Forum Categories

CoTech Discourse
1

I just created a “Events” category, perhaps people could post some other category suggestions in this thread?

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2

Meta - > to discuss the forum

3

I just created a “Jobs” and a "News" category and have pondered if "Announcements" deserves a category… but best start with a small number and see how it goes I think, any other suggestions?

4

“Data”, or perhaps “Data and Mapping”? The data part of this could include discussions about sources of (open) data, approaches to sharing data, encouraging common standards and re-use of data, technical approaches to implementing data, etc. I’ve added the “Mapping” bit, as these two often seem to crop up together, with mapping being an application that people want which relies heavily on data, and so it a good use-case for working out the details of what’s needed.

5

The other categories are one word, I’m not sure if we should stick with that and use “Data” or if this doesn’t really matter and we should opt for the clearer “Data & Mapping”? Or am I over thinking this…?

6

I’d suggest perhaps keeping Mapping and Data separate for the time being - though data does inform it, mapping is, to some degree, a distinct function…

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7

We only have one thread about data or mapping yet, so perhaps we don’t need a forum category at this stage?

8

I’m bursting with new topics on this subject :slight_smile:

9

I had exactly the same thought, concerning one-word-ness! But I suspect that’s a mould that’ll needs to be broken sooner or later. Oh look, there’s a category called “Site feedback” :slight_smile:

The problem with separating them is that you then need to choose which category to use :slight_smile: I’ve found that many discussions that open as if they are about geographic mapping end up turning into discussions about data.

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10

You should definitely go ahead and write them! If we feel we need categories to help people find them later, I feel like we can easily add them at a later date.

11

Is there any difference between “Meta” and “Site Feedback”, other than the fact that “Meta” is shorter?

12

So, Discourse views them as the same thing (but we have 2 categories). Also says:

Meta is where all leadership and governance forms, a place for debate and evaluating direction.

According to this (and at odds with my expectations), it’s about the community, not just the discourse installation.

13

I created “Meta” as Kate asked for it, “to discuss the forum” and I hadn’t noticed the pre-existing “Site Feedback” — there is clearly a huge overlap here, I guess one should go, which one should we keep?

14

I quite like Meta, and Site Feedback has not been used yet, I think. Maybe Meta is more suggestive of it being about the community (including the site) than just about the discourse site? But I’m happy with either.

15

Fair enough, I deleted “Site Feedback”.

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16

Thank you Chris @chris good call :slight_smile:

17

The forum categories have nice and simple URLs for the thread and the RSS feed, when they are one word, for example:

I just suggested to someone on a email list that they could post their question about a customised map to this URL — I think we could do some good things using categories and their RSS feeds :slight_smile:

18

Nice! :slight_smile: Multi-word categories have URLs with hyphens replacing the spaces. I like these too. For example, on the transformap discourse, the URL for the ‘Vocabularies and Data’ category is:

https://discourse.transformap.co/c/vocabularies-and-data

19

I just created the following categories and added existing posts to them:

There are still a few threads not in categories, suggestions welcome :slight_smile:.

20

Thanks @chris this helps a lot. I’d like to share tender opportunities.
Does this need a category?