tl;dr — I want to have all the actionable threads under “Clearing the Path”
I think we’ve been over-using the Meta/forum category a bit. Specifically, I think many of posts here actually belong in the Clearing the Path > Outreach category.
The description for “Clearing the Path” includes:
A place to discuss concrete work on the Snowdrift.coop project.
I think threads containing concrete work belong in the outreach category. For example, Starting set of tags? - #4 by smichel17 and Name for category for discussions outside concrete work?.
This category should be reserved for things that aren’t directly actionable. For example, Bumping posts (particularly wiki-based posts) and Building a staff intro/FAQ.
I’ve been having an issue where I’m not sure which threads in this category still need attention. I’ve been gratuitously solving & closing threads to work around this, but I think separating actionable items is a better solution.
I like the solving and closing approach.
I think it’s okay for now that some of the actionable things really about the setup of this forum are here in Meta:Forum. I agree that once we’re focusing on using the forum rather than setting it up, that the outreach category is right for the engaging here on actual content. But setup things about the forum still belong here IMO.
I would like to draw a distinction between threads that are about figuring out how discourse works / best practices for how to use each feature and getting our discourse instance ready for public use.
The former feels meta. The latter feel like real, concrete work on the snowdrift project.
Here’s a different framing that might makes more sense: “When should we use categories vs tags?” is a discussion for meta, but I’d prefer to put “Which categories and tags should we create now?” in outreach.
I think you’re just getting confused about use of GitLab. Every clear next-action on getting our Discourse instance ready for public use goes in GitLab. Either the ops repo for sysadmin tasks or the outreach repo for “do this admin stuff” or “post an FAQ” etc.
I don’t think I’m confused. Continuing the framing above, the gitlab issue would be, “Set up initial categories and tags on discourse”. It’s there to track the task, but the place to discuss which categories should actually exist is still discourse (and is outreach, not meta, imo).
I think categories and tags are simply in the fuzzy area that could be in either place, and I see no need to be pedantic about having rules for fuzzy things. Accept some fuzziness, segregate things that are clearly one category versus the other.
This thread is about a tension I feel while using the current setup. I don’t really want to spend more time trying to communicate the tension; I’d rather just try the proposed solution. So, unless you have an objection / reason not to, I will start using the outreach category more (and move a few threads).
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In addition to difficulty keeping track of which threads are actionable, there’s a tension something like this —
Meta discussion is tangential to the actual work of launching the site. It’s useful, but only so far as it improves our communication/process for next time. It’s certainly not what we want to spend all our time doing. In contrast, setting up this forum is actually important for communication with the community.
There’s something stressful to me about going to the category for side-tracks to look for work to do. It makes me feel like I’m procrastinating on the real work I should be doing. That’s a good thing when it applies to actual meta-discussions, just not real work.
I’m not re-opening this thread because I don’t think it’s actually important to discuss this; I just wanted to add context.
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