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.
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.