while the archives and gmane give you anonymous access to read without an account, so does Discourse or any of the other solutions being discussed (no one wants to wall off the archives or make it so we can't keep a hold of our data in case of another move).
It's the usual issue of having to get down to the root of the issue as to why people would want to stay with the mailing list vs. why others would want to switch to Discourse. Finding out the fundamental reasons and taking out the emotion of the discussion is usually the key to helping solve this sort of grounded discussion (at which point you can start ignoring those who can't remove the emotion).
And in the case of people worrying about bifurcating the discussions, the python-ideas mailing list would simply be shut down to new email and its archive left up to prevent a split in audience if we do end up changing things up.
Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@...> writes:
> If this sounds interesting to you, I recommend reading through the
Discourse trust levels to get a good sense of how Discourse views community
building. It’s really well thought out, IMO, and is informed by the authors’
experience building Stack Overflow.
It does not sound interesting at all -- Python development is increasingly
turning into a circus, with fewer and fewer people actually writing code.
Stefan Krah
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