Dave, Rebecca-

Thanks for posting! Great to hear from you both, and great feedback on Discourse. I can’t speak for the public policy group since I’m no longer part of it, but the feedback will certainly inform the community engagement department’s experimentation.

Thanks-
Luis

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Sr. Director of Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.


On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 9:07 AM, Dave Steer <daves@mozillafoundation.org> wrote:

Hi all -

I recently joined the list. Since it's my first time emailing, I wanted to introduce myself -- I'm Dave Steer. I work on Policy & Advocacy at Mozilla.

I'd be happy to answer any questions about our experience with Discourse. We're just getting started with the platform, so we are experimenting with different types of conversation to see what helps the policy & advocacy community the most.

Our initial idea is to use Discourse in two ways: first, for people who applied to the Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows program to engage with NGOs on specific job and volunteer opportunities. We saw so many qualified people with tech skills that want to participate in policy during the application process and, with Discourse, we want to keep them engaged especially as many NGOs are looking for people with engineering backgrounds to advance their campaigns.

We're also organizing by issue area. Our hypothesis is that email distribution lists are good, but threaded online discussions can be additive with more ongoing, nuanced discussions and organizing.

Experience so far backs up everything that Bekka pointed out. Again, we're in the early stages (please join the conversation!) and happy to report out on what we're learning along the way.

--Dave
_________
Dave Steer
Director, Advocacy
Mozilla Foundation

Email: davesteer@mozillafoundation.org
Cell: 415-845-5110
Twitter: @davesteer and @MozillaAdvocacy
www.mozilla.org/advocacy


On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 1:03 AM, Rebecca Kahn <bekka@p2pu.org> wrote:
Hi All

We've been using Discourse for a while at P2PU, in various deployments ( discussion space for online courses, as a replacement for mailing lists) and have found several things:  
  • It's kind of like the Linux of community management. It takes some work to install and set up properly, and needs a degree of ongoing gardening-care. 
  • It is a slow-burn community building tool because there is quite a high bar to entry and initial engagement (you have to earn a degree of trust permissions in order to participate)
  • On the plus side (and this is a big plus) it's great at filtering out bad stuff. 
  • However, it's also hard to surface good stuff. 
  • Overall, it's fantastic for smaller, highly engaged conversations, and it actively discourages shallow, large scale conversations
If anyone has any more questions about Discourse as a community management tool, let me know, I'm busy writing a report on our deployment of it for a P2PU / Mozilla OER project and am happy to try and answer any questions...

Bekka



On 22 April 2015 at 09:53, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov <dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov@gmail.com> wrote:
@Luis

I would be happy to try this platform and perhaps this group can be one of the first use cases. The current issue I see with this mailing list is that is makes it very hard for newcomers to catch up. The issue I have with Meta is that it doesn't really appeal to non-wiki/non-techie crowds.

Dimi




2015-04-21 17:37 GMT+02:00 Luis Villa <lvilla@wikimedia.org>:
I'm curious to hear what people think of the use of Discourse (http://www.discourse.org/) in this use case; I've been keeping an eye on that project for a long time and think it might be interesting for some of our discussion forums once their support for email <-> forum bridges matures.

Luis

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 7:55 AM, Yana Welinder <yana@wikimedia.org> wrote:
+1.  We've also chatted with their policy team in San Francisco a little bit and they have interesting initiatives in the pipeline. They recently launched an online discussion space for internet policy that you may want to check out: https://discourse.mozilla-advocacy.org

Thanks, 
Yana

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 7:25 AM, Stevie Benton <stevie.benton@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
Hi Dimi,

This is excellent news. I've done some work with Gervase in the past, including recently in some copyright workshops with Open Rights Group. He's really smart and I think he will be an excellent ally.

Thank you,

Stevie

On 21 April 2015 at 14:21, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov <dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello, everybody!

Me and Karl just had a meeting with Mozilla's Jochai (San Francisco based) and Gervase (UK based and on this list). Mozilla will very quickly get active in Brussels hiring a full-time representative.

Their policy goals will be published soon and are centred around "not breaking the internet" and copyright, with a focus on goals such as having an "open norm" (i.e. fair use), an audiovisual citation exception and fighting against linking liability.

We're also likely to experience similar organisational challenges, as they're also looking into a way to ensure a coherent message and strategy and involve their volunteer community.

I personally am excited that we'll have another advocate for free&open things on the ground here.

Cheers,
Dimi




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_________
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Email: davesteer@mozillafoundation.org
Cell: 415-845-5110
Twitter: @davesteer and @MozillaAdvocacy
www.mozilla.org/advocacy