Folks, My two cents worth, I personally think the “The business case is a hands down a winner”, Personally I would be happy for everything to transition now. However I do understand others have different experience’s and that we need the community to come along with me/us or it will just not work.
I have posted recently that some plugin publishers link to GG discussions as how to contact them for updates and edits of their solutions and thus we should never close the forum. If someone comes back to tiddlywiki after months or years, we do not want them to have a shock, and stop them using their previous knowledge to participate.
I know that experience (Personal and Professional) and background mean little in online forums because, “how well do we know our fellow community members ?”. however I must say it, how I see it. My experience stems from playing, sometimes installing and often signing up to almost every forum, discussion and social media platform that comes on the market or open source. I was also pivotal in promoting an enterprise social network from Hundreds of participants up to over 45,000 participants in a corporate job.
Discourse or any one of the GG Alternatives meets and exceeds our needs as a community quite extensively, it goes out of its way to introduce new users and it has the vast majority if not all the features of modern community tools, we have data sovereignty and at least adequate Discourse support community as well. It is a living project, will change and improve and I expect we can even influence that. Boris and others have experience implementing this for other communities and have being prepared to launch this.
I actually set up and Open Yammer network for TiddlyWiki which does more than 90% of what discourse does and somethings much better. I know the cost and effort to build such communities and the “herding of cats” nature to implementing such change. I feel for those reluctant to move and its challenges but I am prepared to help a transition.
To torcher a metaphor “Better two birds in the bush (Discourse) than only a feather in one hand (GG)”.
In Closing my view is
- Never Close GG, just encourage movement to Discourse
- Any solution is better than GG now, But Discourse is at least as good as most alternatives
- We have started to engage with it and momentum is needed for any transition, we have started sliding in that direction I suggest we start running there. Every day without such features is a day or lost productivity and diminished communications.
- People including myself who have knowledge and experience of different solutions, and meeting the needs of diverse communities, are supportive of this choice so I feel we need the wisdom of the crowds and experience to guide us. Sufficient insight to Discourse from experts has already determined it is not a trap, even if it were not the perfect choice, it is up there.
- Having to tackle funding is a way of developing our community further and becomes an enabler, with open collective and other possibilities opening the scope of our community.
So Finally I personally think we should move now, move at the speed the community moves and retain GG indefinitely while encouraging, all to move to discourse. If someone wishes to be a Luddite (I don’t think this is rude, its descriptive) they can, returning members will still be able to engage without moving to discourse. As a community we can help each other through this change.
Unfortunately we do not (yet) have a democratic community where people can have an equal or proportionate vote, so our only recourse is to the knowledge and experience of @jeremyruston, the most engaged participants and the use of evaluation and evidence to proceed, I think we have that.
