I moved this into a topic of it’s own, since it’s a forum change suggestion that might return in the future. And it’s a good one, but I think in practice it won’t make life easier.
In my experience it’s 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 I’m 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 chapter’s website. The admins are working on a solution. But it’s 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.
I’m not a huge fan of this centralization. I think the forum as it is now is the best setup. And chapter’s 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 don’t want to use Google Translate to get a general idea of a topic description and the post itself. It’s 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. That’s 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 Activism > Support, Activism > Events, Activism > Projects and Activism > Reports. Which won’t make the overview better here.
I gave this a thought in the beginning. And I’m 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 “flag”, hence creating a subcategory in the existing structure 