Working Groups - things you can ask for!

This topic is aimed at people in our various community Working Groups - if that’s you, read on! (And if you’re looking to make a whole new Working Group, that’s cool too, come talk to us!)

We have a variety of tools & integrations that the admins can set up for you to help people find your work, give you recognition, and hook into other systems for wider reach. If any of this is useful, please reply below

Forum Group (recommended)

We can create a forum group for the members of team - some examples are AWX or the Steering Committee. Within these groups, we can configure:

  • A description of the group (with links to other places)
  • A title & flair image for group members to display
  • Visibility: If groups are open to new members, invite-only, public vs private, etc
  • Whether or not forum users can ping the group and/or PM the group
  • A private space for group members to discuss things (admins can also read this, FYI)
  • Tags to track when someone joins the group

The core use of groups (as I see it) is to avoid the common scenario of one person being known for answering questions on a topic. Better to ping a group and see who replies (quite possibly that person, but they may be on holiday, etc), and I will certainly be encouraging that behaviour :slight_smile:

To start the process follow the instructions here.

Tags (recommended)

Any person of TL3 or above can create new tags, so please feel free to do so if you have need for them. However, we have some additional things we can set up for you:

  • Tag descriptions - going to a tag page can show a sidebar description with arbitrary content, so (like group descriptions) we can work with you on what this contains. The Fedora Mindshare tag page is a good example
  • Restricted tags - We can make some tags exclusive to your team, for example the official tag can only be applied by the Community Team to official Ansible events.
  • Tag hierarchy - We can set up some tags to only be visible if a parent tag is selected first. For example, we could hide “vscode”, “lint”, etc tags until a parent “devtools” tag has been selected

Integrations - Chat

We have integration with Matrix, such that messages matching a set of rules can be pushed to a Matrix room. For example:

  • Notify to #awx:ansible.com if:
    • First-post-only tagged awx or
    • Tag-added to existing topic matching awx or
    • Group-mention of @awx

Integrations - Webhooks & API

We can also push to arbitrary other places using outbound webhooks. These can be filtered on post-type, tags, categories, and so on, and land a JSON payload at the target.

Discourse also has a full REST API for interacting with, but you’ll need an admin to make an API key for you. The MeetupBot Events are good examples of this in action, as are the meeting logs from the MeetingBot

If either of these is useful to you, we can discuss exact uses in more detail, so please get in touch!

(This post is a wiki, please edit it if there is more things we can do :stuck_out_tongue:)

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