Renovating our Community Forum

Workshop Community
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Hey y’all, I’m Hakanto. I help with onboarding processes, coordination, and various things here at Resonate. We’re about to be doing a lot of work soon to renovate the forum here, so it’s a great time to get some feedback on this space. lt’s up to all of us what we want to do here together. Or if we conclude that this space doesn’t fit all the kinds of interactions we want to foster, then we need to brainstorm other complementary kinds of community spaces as well! So hey, please share your ideas, frustrations, dreams, all the above.

Here’s a couple examples of really bustling Discourse forums!
Ardour Digital Audio Workstation :evergreen_tree: Blender Artists :evergreen_tree:

There is an emerging vision among active staff to open up this forum and make it a more public space. A kind of “front porch” for Resonate. This way, it can be more engaging not only for members, but to anyone who has interest in Resonate and wants to express their thoughts, questions, and give feedback. Discourse (the open source software this forum is built on) has great built-in features to limit spam and objectionable posts, so the space would still stay nice and tidy.

Now that we have more volunteers and folks actively working on maintaining and upgrading Resonate, we can also focus more on outreach and updates to members. If you’ve ever wondered “Uh, is… is anything happening here? Is this platform growing?” Well, the answer is resolutely yes! – in fact, ironically, many of us have been so busy that we haven’t gotten around to posting updates here in the Community Forum about everything that’s happening! And that’s silly! And it’s changing. So now, you can look forward to new information appearing here more often about what the co-op is working on. And there will be opportunities to help out, if you’re interested.

One of the things I’ve wondered is if anyone is interested in creating a parallel text-chat space, like people use Discord for. Discourse (watch out, the two names are way too similar) is a really great forum platform, but it also can feel a bit… formal sometimes? There’s a kind of relaxedness that comes with the fleeting nature of conversation on real time text chat platforms. That idea is a bit up in the air, but there are some cool ways to integrate Discourse notifications into the following chat platforms if we wanted to start something like that. Chat Integration | Discourse - Civilized Discussion

As was said, ultimately this co-op and this space in particular is whatever we decide to do with it (and whatever we have the resources and labor to build!), so please share your thoughts. There’s so much exciting stuff going on behind the scenes, and I’m excited to share more about it with all of you – to make all of this more transparent and welcoming. And I look forward to meeting other musicians and enthusiasts for the ethical streaming vision we are all building together.

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I think the addition of new communication options is a great idea as long as the new platforms provide something that the existing ones don’t, because each new place where conversations happen also makes it harder to keep everyone updated on all the things that the community says and thinks.

I have the same feeling with Discourse sometimes. By looking at the plugin list, I think that experimenting with a platform like Telegram could be interesting, as it would be easier for Telegram users, which are increasing greatly, to initiate or join community conversations right in the same platform they use for chatting with their people. But I don’t know what are its limitations, or what are the security and privacy conditions.

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Yeah, I agree! For folks who are actively working on co-op stuff there’s a lot to keep up with – too much honestly hahaha. This is why we need a newsletter!

I was imagining the other chat space as like… well, picture a house party or an event. Inside, there’s a lot of people hanging out, activities going on, discussions etc. But then there’s almost always a few separate small groups of folks hanging out outside – maybe sitting in the backyard around a little fire, or standing around on a porch with a few beers, just chillin.

I pictured that chat room as being like that. It’s not the “main event”, it’s instead like a sort of balcony where a few people may be chatting and looking up at the stars.

It would be fun too to actually integrate it into the forum itself, but it doesn’t seem like there are any plugins like that for Discourse. I like the idea of a feed on the side of the screen full of random comments, links to songs, and emojis popping up here and there.

Maybe typing in it would be a members-only thing, since moderating it would be essentially impossible. We’d want at least some responsibility for such a chaotic element hahaha. Or maybe you’d have to earn a certain level of trust inside of the Discourse system before getting access to it.

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