What to rename "community-topics" to as a forum tag

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This is a new discussion (split from Replacing news-for-maintainers - #5) so I’m going to split it out to a new topic and then tag the original - yay forums :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

That’s fair, we’re figuring it out. I think in general the SC’s work is still part of the project and belongs in Project Discussions (certainly more than it belongs here or in Get Help).

Again fair. My thinking is that today, the community-topics is a mix of collection/package related things, and then some higher level discussions (actually this one is kinda both). So I think we need a tag for each type. I’ve created collections for the former - for the latter, I was planning to borrow Fedora’s idea of mindshare, but it doesn’t copy neatly. Does anyone have any ideas for what to name that?

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I think community-topics matches to a few tags. Looking at the description in the community-topics repo:

The scope of the topics is changes impacting the Ansible community, contributor experience, Ansible Community package, and community collections.

https://github.com/ansible-community/community-topics

The topics in scope seem to include:

  • Meetings (this seems obvious, meeting tag)
  • Changes (this could be #changes , proposal or idea for ex., I prefer proposal if it will be used for voting later)
  • Voting (vote)
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I have to think more on this, but I want to make sure there’s a way to mark something as a proposal or discussion item for the Steering Committee to vote on as opposed to a general Project Discussion. The other tags such as #changes, #proposal, and #idea could be there for further organization. I would like there to be a tag or some other way to mark something for the community meeting agenda; I remember @gwmngilfen having ideas about this and potential integrations with meetbot :slightly_smiling_face:.

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I think every project is going to want this, so given we have awx, devtools, etc, then steering-committee is fine too. Happy to use a shorter name if we can think of one. And of course any project can add meeting or vote - one of the things I like about tags is you can have many (whereas a topic can only be in 1 category).

You should all have the power to create new tags as you see fit, and I encourage you to experiment - we’ll settle on a process by trying things out :wink:

I agree, this also sounds like a tag. It’s not super obvious, but you can save searches and other links to your sidebar (maybe I should do a tips post on this?), which ends up like this:

2023-08-17-093331_273x219_scrot
2023-08-17-093331_273x219_scrot273×219 4.33 KB

It’s then a fairly easy process to click a saved search for “next-meeting agenda items” at the start of a meeting. Would that help your usecase?

It’s possible to do something along these lines, but not soon. The biggest problem is that the meetbot can be used simultaneously for many meetings, so knowing which items are for which agenda isn’t simple. Also once you codify a process into a bot, it’s much harder to change it - I’d rather we experiment and find what works for us, and then augment the bot to make it smoother.

We also have #project:ideas but I need to check in with Shane when he’s back from vacation. He wants a place to do a proper public ADR process, and that the Ideas category (similar to Ideas - Discussions on Python.org) is the place to start that process. What’s not clear to me yet is how things in there differ from things in Project Discussions more generally - once we understand that better, we can figure out if all votable things end up in #project:ideas or if we need a vote tag for other things (which we probably do anyway because people will put votes in Social Space :stuck_out_tongue:)

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Oh, I already did :slight_smile: - do people want a written one?

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One of the things I can’t really grasp yet wrt a combination of tags to replace community-topics. Today, I can go to one place and see the full list. And that list is ONLY the list of proposed…topics. So it would never be something unrelated. But if it’s a combination of tags here (say collection+idea) or something like that, any individual anywhere here could mistakenly use that same combination and not realize their thought is now at the attention of the community working group.

And on the flip side, we don’t want to take them steering-committee+idea as some people might shy away from tagging the steering committee. The name sounds very formal and if you’re not in the know, you might think they are too high up in the clouds to be bothered by your little idea so to speak.

But we’ve always had a naming problem with the Community WG because it doesn’t cover the entire community.

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@samccann that’s interesting, because I see it almost completely the other way - community-topics is a grab bag of different sorts of discussions ranging from collection inclusion all the way up to ecosystem-wide things. To me, that’s overloading the term, these things should be tagged differently - being entirely honest, I’m not looking at the collection stuff (I have enough to do and nothing to contribute, other people know this better than me). Credit where it’s due, this is basically me restating @Leo’s point (although I would call out that we need content tags like collections, documentation, github, ci, matrix/irc, and so on, in additional to the meeting/proposal/vote axis)

Having the right tags for the discussions I can contribute to is a plus, in my opinion. Yes, it’s a change in our flow, but after some adjustment I think it’ll be better to be able to follow tags that interest each of us. Right now (as you’ve said) there is a significant amount of overloading in both the repo and the weekly meeting, and that’s largely because we have nowhere else to put it. But that won’t change if we don’t try new workflows.

As for “mistaken tagging”, well that’s OK and why we have moderators and trusted members - tags can be edited. If you see something that is incorrectly tagged, please fix it! It’s a great way to help the community improve its communication. And of course, if the tags are right then perhaps the issue should be the centre of attention!

Looking back through the topic, I think the main thing to solve is @gotmax23’s point: “how do we mark an item for the next meeting?”. Ultimately, I’d like that to be a minor issue, because the meeting should be the 2nd place where we discuss things, with the forum as the primary (this is more inclusive of timezones and people who need time to process things before replying - not everyone likes chat). A wiki-post agenda similar to the docs one might be a good fit longer term, but we need to start off with a single step, so how about a community-wg tag for now?

BTW, tags are so flexible, I want everyone at our level of community seniority (Community team, SC, WG leads, etc) to feel comfortable in creating them as needed - please do! I see absolutely no problem with tags that are meant for a specific workflow (like this) and I’m happy to have tags that can only be added by specific groups (e.g. the SC) - we already do this with the official tag in Events. I will gladly take on a role of regularly reviewing/updating/merging them if we get typos/synonyms/etc, so please go big here - I would rather have too many tags than too few.

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I think it’s important to start simple, then go more complex if needed.

Marking topics as SC

UPDATED after discussing with Greg

I would suggest starting with relying on the SC group mentioning:

  • everyone can mention the SC group
  • we will add this info to our SC guidelines to ask readers to ping the group when they think their topics match to SC scope and responsibilities
  • we could also ask topic authors to put some key tags we’ll define, including those covered below. E.g. if a person wants to discuss a collection exclusion case , they’ll put #collection-exclusion
  • SC will use a bookmark with search result by group to quickly access their topics
  • we could reassess this later (e.g. if there are too many topics with SC group mentioned wrongly, etc)

It feels to me like a simple approach to start with

For the tags (option independent):

Not sure if the “mindshare” tag will be very helpful. Feels a bit vague to me. Seems suitable for any kind of mood sharing. Are we gonna have a page explaining use cases for such tags? If not (and I don’t think it’s worth), I would suggest coming up with something clearer/specific.

In a special tag group, we could start with tags matching (some of) the labels we have in community-topics, e.g:

  • #active-vote
  • #being-implemented
  • #implemented
  • #collection-inclusion
  • #collection-exclusion
  • #meeting-agenda: suggested by gotmax23
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Just to add a little context, I’m keen to make sure that what we come up with here works for other groups too. While the SC is obviously important, plenty of other groups will want to solve the same issue (ensuring eyes on the right things in an otherwise busy place). So, I think Option 2 looks right to me, along with the note that group mentions & tag usage can be pushed to a Matrix room too (@AWX are doing this, how’s it working for you?).

The only thing I’d add is that we can also configure a set of “default tags & categories” for a group - these are added to your existing notification settings when you join the group. These aren’t enforced, you’re free to alter them after - it just means that new group members need take no action to be notified of appropriate things. (This mostly applies to new groups, since we’ve already created the SC and populated the membership, but it’s worth knowing about).

We can - take a look at Topics tagged official and you’ll see a side bar with a short message. Compare that to, eg, Fedora’ mindshare tag and you can see that it’s possible to do quite a lot in that sidebar. However, it does require you to land on that page, which isn’t going to be true while writing a post etc.

I’ll re-state what I’ve said above - don’t think of tags as “pick the right one” but rather “pick all that apply”. In that sense, mindshare isn’t meant to be used alone, but rather to signify a broad topic that might be of interest to many folks - other tags may be needed to refine the content, and that’s OK. However, this tag has been questioned by many folks now, so I’m going to go find a better word for it :slight_smile:

The tag group sounds fine to me, please go ahead :wink:

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I’d like to discuss this in the next @SteeringCommittee meeting, but I’m not sure how to tag this for the agenda.

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Solid question @gotmax23, and I’m open to a variety of ways here. I can see a few ways (tags, search, etc), so I think the SC should tell us what they want? What would feel most natural to you? Perhaps simply a “community-meeting” tag?

(Also, we could move this to What to rename "community-topics" to as a forum tag or perhaps a new topic? it’s not EE related)

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the community-meeting tag SGTM

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Moved here to keep the EE discussion clean.

I’ve created the tag as suggested, since the next meeting is tonight. A search like this one should be what you want, I think (tagged, open, and in Project Discussions). The Docs-style agenda post (as discussed above) might be a better fit longer term but this gets you something right now.

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Summary from today’s Community WG meeting:

  • goal would be to have a process in place (which labels and when, etc) in time to announce at the mid-Oct Contributor summit
  • follow-on goal would be 'what to do with all the open existing topics) - which could be just leave them there, or move over important ones that still need discussion etc.
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I have seen different meeting posts in the Events and Project Discussions categories with the community-meeting and meeting tags, not sure if we need both or they should be aliased.

Maybe Working Groups organizing meetings should use their specific topic tag + community and meeting maybe and there is no need of community-meeting.

pd. We also have the MeetingBot Logs and Workflows & Logs categories, but logs are currently being published to the Workflows & Logs one.

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meeting is generic and could/should be applied to all our regular meetings. community-meeting is a :adhesive_bandage: bandage on this specific issue of how to move Community Topics [GH] here and get the right people looking at it. I expect this latter tag will be deprecated after some time. So no, while I agree they are similar names, they have different purposes.

I would agree - caveat that this particular group calls itself the “Community Working Group” which has become more overloaded over time. Under your proposal you’d then get community + meeting + community-meeting :stuck_out_tongue:. However, this is a more general point, and I’d love to have a discussion about renaming that meeting and WG, if we can figure out how (because clearly there is still a place for community-wide stuff too). That does not belong in this topic though!

Huh, how on earth did I manage that? I’ll update the bot config, thanks! FWIW Workflows & Logs is totally the place if others want to do any logging from our processes, just get in touch :slight_smile:

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Can’t we use the interesection instead?

My main concern is it feels duplicate and I’m not sure how we are to know which one to use intuitively without having to look it up somewhere.

Maybe we need a #community-wg instead of community-meeting ?

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I don’t think it’s helpful to get wrapped up in another tag bikeshedding debate, especially on a tag intended to be retired after a transition period. We have enough to spend our energy on.

The community-meeting tag is already in use, let’s leave it be for now. When the SC is ready to retire or rename the tag, they’ll tell us.

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I concur, to me community-meeting makes sense for now. Let’s see what the SC decides for things going forward since there are plenty of details to work out, and better to make the changes when things have been decided and agreed on in a cohesive and comprehensive way.

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Hello @SteeringCommittee and everyone interested!

We have been discussing the community-meeting tag further and due to the confusion the tag is causing with other meetings we are thinking on renaming it to #meeting-topic

As the previous one, the #meeting-topic tag is to be used to track the Community Topics (formerly in the Github repo) that are discussed (or to be) during the Community Working Group meetings. We could do a variation, like #cwg-meeting-topic if you prefer to be more specific as well, or you are welcome to submit some other proposal that makes sense to you.

It will probably be used in conjunction with the other tags mentioned in posts above for the actions, but hopefully following that tag should provide notifications for the Community WG meeting topics without mixing them with other meetings.

If #meeting-topic or #cwg-meeting-topic doesn’t feel right to you, please chime-in with alternatives. Leaving a poll below to get your opinion :slight_smile:

What to rename community-meeting to?

  • #meeting-topic
  • #cwg-meeting-topic
  • other (comment below)
0 voters