 The Fedora project leader and this is a Fedora council video meeting every month or so we have a meeting where we instead of doing our normal IRC typing ticket wrangling kind of thing we Go to video for sort of a high bandwidth interactive format and usually we check in with somebody in the project about some, you know, some area of the project where something interesting is happening. Or maybe where something seems like it needs important help and we can talk to people about what they're doing and what they need and so on. This time, because it was kind of last minute, I am filling the role of the guest star here and I'm talking specifically about Fedora discussion, our discourse based site that I basically spent the holidays rearranging. So I'm going to talk about that rearrangement and discourse overall and what I think about it and what I think we should do. Before I get to that, just a little bit of council business stuff. We've got a few people here from the council and some guests, which is awesome. These meetings are open to the public anybody can join and of course we put the recordings up later which is if you are not one of the few people here probably how you're seeing this. For the council point of view, I think we're not getting the attendance that we would like to have. So I think it might just be that people are still on vacation. And it might be that maybe we need to look for a new time as we've got a new elected slate of people and everything. So we'll probably do that. So the time might change for future meetings here. But for now, here we are with this one. So yeah, I guess I didn't make slides for this, but I'm going to share my screen after it, but I'll start by doing talking head just a bit. So what is discourse? Discourse is forum software basically, but it is not the forum software of the 90s. It started around 2013, something like that, and it was specifically designed to be modern forum software that would take the lessons, learn from those and do better things. And also specifically to do the same thing for mailing lists. So it is designed to replace mailing list, which is a topic I'm going to get to after a bit, but I need to hold off on it. I'm excited to talk about that, but let's talk about that later. The important thing, though, as a mailing list replacement, of course, we at Fedora have hyperkitty developed here by some of our own awesome people designed and built, which is a improved archiver for mailman mailing lists and a web interface so you can actually post and read the mailing list there. So in some ways it's a competitor to hyperkitty, but it takes a very, very different approach where a hyperkitty is very much mailing list, mailing list archive first. So mailing list, the open standard of email is sort of the greatest common factor or lowest common denominator if you prefer that everything else is built on. And then hyperkitty is a layer on top of that that provides a web UI and some other features. Whereas discourse is very much, you know, the web forum is the home of everything. And as I'll show, you can actually interact with it very well just through email. I'm not actually going to demo the email part, but I'll show where we explain that. It actually can be an email first workflow if that is what you prefer and has pretty nice features for that, much better than, again, the traditional PHP, BB or BB style things. But it definitely is forum first, and there are some things that, you know, you'll come to the forum to manage or see. And there are things that don't necessarily get translated to email because hyperkitty in a lot of ways, you know, decided to hold itself to email is the common standard. And this says, you know, the forum post is the common standard and email is an output. So different different approach there. I'm not going to go on too much about hyperkitty, but I think there is a crucial thing which is, you know, I really love and support hyperkitty. And I think it was great that we developed that. But there is also a reality which there's two big things in reality, I guess. One of them is when hyperkitty was launched, you know, we didn't really have the resources to do a big project like that. And we did it anyways. So Aurelian and developers working on that Fedora infrastructure team people. Awesome. Of course, Mo Duffy doing the design. That was a lot of awesome work. But it turned out because it was under resource to be something like three years delayed from its initial launch point. That might be an exaggeration. It was delayed from its initial launch. And by the time it finally got launched, you know, the management was kind of looking skeptically at this. And basically it was a, well, finally that's done. We can pull the resources off of it thing. And of course it's an open source project and, you know, things have advanced. And I know there are Fedora community people right now working on bringing our version of what we have in Fedora up to the latest version, which will have some niceties and new features. But on the whole, the design of hyperkitty and the way it works is basically how it was in 2014 even when it's been coming in. Whereas discourse in the past, you know, seven, eight years has made huge improvements and continues to make them. And, you know, there's new features and improvements every month. So, you know, new isn't always better, but there's just a lot of stuff going on in discourse, which is nice to hitch ourselves to, I guess, really. And it is a completely open source project. It's not open core or anything like that is fully open source, which is awesome. We actually choose to have it hosted because of reasons, but we could host it ourselves and someone else could host it if they would like to. So I do think that this is the future of our asynchronous communication in Fedora. That is when we're writing messages back and forth that kind of take more thought and maybe have a longer form and a longer discussions. We have the new Matrix Fedora chat, which is there to be our, you know, a bridge to IRC, and that's kind of the real time discussion. I know we had a little talk recently about whether asynchronous and synchronous are the right terms for that, but it's kind of the basic concept. Like the chat is for when you want to interact with somebody right now back and forth, and it's kind of ephemeral. It's, you know, when the chat is done, you're done, and it can go away. Whereas the forum thing is, you know, more thoughtful and makes a record and you might go back and read what somebody posted last week. Whereas unless you're looking for something specific, it's pretty unlikely that you'll scroll back in a chat. And, you know, even on a forum, you can reply to somebody from a week ago, and that's not bad form. You can even reply to somebody from two years ago with possibly less good results, but it's still there. Whereas if you reply to a chat message from two years ago, you don't really expect anybody to be anything but like, what are you talking about? So those two things kind of complement there. And so this is our answer to the one half of it. And again, I'll talk about mailing list more at the end. Okay, so I said that over break. I did a huge rearrangement of the site and the how we got here thing. Wait, let me stop. Does anybody have any questions about all that stuff I just spewed? So just as a comment to break the flow a bit is I really, really hope that people realize that forum forums didn't go anywhere. And we're still a very valuable communication media. And from what I see, like, this course is one of the best tools for the job. I really like the minimalistic approach to the content it takes. So, yeah, if any people listening to this or like hearing it later don't know what this course is yet, try to take a look and don't feel like forum is something old school, which you know how it works. This course works differently and it's worth looking at. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. And yeah, I noticed like the Linux Foundation is using it for a new project. Python uses that Firefox in Mozilla in general. I was looking at something like a matplotlib, which is a little Python library. They've got their own discourse instance. I think it's very rapidly actually becoming the primary communication platform for a lot of open source projects, at least the ones where GitHub tickets aren't their main communication platform. So, yeah, the how we got here thing, we had a thing called Ask Fedora, which was basically a Stack Exchange knockoff using some an open source platform to implement a Q&A thing. But that software was also under resourced and the design of it really was just sort of something to make something that looked like Stack Exchange and it didn't really function in the same way as a Q&A site under the hood. It didn't have a lot of the moderation tools and things to make it really successful. And it became pretty frustrating. So the folks running that site, the Ask Fedora community at Fedora, decided that we would try moving it to discourse as a new possibility. So we have that running ask.fodoraproject.org. And at the same time as we set that up, we decided, hey, let's also set up one just kind of for more general discussion. So we set up discussion.fodoraproject.org kind of on a whim that same night we were setting up Ask Fedora. And that partly became because the CoreOS and SilverBlue folks were looking for some kind of forum-based place to have discussions. So that was the original setup. And basically at that time we set up some initial categories for the forum. And again, I wish I had smartly taken a screenshot of what it looked like before. But basically we had some server, desktop, whatever categories at the top, and then project topics, and then other top-level categories. And then a bunch of categories underneath that subcategories kind of as one does in a forum. And there were several problems with that. One is the user discussion part of it kind of became confusing between Ask Fedora and this. Like if I have a question about SilverBlue, where do I go to talk? And the other problem is as people, teams kept saying, kind of coming to it and saying, hey, this is neat. Can we have one? We started having like 20 subcategories underneath one of the categories. And that is just a UI mess. And then when you go to enter a topic, you've got to like go scroll through a long list of categories. And it may be some actual different forum software handles that very well, but actually discourse turns out to not handle a lot of categories particularly nicely. And so we started talking about how to do a redesign. And actually Alexandra suggested a tag-first approach. So tags may be familiar with the concept. It's basically instead of putting things into a hierarchy, you just attach a label to it. And it turns out that these tags as discourse uses them can actually work a little bit like subcategories, but without the limitations. So having given a background, I'm going to screen share and log into an account here and we'll see how this goes. Am I successfully sharing? Yes. You are. Excellent. I'm going to donate a fake Matt DM account. In general folks, don't make fake Fedora accounts. It's not useful. But if you want to make them fake, put the name fake in them. So that's very helpful. So I've already got this set up here and we'll see. So basically it's linked to your Fedora account. I'm going to skip these tips here. But if you are new to discourse, these tips are actually pretty useful. There's a little intro tour and things that kind of guide you through the features. But if you're impatient, you can skip them. We'll also see that we have a lovely cookie notice here at the bottom. I am very sorry about this. But as the banner says, the compliance people made us do it. This really is a legal obligation we have. And we actually, as the more information will tell you, we have a very minimal use of cookies here. There are actually cookies that are needed to do something. And this is a terrible law. But there it is. We can say fine. I did get this notice cleared by legal. So they didn't mind my slightly dismissive sarcasm. There we go. And that requirement is part of what we're doing to go get the vendor that sells the company that makes discourse onboarded into as a Red Hat vendor. So Red Hat can do the thing that they've offered to do, which is sponsor this in a way that isn't going on a personal Red Hatters credit card for reimbursement, which is not a good system. And it will let us actually go up to the enterprise tier for hosting, which I don't know if I have time to talk about today, but I'm excited for the potential there. All right. So here is the layout. There's a banner here at the top where it shows you the new things here. I will probably take away the party favors things soon, but that's the top banner, and it kind of shows you these get started guides here, which I'll get to in a little bit. I'm going to dismiss the banner right now and just kind of give the overview. Here on this side, basically, I don't know if we can, if you can see my cursor. On the left side, we've got the categories here, and there's a few of them. And on the right side, there's just a latest articles on the latest posts on the forum right here. You kind of see activity there, which I think is actually a really important thing. Again, I'm not going to complain about HyperKitty too much, but one of the problems with HyperKitty really is the view of it that you see first is basically HyperKitty as an archive, and you see a view of lists, and then you kind of drill into them to see what's going on. But your first view of it is you're pretty deep before you see conversation, and this kind of puts conversation right out in front. You know, that's something that could be improved in HyperKitty, but we don't have the resources to do something like that. And here it is already in this, which I appreciate. Now, the UI for discourse isn't always perfect. It's got its own quirks, but it does have a lot of things that I like here. So the categories over on the left side here are kind of the things that I made the biggest changes to here. So instead of having a lot of different categories and subcategories, we actually just broke it down to just a very few categories here. So the top thing here is news and announcements, and that basically is what it says. This is important things that get sent out to everybody. The community blog goes here, and new podcast episodes are separated out, and then other sorts of announcements can be put in there. We are looking at possibly adding the announce list to this, and Ben and I were talking about an idea, or maybe our Fedora announce list in general through this that we'll talk about more later. So there's the announcements there. And then sort of the meat of the site is this project discussion area. This is basically where all of the discussion about what's going on in Fedora can go. And so you can click on this top-level view here, and you can see all of the different discussion. But there's actually another view, and one of the things I need to do is kind of emphasize this in the UI. But we have these different tags here, and these different tags each represent a different team in Fedora that is using the site for communication. So we can go here and click on the Council tag. And so this basically is a subcategory of all of the different topics that are about the Fedora Council and what we're doing. On the Fedora Council. And you can see we've got a lot of stuff there. And one of the nice things about tags is you can see that some of these things can actually be tagged into different things. So it's kind of like cross-posting on a mailing list by adding different tags to the posts themselves. Also see that when I'm looking at this tag view here, there's a little bell up in the right. And so this bell is not really obvious, but it's very important. This is how you subscribe to the tag. So you click on the bell and then you can choose to be watching it, which will notify you whenever somebody posts. You can just watch the first post. So that's the intro to the topic. And then you can decide if you want to follow that. Or there's some other things where you can like, I never want to see this thing. I don't care about the Fedora Council at all. Or you can say tracking, which is actually a useful thing, which I'm going to turn this into tracking for fake MACDM. And we'll show what that is later. So you can go to your different teams and you subscribe basically to all the ones that you think might be interesting by going through these things here. Or you can actually go into your preferences as a user. Click on your username there and go over to the preferences. And you can choose the teams and tags to subscribe to using this interface as well. Why is it not show the ones I just selected? I don't know. A little bit concerning. We'll worry about that when it's not a live demo of things. So that's basically the idea is this is where the main discussion goes. If you want to start a conversation, say here in the marketing tag, the easiest way is to go to that marketing tag and then hit new topic is then this new form here will fill out with the marketing tag already selected and in the project discussion forum. So you add your title here. This little thing over here is advice because I'm a new user. Yes, very helpful. And then I can actually start typing. And this is markdown formatted. Oh, it gets, you know, you can do headlines and all that kind of thing. And if you have a link. This and they do say have a word like marketing. And you paste over the link. Look at magically makes it into a hyperlink there so you get a nice preview as you're typing on the side and also see the actual way it looks and then you create the topic. You could also change the tags here or add new tags and we could post in a different category if we wanted as well. The podcast category. I need to fix that. I think Matt Demm shouldn't be allowed to post in the podcast category. I'll get those out of the way. But we'll discard that post for now and kind of go back to the top. So another important thing we have here is a section called the water cooler. Now, I don't know how internationally this metaphor translates, but basically it's, you know, at the office back when people went into offices, you go to the break room, you get you get a drink and you stand around chatting with other people getting coffee or whatever in there and sort of it's a non work social sort of space. So here, rather than having the tags that are team based, we've got introductions off topic random. If you want to talk about something that's not Fedora, but other open source technology things that are generally interesting to Fedora people, this is the place for it. And one of the nice things that we can easily do on a forum is if there's something interesting that kind of branches off topic that was posted in, you know, say the council thing, we can just easily move it to on off topic. We don't have to shut the conversation down. We can just say, here's a place for that and it can go there, which is, you know, basically impossible, impossible to do with mailing lists. There's a gigantic introduce yourself thread here. And if you're new to Fedora discussion or new to Fedora, I encourage you to add yourself there. Again, fake Matt damn will not be doing that. Then we have the site help and feedback category here and this has some pinned posts here. That give you tips and tricks. This is basically kind of what I'm talking about right now with all the different categories are for. One of the things is you can unpin that post if you've read it. And then when you go back to site feedback, it'll no longer be stuck at the top so you can read the different things. If you don't need to see that anymore, you can unpin it or if you'd like to keep it at the top, you can keep it pinned. This here is one of the very important ones that I was mentioning. This is a guide to interacting with the site with email and you can read this yourself. I'm not going to go through all of it, but basically you can change it to make all of your notifications always come as emails. And then all of the things that you're watching are subscribed to become basically email. So subscribing to a tag becomes like subscribing to that mailing list. And actually the site help and feedback here reminded me of another thing I wanted to show. I showed about muting all about subscribing to and muting all of the different tags. So one of the things that might be tempting to do is go through and be like, watch all the things you're interested in and mute all the things you don't care about. And like go through, you know, 50 tags and do that, which sounds tedious. It turns out you don't have to do that to get a good view, which and wait, I don't want to change it yet. I'm going to come back to that. There's another way to do that. But I do want to show a couple of things really quickly. Yeah, site help and feedback and there's also the CentOS category here. CentOS people ask us for a space. I'm actually not quite sure how this is all going to fit in, but I think it's good for us to collaborate with them. So there's a space for things to happen in CentOS there as well. I see it's not very active right now. If it continues to not be very active, we might retire it, but it's an experiment. We also see muted categories at the bottom, just like you can subscribe to a mute tags. You can do that to whole categories. And we actually have some categories that are muted by default. These are what we call team workflow categories. And basically in the site scheme, the reason for having a category rather than a tag is if site functionality is different there somehow. So in this projects and copper category, all the topics are actually created automatically when you create a copper repository. So that's very different and actually there's like 30,000 topics in there. So putting that aside made sense. And then Fedora Magazine actually uses their category for a very specific workflow where you propose new articles there. So that's not really meant for Fedora Magazine general discussion. There's a magazine tag up in the project discussion area that's for magazine project discussion. This is for actually the workflow of Fedora Magazine. And then there's stuff like this Kanban test where, wow, something's not great with this theme here. And I don't have the right permissions to use this properly, but basically there actually is an experimental thing that actually turns a category into a Kanban board. But it's obviously not working, right? It's kind of a toy, but it's kind of a neat thing to have the possibility there. And like I said, discourse development continues. So that actually might turn into something super useful sometime in the future. So those are the categories there. So let me go back to my tip, which is this is the default homepage view here with the categories on the side and all of the hot topics on the other side here. But you can actually change your default view. And one of the most useful ones is the unread view, which I don't have any unread views because I didn't write to anything yet. But what happens is things that you are watching here, unread topics, will show up in this list. So you can actually go into your preferences here and to the interface and change the default homepage to unread. And I find that to be a really useful way to sort of keep up with what's going on. That way, when you come to the site, what you'll see instead of that categories view, you'll get this by default. And it'll basically be all the things you're involved in and interested in, the things you're tracking or watching in addition to posts you've actually done something with. And you can also subscribe to and mute individual topics. If there's something here that's annoying you, you can just say mute that one and it won't show up there again. Yeah, so that's basically the demo overview here of what's going on. And I really do hope to get a lot of teams kind of moving to this whole thing. Oh yeah, one other thing you can see right here. In addition to team tags, I created mind share and engineering tags. It's basically the kind of big halves are our org chart. And those are there for topics that are kind of general or for topics that are, you don't know where to put it. Maybe the team isn't active on discussion, but you want to talk about it there anyways. You can kind of put that in engineering or put it in mind share and we can have that conversation there and maybe give it a more specific tag later or add tags. But this kind of a way to have those broad topics and also to not make it feel too complicated. So if you don't know where to put something, pick one of those. It will be fine and we'll sort it out. And I'm going to stop sharing here. Questions, anybody more talking, you feel free to put your video back on here. I'll ask the first question of many that I could throw out there for you. So obviously, behavior that violates the code of conduct should continue to be reported to the code of conduct repo but for things that are more general moderation issues where you know miss filed topics or spam or something who moderates discussion and how do people report that. Yeah, that's a very good question. So there is a moderation team and you can actually, I actually should let me share my screen back again here. So if you go to, well, actually about, there's actually several useful things here. First of all, the terms of service for the site here. So talk about the code of conduct that's referenced here. But I think in some ways this middle section is more important, which is that moderation on a site isn't necessarily all about code of conduct. It's about a good flow of conversation and making things pleasant for people. And not everything that gets moderated activity rate goes to the level of code of conduct, which is kind of a big hammer situation. So not everything that's a problem, you know, certainly somebody put something in the off topic place. That's not a code of conduct issue. But even also discussions that are getting too heated a little bit too much back and forth. Some things might need to cool down. Like there are moderation tools for that. And the code of conduct probably isn't the right thing. So we kind of try to have some levels before it gets to a code of conduct issue. But over here on the about thing, you can see the moderators on the site. It is a number of volunteers here and number of people who are admins. Jason Brooks is Marie's boss at Red Hat and is the person who is actually doing the credit card funding I was talking about. That's why he's an admin here. I'd actually love no offense Jason to kick him off being an admin because it's not something he's actually actively involved in. But we do appreciate the paying the bill. So we have moderators here for the site in general. There actually is a topic in site feedback if you're interested in helping us with moderation to you can reply to that. It's also also possible to assign moderators to a specific category. Unfortunately, that can't be done by tag but for those workflow categories, we can assign specific moderators to there. So if there is a post that is something that has needs attention. What you can do is use this little that's the bookmark one. Wait, where is the flag tool? Oh, do you know what? I can't I cannot flag things. This is part of why my users is restricted for some things because I just created the Fedora the Matt fake Matt DM account. I cannot actually flag things because I have. I'm in a restricted state when you create a new user until you've spent some time on the site, you don't actually get full access to all of those tools. And that's basically that it creates keep spammers from creating accounts and then flagging a bunch of stuff and causing a bunch of trouble. There's kind of there needs to be an asymmetric thing where it is easier for moderators to moderate than it is for trouble makers to make trouble and that's part of the protections there. But if you go to the site and it is it really doesn't take that much activity to get to what's called trust level one and then you can flag posts and that's what is what you should do. There's a flag icon there. Then you can come back on the screen here again. Thank you for that wonderful question. Did I answer it sufficiently? You did. Other questions. I wanted to comment on, like, again, the forum approach and why we think it's a replacement for memo. Sorry. Yeah, so one of the concerns people have over these new ways of communication, especially messengers is that it messengers introduce this short thinking and communicating. In smaller form like in a couple of sentences and mailing list traditionally is a place where you spend some time on designing your text on thinking about a complex topic and describing it in many words and in some structured way. And the one thing which I really like about this course is that this editing interface is actually promote writing a longer form. It has this preview option. You can also like increase your edit field and make a full screen editing interface. And so when you interact with forum in some places like especially in water cooler section communicating with short form is nice and working. But when you try to participate in some deeper discussion, the one suggestion is like keep it like don't split your thoughts into in hundreds of small messages and try to think about your posting for maybe longer time. This course has draft option where you can start writing something, work around for half an hour, come back and continue and go back to this next day or whatever whenever you feel like it. So don't try to be fast. Try to be complete on your thoughts. And this is I think important for project discussions as a general rule that we want them to be like deep on the content and not a very shallow conversations. This will increase the quality of our communication here. Yeah, I very much agree. Thanks. There's actually there's some forum tools actually that can help that as well. One of them is called slow mode, which when there's a thread which is getting a lot of back and forth like that where it would be maybe beneficial for people to slow down and maybe put their thoughts together into posts. It's not that we don't want to hear them, but I can put them together instead of back and forth conversation like that. You actually make it so that you require an hour between replies for each person so that every person, you think about the reply that you put there. That's not something we'd use for everything, but it's a tool that provides us. Another example, not necessarily of that heated back and forth, but in some of the threads we've had recently about Fedora changes, these tend to be kind of some of our biggest changes on threads on develop list. They've tended to kind of veer away from the topic about the change to some other design considerations about software that's tangentially related stuff. That's important things about encryption, things like that, but which aren't actually part of the main topic. It's really easy and discourse to break that out into a completely other thread and move other topics over there. On a mailing list, people can choose to rename the title, but often people don't, or it gets to be a mismatch of some renamed topics and some not, and the thread still all becomes entangled. This gives us a tool to sort of move those to other conversations. One of the big things that's key to the design of discourse that is basically fundamental to what they're going for is there is not a nested threading model. Basically, all the replies go down the list. Even though it actually does keep track of who replied to, if you click on the reply to a message, it will keep track of that, and it can associate those, but it doesn't present them that way. The fundamental thinking behind that is actually those big long-threaded discussions don't work very well. As someone who's participated in a lot of those, you can look at the mailing list archives. I've kind of come to believe that is true. A lot of the long offshoots tend to be people going back and forth and not really being part of the big conversation. Those things can be broken out to other threads, or we can even say, hey, can you take that to chat to work that out? Basically, the idea that long threads just don't work, period, on a forum, a mailing list, anywhere else. Once a discussion gets so long, who has time for that? This kind of actually encourages things to be shorter and, as Alexander said, more thoughtful, and I think that's actually useful. And again, there's a way to break out to other things when you do need that other conversation. It's not shutting down the discussion. It's just kind of trying to keep it more focused on something that's about the topic at hand, and I think that is really a useful thing. More questions, let's do it. Marie, you said you had some. I do. So I noticed that you have an experiment going with discourse and Fedora badges. Yeah. So of course, I'm going to get excited and want to know what that's all about and maybe how people could get involved or just status and if it's something that's going to happen. So discourse on their own have badges for the forum, but they're all very forum-oriented badges, like you made the first post. People are familiar with badges.FedoraProject.org, which is loading that. Badges is another thing that actually came around the same time as Hyperkitty, like seven years ago in Fedora. Game of the ... Okay. I'm back. I'm sorry. I'm not sure what happened there. No worries. Am I back? You are back. Let me go back to the sharing. It took that long for the badges to load anyways, so I think that's okay. The badges break your connection. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. So this is the Fedora badges site, and it's pretty neat. We've got a leaderboard of people compete for the most badges and a whole bunch of different badges here. This is going to take a long time to load here when I click this. Oh, hey, wow. It was fast. I take that back. Cool. Good job, badges. So this is all the different badges you can earn for all sorts of different things, like developing the badges stack. You get this cool rocket badge and so on. That might be relevant to what else you're saying. Here is for updating the comps collection of packages. You can get this badge for doing these different kind of things. And there are badges for testing and then for Fedora attending and working at Fedora events, all sorts of different things here. The badges are pretty neat, and it actually has a lot of potential to do a lot more than we have with them. And so one of the problems is this software was developed a long time ago. And like again, a lot of these things ended up being under resourced. It was developed, put out there, and then there were no more resources for further updates. So it's kind of slow, and there's some features we like. It doesn't have. And right now it's in trouble because it needs to get updated to Python 3 from Python 2 and to actually keep running. So it needs some work. So I did an experiment where I made a little bot that uses the Discourse API to actually award people these same badges. It basically copies the badges they've earned from the badges site to Fedora discussion here. So if we look at real MathEM, we can see the badges that I have here on the site. There are a few implementation things here. They're small because of some graphics weirdness. They actually should be the same size as on the site. That's easily fixed. But the basic idea is I don't know if we can entirely replace the badge system, but we definitely want to at least mirror the badges to Fedora discussions so that they are more visible. So that right now one of the big problems is the badges are just there on badges. A lot of people who are active in the project don't even know they exist. And if you get a badge, you don't know that you got something cool, which makes it hard to kind of use this as an inspiration. So one of the things we'd like to do with badges is make badge paths, which are things like if you're new to Fedora, here are four badges you can go for. You sign up for signing the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement. Introduce yourself on Fedora discussion. I don't know. Some other thing you should do as a new user. Again, those are going to be the four first steps to get. And then you do these four badges and then you might get a Fedora first level Fedora badge or something like that that kind of shows you've completed those steps. But as it is right now, we don't have a good way to even present those pathways to people. And we could have things for you. You join the docs team. These are the steps you need to do to join the docs team, those sorts of things and even more complicated paths. We don't have an interface for doing that. But we also right now, we don't even have a way to expose that to people. Having the badges upfront center here really makes it so that people are more interested in using it and something that they can see it there all the time. So it was kind of hard to find the badges section. Like you had to click through a lot of things to do that. Is there a way we can make it more visible? Yeah, so there's several things. Let me go back to the sharing guy. I probably shouldn't have stopped sharing, but it's okay. Yeah, so there are definitely a lot of things we can do. So first of all, right, I had to go up in the hamburger menu up here and find badges there to find it. But they are also available on everybody's profile on Chrome. I'm not sure what's going on there. All right, well, stopping sharing again. There are several things we can do. We can certainly make them more prominent in the UI. We can make a badges link up to the top. But it is also the case that badges, if you click on a person's profile, not just on their profile page, but also on the little pop-up that comes up by each user, you see their top badges and the number of badges they have. And we can also make it so people can select a badge as Flare to show up by their name. And actually they can pick the user, the badge name to be their title on the forum, which is kind of a way to kind of expose people to the badges. And the people can see, oh yeah, Matthew Miller, he's got Apex. How do I get Apex? And become the next Fedora Project Leader. That kind of thing. You can see those titles. And we might be able to actually make them interspersed in other places in the UI where it might make sense as well. So yeah, I think we can make them more prominent that way. Thanks for answering that question. And another thing that is nice about the forum over mailing lists and so on is obviously you can send images in mailing lists via HTML attachments and so on, but most mailing lists strip attachments and it's poor form to send HTML mail. It's easy to put an image in a post on the forum. And so if you want to have your team have a post about the badges you can earn, you can actually show the pictures of the badges there and make a graphical post. And it does actually support adding alt tags and things for accessibility easily as well. So kind of best of both worlds thing. Bringing accessibility up, it would be interesting to try to evaluate discussion page on accessibility factors. Yeah. One of the things I did do, the color palette that I picked is from a color blind friendly palette that Moe worked up for me. So I hope that that is largely the actual case. But I do think there are other things we could work on accessibility. I know that the upstream project does use the ARIA tags. There's some stuff for voice readers and things that are in the upstream software that hopefully help. But I think it would be good to evaluate ours separately and see what we could do to make improvements. And again, this is one of the things that would be nice to have in Hyperkitty, but I don't think that we do. But that we kind of get quote for free by following an upstream project that's more active and has the ability to add these kind of things in. On implementing it itself. So right now this is all done by a very hacky script that I wrote that basically calls the badges API and calls the discourse API and goes back and forth. So there's a lot of things we could do to actually make that a lot more seamless. If you're interested, there's a post on discourse about what to do next. Especially if you're a Python programmer and this is interesting to you, we've got some things that would be kind of fun to work on. I see we're getting to the hour here. Are there other crucial questions? Because I have a pitch to make. I will throw one crucial question at you real quick. So prior to the reorganization, people could open new topics in a particular category by sending an email to an awesome address. But with the tags, you can't email to a tag. So for people who want to use email as their way of starting conversations or as a way to implement integration between other services, how can they do that? Yeah, so previously, basically, there was a magic address that was attached to each category. And you can't do that to tags. I've actually asked discourse to look at what it would take to implement that. So that's one of the things they're going to, they're researching and they get back to me on. And it may be something that if we're interested in that, we could actually work on adding that as an open source feature to it. And I think they'd be interested in taking that if we'd add it. But in the meantime, so the first thing I should say is you can reply to topics. No problem. It's the issue of starting a brand new topic because basically whenever you get a notification by email, there is a magic long string. That's the key that you have to send back in order to properly reply so that no one else can spoof sending your reply. So starting a new topic has a risk, which is anybody can basically spoof your address if you have a valid, but they know the address you've used on the forum. They can spoof it and post as that user, which we haven't had a problem with. Hopefully we won't have a problem with, but it is, you know, a vulnerability. Of course, it's the same vulnerability that all mailing lists have. So when we've had only minimal problem with that over the years. So it is the workaround is I did create a category where all of the email is directed at. I think it's Dora dash discussion. There's a link to it on that interactive side by email thing. If you email to that address, it will go into a moderation queue. And one of the moderators can tag the post and put it where it's supposed to go. That's not ideal. But as long as we don't have hundreds of people starting topics by email every day, I think it's a workaround for now in the future. In addition to the idea of having, you know, per tag email addresses or something like that, there's the possibility of making something that processes incoming email and looks for keywords and assigns tags based on those or even looks for, you know, things in the hashtag kind of format and those as tags if they exist. So we have potential other things in the future. So I'm hoping this is kind of just a temporary workaround. I mean, the other thing is, you know, starting a topic is less frequent of a thing to do than to reply to a topic. So it's not necessarily the most horrible thing to ask people to go to the interface to start a topic. But I would prefer to make it as flexible and available to people as possible. And yeah, that'll segue into my grand thing, which is I would really actually like to eventually replace all of our non-announce mailing lists with this. And by eventually I don't, you know, I don't have a timeline for that. If we mentioned, was that before we started recording that I'm the Fedora project leader, not the Pope of Fedora. So I don't get to declare this. If I were going to declare, I would say by the end of the year, let's switch. Let's just do it. But I know we're not really ready for that. And I've got a lot of convincing to do, but I would like to start doing that convincing because I think this brings us a lot of things. And one of those is having discussion in one place. I realize the irony of that right now, because at this point it is now another thing and we split the discussion further. But it actually turns out that we have a lot of discussion, you know, in different mailing lists that really aren't connected to each other at all. Even though they're both in hyperkitty, you know, you kind of have to go back out and back in again to the mailing list and they can ever be kind of reconnected. People can cross-post, but that's really messy if people aren't subscribed to all of the lists. It just kind of, that actually makes discussions a huge mess. It's half of the people are subscribed to only one of the lists. The threads get all broken up. And this handles that kind of thing neatly. And it can kind of be a central place where we can tie into, for example, for the Fedora council. I made a little, another experimental hacky bot that basically when someone makes a pegger ticket in our track, ticket tracker, it actually creates a discourse thread to go with it and says, hey, here's a new ticket. Comment on this ticket over here. That way you keep the ticket to just being the business part of things that need to be recorded in a ticket, which a ticket is good for, and the discussion over in the discussion area where everybody else can see it. And I think that kind of thing will really be helpful to the project with a lot of different, you know, sharing of what's going on and different things going on side by side, rather than in different silos. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to have, you know, when the CentOS people said they were interested, I said, sure, let's figure out how to put CentOS here as well. Because even though that's a distinct project, obviously we've got some strong ties to our friends over at CentOS. So having that connection, I think, is a good and useful thing to have. So that's my goal. I don't think we'll have it this year, but I actually do think that getting to having that goal and putting a time on it and doing it more quickly than, you know, let's keep this going for 10 years is probably good because of getting all of that conversation in one place. And as I was saying, you know, this is where a lot of open source discussion is going to. There is, you know, these discourse forums for a lot of different sites, a lot of different technologies is what they're using. And, you know, when I went to that matplot lab, matplotlib thing, I was actually really glad to see that because I could find posts in a familiar interface there. And also, I didn't have to sign up for another mailing list to kind of get involved and ask a question. And that just had me thinking as someone who's, you know, I use lots of mailing lists every day, I've signed up for lots of mailing lists. And I think when was the last time I was interested in some open source project and went and looked at their home and thought, yeah, I want to sign up for their mailing list. It's been a really long time. Even like I said, I'm an old school mailing list person. But I think that by asking new people coming to Fedora to kind of get on board with our mailing lists, that's going to be increasingly a barrier to entry and we can make that easier for people. And yeah, that is going to be some change for a lot of us who've been here for a while and are used to and comfortable with the mailing list way of doing things. But I think it'll ultimately be good. And we see mailing lists changing already. I know, you know, I see top posting on the Fedora develop mailing list quite often. And it used to be that, you know, no one would ever do that. And then for a while, as anyone who did that guy yelled at, and now we're just kind of like, oh, top posting. And I won't go too much into that. But, you know, basically top posting already breaks the traditional things everybody are looking for from the mailing list. And then there's a whole problem of just what the future of is of email on the open internet in itself. That's a whole nother thing. But I don't think mailing lists are our future. And I think this is that's my that's my pitch here. And I'm going to try and refine that pitch and convince more of you over the next, you know, few months, I hope, actually, even if the few months isn't the end goal. All right, this has gone on long, but that's what happens when I am talking and also, you know, running the meeting. Do anyone else have any other questions or comments before we wrap up? I have a question on actually trying to achieve a plan you say by the end of the year. Do you think it's worth like doing monthly reminders on Fedora mailing list that the form exists and they can try it? Maybe quarterly reminders like inviting people to actually take a look because I think initial announcement was happened. But when people just are not aware of new developments and maybe it's beneficial to remind. I'm not sure about orderly announcements yet, but maybe I definitely have on my list of things I still plan to do a community blog post. And actually, I have three things I want to do, a develop list post, a community blog post, and a Fedora magazine post about the fun way to do list. I'm probably going to wait till after DevConf to do them at this point because I do have to write my DevConf talk and it's coming up sooner than I thought. But yeah, I think we'll set out more announcements and the idea of maybe sending out some more general posts about it. Maybe actually in some ways it's a reminder of it, but also here's some things that went on on this mailing list or on the forum to the mailing list to help actually also buy a useful bridge. It's not just an advertisement, but also there's topics that are happening that you might want to be aware of. Yeah, I actually considered the idea of having a special tag to mark some interesting threads on discussion for like a digest purpose so that we can send this snippet of this into mailing list. But maybe like doing it in this complicated process is not needed, but just a random choice of five topics to look at and the reminder that this exists and you can take a look could be good enough. Yeah, and discourse does have a digest feature of its own where it can actually send you a weekly thing of pop happenings on the site. Personally, I never found that kind of thing very useful, but I know some people do like that. So that feature does exist, but it is it's personalized. It's not kind of a develop personalized to the develop less. The other thing that Ben and I were kind of talking about which is a not is a half baked idea. We've got a bunch of announce lists and like I said, I think announced like an ounce lists are good use of mailing lists. It's a push kind of thing where you want to send out some things. I think we'll probably have an ounce lists for, you know, tell email entirely collapses. Right now are we're kind of haphazard on how we deal with the moderation for these announced lists. They basically go to a moderation queue and then somebody looks at them and passes them on. And so one of the things discourse can do is actually be a meet have a read only mirror of a mailing list where we actually have, you know, like the announced list come into that now use an announcement section of the web of the site. But that has some problems, some of them technical and some of them just kind of annoying like if we're going to put announcements in the mailing list and then we also want to have a pretty formatted version of it. We can end up with duplicate announcements on discourse. So Ben had the idea of possibly making the discourse announced posts the first level thing and then have those go to the announced list. And so the way that would work is we'd actually have a workflow category, which would be pending announcements, and we could put posts there. And I think it's limited to admins. It might be moderators can mark the post with a timer that says, you know, this is scheduled to go at 7 o'clock Tuesday morning, which is something we don't have for mailing lists. We have it for magazine and comp log, but not for that. Just a minute. My wife is saying it's time for you to be done with your meeting. So I will hurry this up. But I've totally lost my train. Oh, yeah. So basically we can have an area for scheduled posts and then they could go at the schedule time they would go to the announce category. And then at the same time, we would have that message go to the announce list as well. And we could maybe make it so that that is the only ingress route to the announce list or we could have it also just be in parallel. I'm not sure how we've got several possibilities. And we could do that where it could generate both a the markdown version of it as a plain text version and an HTML attachment. If people are ready for HTML versions of their email to become on the footer announce list. I'm not I'm not sure, but we could do things like that as well. And I think having that like review queue and timed sending rather than sending to the moderation queue and then having somebody look over it right when it's time to send it out probably will increase the quality of our announcement posts and make us feel more confident on release day mornings and things like that as well. But there's details to work out on that. And yeah, I guess it's time for me to have some lunch. Ben, this is the time in the meeting where I put you on the spot. What's our next video meeting. So our next video meeting will be about the Apple project will have Carl George and Troy Dawson on February 10th coming stock to us. Nice. That was that was excellent there. Thank you everybody for coming. Thank you for questions and comments and everything and I'll talk to you later. Bye. Thanks Matthew.