I'm building an OSS thing just for that; simple, built on top of GitHub, doesn't require any hosting, has Q&A...
Shoot me an email and I should be able to direct you to the repo in the next week or two.
Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
41–50 of 70 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
#42Would team discussions be an option? https://help.github.com/articles/about-team-discussions/
Might mean having to bring people into the project as outside collaborators though if I read that correctly.
Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
#43> I'm looking for an app like Discourse that is integrated with github. [...] The only 'must haves' are sign-on-with-github-account, and asynch communications. So, Discourse? It supports OAuth logins, what you need for GH.
I might go with discourse but I can’t afford the saas version ($100/mo) and was hoping to avoid having another thing to maintain.
It's 100% open source, there's a very nice Docker-based install. You can host it yourself on AWS or Digital Ocean for very little money.
Make a free Mailgun account and put your credentials into the Discourse installer and delivery is free up to 10,000 messages.
Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
#44Why do you think stack-exchange is not the right place for questions and user support ?
I'm asking because I am building a tool for tracking mentions on stack-exchange. I need your opinion. ;)
Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
#45This can entirely depend on the type of project and how many active contributors there are - if you have a lot of contributors then you may find more cross-user communications in which case gitter really does help (they answer each others' questions). If there are just a few people able to answer questions or just one (you), then using issues as Q&A would be good enough for now. The latter is quite common with apps r…
I see 19 contributors, which do look small.
19 is very good. Recruiting active contributors is extremely difficult.
Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
#46Why do you think stack-exchange is not the right place for questions and user support ? I'm asking because I am building a tool for tracking mentions on stack-exchange. I need your opinion. ;)
I haven’t looked in a while but I don’t believe there was a way to get notified on a mention. With a small community that would be key
Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
#47We moved the Open Data Kit community from Google Groups to a Discourse forum at
https://forum.opendatakit.org and it's been awesome. Over the last year, we doubled in size (now up to 7,000 members and growing) and a lot of that growth has been enabled by Discourse.
We use the forum for exactly what you described, longer conversations that aren't necessarily tied to a closable issue. And we also use it for all our support requests. Handling support is great on Discourse because the new topic interface shows users (a lot of them non-technical) similar questions and it has great search and SEO.
I think for a small community, Google Groups would work, but my gut says Google Groups is not long for this world. Also, while mailing lists are workable for support, but I find them miserable (e.g., you can't move posts from one topic to another, you can't easily prevent duplication questions).
Anyway, I'd say try Discourse. And if you have any questions about started with Discourse or using it for open source projects, I'm glad to help! My handle is "yanokwa" on Gmail and HN and Twitter and GitHub and pretty much everywhere.
And I guess while I have HN's attention, I can give a quick blurb on Open Data Kit!
Open Data Kit (ODK) is a set of tools that replace paper forms. Our tools are mostly used by social good organizations to collect mission-critical data in difficult environments (e.g., collecting polio vaccination data on 1 million kids in Mogadishu [1], monitoring elections in emerging democracies [2], protecting forests in Indonesia [3]).
I love working on ODK because the project has a measurable positive impact on the world and we have a very kind and welcoming community. As one of the project founders, I'm a little biased, but if you are looking to get into open-source software, ODK is a great project to contribute to.
To get started, go to http://github.com/opendatakit, find a pinned repo, read the readme, and claim a "quick win" issue. Oh, and sign up on the forum http://forum.opendatakit.org and introduce yourself!
[1] http://www.emro.who.int/som/somalia-news/somalia-to-conduct-...
Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
#48I use the free version of slack for https://github.com/nanohop/sketch-to-react-native
I mostly chose it because it was free (despite the 10k message limit - which I don't see us hitting anytime soon), and people already know how to use it. I know about the limitations and problems with it - but it was basically the easiest thing to get started.
Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
That looks really nice and cleaned up, is there a GitHub URL instead? That post leads to a URL that is down.
A bigger project that I have been working for a long time is HelloBox https://www.hellobox.co
Any project that dog-foods is a good sign, in my view. Good luck with it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?
#50A major characteristics that you need to decide upon is how searchable/disposable are you expecting the conversations to be. Coarsely you have forums, mailing lists, and chat options. My own open source projects are split between the different mediums. Chat via something like IRC on freenode (+ matrix if you want extra features) is easy to setup and great for casual discussion or very bursty conversation (time-zone permitting). Mailing lists make for decent multi-day and searchable conversation, but they can pose signal-vs-noise issues (freelist would be a good option). There are various options for forums (e.g. discourse) and they work well for longer lived, but marginally more disposable conversations compared to mailing lists.
As long as you can pick something that the community is interested in using any option should be reasonably viable.