Community
We’re new, Solid is relatively new and fairly unknown, the whole semantic web movement is largely ignored by most developers, let alone users. So we’ll have an uphill struggle to get developers and users to try solid apps.
So we must do an exceptional job in getting people to participate and try out solid on nextcloud or in their own development projects.
We plan to do all our development in the open, so we should have open communication channels, that people actually want to use. I think there are a few types of channel we should support:
- direct - chat/talk
- asynchronous - forum/messages
- reference - wiki/knowledge base
- afk - talks/meetups/conferences
- existing communities
chat
We currently have a slack channel, but that is not very open. We could open it up, but I think if we want to do that, we might as well switch to something like riot.im - based on matrix.org, or discord, since those are inherently more open. On the other hand, if the chat becomes too popular, we may want a more closed section for day to day stuff anyway.
forum
There are github issues on the project-admin repo, but we’ve decided to use these as current todo’s for the people working on the project. So we shouldn’t let random people in there. We could use the issues in other repo’s, but that might interfere with actuall bugs/issues that early adopters have.
Do we really need a forum anyway? I think we do. It helps offload the direct/chat channel and our personal email addresses. A forum is also a history of questions and answers and can, in a pinch, fill the role of a knowledge base.
I personally favour something like vanillaforms.com, because I like the look and feel. But we could also go for discourse.org. Both have a hosted solution we might want to use to avoid getting bogged down in setting up and hosting it ourselves.
knowledge base
We’re going to have to explain to people how and why to use our software. I don’t think we’ll be able to write a detailed user manual, programmers manual and reference. But if we can write small articles and combine them on a single knowledge base site, we might accidentally write enough content to fake them.
Github has a wiki feature, but we hate those. We could write everything in markdown in git repo’s on github, but I don’t think that’s easy enough to manage or search. I would want a search system that allows for text search as well as tags, date, author, etc.
I found http://docs.raneto.com/ which seems simple enough and might support something like tags if we can add it to the meta block on each page. If we want something a little more complete, I’ve made a prototype system that supports search and tagging using SimplyEdit. I know I’m biased, so I’ll let Ben and Michiel decide if they want to try this.