Requirements
- Community members can ask questions or proposed ideas, either technical or non-technical
- Searchable, structured knowledge-base
- Community members can report issues/bugs and follow progress
Types of communication
- announcements
- general questions
- technical questions
- bug reports, issues
- pull requests, contributions
Options
Chat
Chat services are generally used by distributed development teams.
| Service | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| HipChat | Already use it Web or client-based | NCSA-internal Rarely used outside of NCSA |
| IRC | Low-barrier Commonly used Web or client-based | Hard to use No backscrolling (if you're not present, you can miss things) |
| Gitter | Anyone can join 2 weeks of backscroll Web-based Git/Docker integration | Requires Github account |
Forums/discussion groups/knowledge-sharing
Mailing lists, forums, discussion groups, and knowledge-sharing sites are intended to facilitate community knowledge-base construction.
| Service | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| discuss@nds | Already used by NDS Easy/classic model | Requires email Not searchable |
| Google groups | Supports sharing/discussions Public Widely used Can receive emails, but don't have to Searchable | Technical questions get lost No upvoting |
| Confluence Questions | Great for technical questions Upvoting Searchable | NCSA-internal Not useful for general announcements or discussions |
| Stackoverflow | Great for technical questions Upvoting Public Searchable | Not useful for general announcements or discussions Requires monitoring |
Bug tracking/Issues
| Service | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Github | We already use Github Natural workflow Publicly available | How do we integrate with JIRA for tracking? |
| JIRA | Used by NCSA, so it fits our current workflow | NCSA-internal Requires an account Complex workflows |