[LINK] RFI: Suitable Tools for an Electronic Forum

[Karl Auer]

On Fri, 2021-06-25 at 08:51 +1000, Tom Worthington wrote:
> Has anyone seen any examples of effective use of electronic fora in
> > membership-based organisations? ...
> 
> No.

I have to agree.

Wearing various hats I have found Slack, Discord and Mattermost
excellent for discussion, but the results have to be extracted by
someone and summarised. They do maintain history, but not in a very
useful way, and they maintain very little context. Discussion recedes
quickly into the past.

Zoom and related meeting/webinar tools are also great for "face to
face" discussion, but they are real-time. And again, someone has to
extract and summarise things like whiteboards, chats and Q&A exchanges,
because they otherwise disappear when the meeting closes. You can
record meetings and webinars of course, but video is not a useful thing
for searching, citing, quoting etc. You need someone to produce what
amounts to traditional minutes.

The various forum products out there are mostly crap. Discourse is OK
as a forum, but has no effective mailing list capability. Most forum
products have very poor thread-handling abilities, and very VERY poor
search facilities. This means that unless someone is curating them and
adding metathreads, or unless participants exercise a lot of
discipline, useful discussions are just as quickly lost as in Slack or
Discord.

One quite effective method I've used in a couple of contexts is Google
Docs. A document is created about a topic, then people can add comment
threads (or edit the doc directly if they have permission). The
document owner incorporates the comments into the doc as discussion
continues, rolling up/resolving threads as they go. The end result is a
consensus document. Arrange all the different things into different
folders and you can have related documents, supporting data etc all in
one place around the primary document, and even put references to them
into the document. I'm not sure how that would scale to hundreds of
commenters, but has certainly worked very well in teams of up to twenty
for me. Google's search abilities are of course second to none.

For most serious discussion purposes, email is probably still the best
way to work. Every participant has their own copy of the "forum"
arranged in the way that makes most sense to them, generally with
pretty good searchability. It is not a confidential medium though
unless everybody uses MIME or GPG, which I have never seen used outside
very small groups.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer

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