There you will get your French group assigned which might ease a way of finding someone to work on things, and might also notify others and get notifications from French speaking people.
Making sections for each chapter is probably a good idea.
@Kees
I wonder if it would make sense to make one more category named āChaptersā and inside it: have some pinned threads for Chapters like French and Lithuania and others. Itās just a quick though, not even sure if it would fit forum design. Maybe people would use it for some general localised things or making quick attempts to meet or chat. Yeah we do have all this functionality of sending personal messages in Discourse, but itās maybe not very new users friendly, and while hanging out, engaging and experiencing forum - a gradual move towards use of full Discourse functionality would happen.
Itās indeed best to leave an introduction here below:
Please read the top post and leave some details of your chapter, also check if there is already an online chapter somewhere on Facebook Groups, Reddit or a dedicated home page on the web, etc. With that information I can create a forum group and add you to the global map
@BoQsc itās certainly technically possible to create a category named āChapterā and there create subcategories for each chapter like you mention. The Fedora support forum has something similar:
These are the reasons why I havenāt set something like that up:
Less is more. Creating too many categories creates too many options, which doesnāt make things simple. A solution for that would be to only show certain categories to people in a group. But that will create islands yet again in the movement, which is the thing I want to fix with this forum.
We already have the groups which advertise a chapterās own domain of interaction already. Which may be a website, social-media group, etc. This gives chapters their own independence, which also saves some drama when things may change with the forum. Itās more flexible if chapters operate their own communities and keep this forum as a common digital square to meet and discuss subjects.
Moderation also becomes harder. I cannot moderate topics and discussions that arenāt written in English.
There is a reason why Windows Operating systems have duplicate functionality that transent. Such as File Explorer and Trash Bin that is also a File Explorer. Or Edge Browser having multiple shortcuts but different on-screen places: on Task Bar and Desktop itself. Less is not always more. Less is sometimes less. Having multiple simple access points does ease accessabilty and usability.
The thing is, a transient category of Chapters would be helpful and it might feel like Forum is missing something and hard to find things without such large part of movement not being in the Forum and being outsourced directly out of forum. Where, independent sites with semi-anonymous owners would have the same difficulty of moderation and it might not exist at all. There is no need to moderate on forum unless itās really needed, especially subforums that are of different communication. In the worst case scenario a Google translate or other translation software would be very handy as situations that need intervention: most of the time are not that complicated.
I still somehow think it would be a good idea to have a place for each chapter, here on the forum.
It feels more robust and permanent, could keep records and if things happen in chapters, this forum could provide for third party resolvance of things instead of going nowhere.
Anyways, Iām not defending the idea unless some more people will feel the need for it.
Itās great how it is today, and it would be as great without Chapter category containing subcategories of chapters to express and hold independent communcation of the Chapters websites or thirdparties.
I moved this into a topic of itās own, since itās a forum change suggestion that might return in the future. And itās a good one, but I think in practice it wonāt make life easier.
In my experience itās best to keep local chapters in control of their own resources. We also have a Discord server, where each country has their own channel. But because Iām not really the owner of that channel (and server), I cannot do things like e.g. automatically link it to the RSS feed of our chapterās website. The admins are working on a solution. But itās been a while already.
We also have a global calendar where one person has to maintain all those events. There is also tzm.community, where requests to add/change things sometimes took weeks or months because of not enough time.
Iām not a huge fan of this centralization. I think the forum as it is now is the best setup. And chapterās themselves can have breakout discussions in their own language, with their own control and moderation. This distributes responsibilities and resources (such as time as well). I donāt want to use Google Translate to get a general idea of a topic description and the post itself. Itās too time consuming and it will place a small number of people in central control of the movement. That also goes a bit against the grassroots culture we advocate.
Also, in the category dropdown menu we now have 17 categories. If each current chapter on the forum gets their own subcategory, then that will add another 19 categories. Thatās what I mean with less is more. People might then also want their own tags, their own documentation pages. They may talk about things that may be better off in Support, Events, Projects and Reports. Which wonāt make the overview better here.
I gave this a thought in the beginning. And Iām really not a fan of facilitating every chapter in a category. The groups and the info listed there should be more than enough and can also be used to tag and message these groups. Also, chapters can use their country tag, such as nl which can combine multiple topics under that āflagā, hence creating a subcategory in the existing structure
