threads stay up and visible forever for free (Slack is almost $10 per user and month if you want to keep post history beyond 90 days)
there is an upvote feature making browsing more interesting because you can sort posts (once there is lots of content)
people can close discussions when their post is resolved which declutters the default main page (for simple question + answer posts)
no user management necessary
if I made a Slack joining link public I open the doors to bots—GitHub is natively pretty great at spam/bot prevention (at least so far)
if I made a Slack joining link private I would have to spend some of my time going through applications
anyone can easily check it out without having to set anything up
everything related to High Impact Engineers is on GitHub, making it easy to onboard new contributors/maintainers/admins which is great for a volunteer-run org
many engineers have a GitHub account already and are familiar with the interface
Slack seems expensive and/or more appropriate for real-time conversation.
I do appreciate that this is a bit unusual, but it seems like the perfect platform to me!
I love that High Impact Engineers is back and I generally like a forum-style place over Slack, but I want to push back specifically on “many engineers have a GitHub account”—especially since your goal is to be welcoming to non-software-engineers, I wouldn’t make this assumption! I was a materials engineering undergrad and none of my classes/internships/research projects used GitHub. Maybe it’s really taken over in the last 10 years or something, but if not, you might want to consider being a bit more 101-level with the GitHub stuff, e.g. not using jargon like ‘pull’ or ‘repo’ without explanation—when I see that kind of thing, at least personally my immediate reaction is “oh, this is a space for software engineers”.
Thanks for the feedback! Maybe I overestimate how common GitHub use is.
Having said that, GitHub Discussions as a forum space requires no knowledge of git or coding. I think the interface is even simpler than the EA forum.
Contributing to the website is definitely going to be more accessible to people with some software experience. Although I am totally willing to onboard people with no prior experience if they’re excited to learn!
I’ll look into making the contribution guidelines on the website sound more welcoming.
Thanks! Some reasons I chose GitHub Discussions:
threads stay up and visible forever for free (Slack is almost $10 per user and month if you want to keep post history beyond 90 days)
there is an upvote feature making browsing more interesting because you can sort posts (once there is lots of content)
people can close discussions when their post is resolved which declutters the default main page (for simple question + answer posts)
no user management necessary
if I made a Slack joining link public I open the doors to bots—GitHub is natively pretty great at spam/bot prevention (at least so far)
if I made a Slack joining link private I would have to spend some of my time going through applications
anyone can easily check it out without having to set anything up
everything related to High Impact Engineers is on GitHub, making it easy to onboard new contributors/maintainers/admins which is great for a volunteer-run org
many engineers have a GitHub account already and are familiar with the interface
Slack seems expensive and/or more appropriate for real-time conversation.
I do appreciate that this is a bit unusual, but it seems like the perfect platform to me!
I love that High Impact Engineers is back and I generally like a forum-style place over Slack, but I want to push back specifically on “many engineers have a GitHub account”—especially since your goal is to be welcoming to non-software-engineers, I wouldn’t make this assumption! I was a materials engineering undergrad and none of my classes/internships/research projects used GitHub. Maybe it’s really taken over in the last 10 years or something, but if not, you might want to consider being a bit more 101-level with the GitHub stuff, e.g. not using jargon like ‘pull’ or ‘repo’ without explanation—when I see that kind of thing, at least personally my immediate reaction is “oh, this is a space for software engineers”.
Thanks for the feedback! Maybe I overestimate how common GitHub use is.
Having said that, GitHub Discussions as a forum space requires no knowledge of git or coding. I think the interface is even simpler than the EA forum.
Contributing to the website is definitely going to be more accessible to people with some software experience. Although I am totally willing to onboard people with no prior experience if they’re excited to learn!
I’ll look into making the contribution guidelines on the website sound more welcoming.