[QGIS-Developer] Announce - migrate our mailing lists to Discourse

[Régis Haubourg]

[Message sent to all QGIS's lists. Sorry for crossposting - **please 
reply only in PSC list**  ]


Hi all,

as you may know, we traditionally use mailing lists a lot in QGIS 
project as well as for other OSGEO projects.

All those mailing lists are server by mailman, a venerable piece of code 
written by Richard Stallman. Those mailing lists are hosted by OSGEO 
team (System Administration Committee known as SAC).

Mailman is end of life and all FOSS project are looking to its successor 
, like  GNOME project for instance [0] .

Additionally, mailing lists are not used anymore by younger folks.

Reason for this are numerous, from competition with instant messenger 
tools, the lack of a nice responsive interface, difficulty to search and 
explore mails on the web, or simply because the monopolistic Outlook 
client does not make it easy to use mailing list correctly.

OSGEO team has deployed a Discourse instance, and after 4 months of 
tests with some early adopter -like QGIS-FR list - we think the project 
is mature enough to start discussing about migrating QGIS's main lists.

With this move, we hope that we can counter the current fragmentation 
and streamline our discussions. Please fell free to react.

Any help in this migration move will be more than welcome, from testing 
and spreading the word, to buying a beer after this move ;-)


## What is Discourse ?

Discourse [1]  is an open source only project built to support community 
discussions, started in 2013 and thought to address the gap between 
dying mailing list, forums and the rising instant messenger tools 
dragging all discussions into private and locked-in spaces.

It allows advanced moderation, advanced notification settings, and is 
thought to streamline discussions.

It is already used by tons of community projects, you probably already 
know it, from Gnome to Mozilla.

Want to have a look ? The already migrated lists are there : 
https://discourse.osgeo.org/

## What are the benefits of using Discourse ?

It is searchable on the web, and can be explored lot better than our 
mailman archives.

It is extremely easy to subscribe to a category. No more need to have 
one subscription per list.

Receiving mails and answering from your mail client is fully supported.

You can copy paste images, videos, code and can react via emojis.

There is a basic instant chat, based on matrix. We prefer at this stage 
to use a dedicated channel to avoid confusion. (We are already present 
on IRC and Matrix - see [3] )

## What if I prefer mailing lists ?

Discourse offers options that are very close to mailing lists. See 
Mozilla's tutorial :

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/how-do-i-use-discourse-via-email/15279

## What calendar and steps for this migration ?

With the System Administration Committee we agreed to  :

- Prepare archive import for a zero downtime migration in June.
- Start with PSC list first, which is smaller
- Announce the  several times for a month we are going to switch, and 
ask everyone to create an account on Discourse via OSGEO LDAP connector. 
Channels will be lists themselves, blog, QGIS desktop feed, and asks for 
communities and user groups to relay in their dedicated channels.
- Do some tutorials about how to handle notifications and advanced options
- Do the switch list per list during june
- Put old mailing list in archive mode with disclaimers.


## What about private lists ?

We currently have private lists like QGIS-voting-members or 
PSC-Private.  We did not tested this yet, but Discourse has options for 
this [2]


Any thought from you is more than welcome, from ranting against 
modernity to thanking SAC for their hard work.

Best regards ,


Régis on behalf of your beloved PSC



[0]https://discourse.gnome.org/t/common-questions-re-mailman-to-discourse/11841 


[1] https://www.discourse.org/

[2] 
https://meta.discourse.org/t/understanding-groups-and-category-permissions-security-settings/87678 


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