Discourse / Streamlit / Discord

[cgentemann]

For community discussion we want an accessible discussion site to keep everything possible in the open. There are a lot of options, Discourse, Streamlit, Discord... Any feeling or preferences?

[admercs]

Why not use GitHub Discussions to reduce platform entropy? 😉

[penyuan]

If we want to sign up for a space for discussions, I strongly advise that we avoid closed source, proprietary, and centralised platforms that engage in mass surveillance without meaningful consent. Unfortunately, that rules out the likes of Discord or Slack. We should also adopt fully open source options because that is in the spirit of open science, and TOPS's visibility can set a good example for the rest of the global scientific community.

As @cgentemann suggested, Discourse is a 100% open source forum and mailing list platform that has been successfully used by many communities, and I can personally attest to its usefulness and user-friendliness. It is decentralised, and you can either choose to host it yourself (I suspect NASA's web infrastructure can easily handle this), or pay a small annual fee for professional hosting.

And for future reference, there are also performant and user friendly 100% open source replacements for chat platforms, one of the most successful is the Element client (which taps into the federated Matrix chat network). Element has been adopted by the governments of France and Germany, so it's got a pretty good track record.

UPDATE: I just noticed that the Discourse developers offer free-of-charge hosting for open source projects with tight integration with GitHub. Might be worth pursuing!

[BriannaLind]

Discourse sounds great to me! It seems like it might be easier for people than github

[devita1983]

Hi! I'm new here!
I'm Luis!😃
Is there a Discord group for TOPS?

[penyuan]

BTW, successful open source projects like Jupyter uses Discourse for their community forum.