Discourse started as an experiment and the IT team is doing an awesome work. I have the feeling that many Mozillians see this Discourse instance as beta, waiting to see how this experiment will work out.
I think it would make sense to move this instance under a more prominent (sub)domain. Something like: community.mozilla.org or discuss.mozilla.org. You get the point. I know that moving it under mozilla.org may have some legal implications we should consider, but it would also be a good opportunity to have a fully volunteer IT effort under mozilla.org.
I agree, I’ve been talking with @tad@tanner@leo@majken and others to advocate more for Discourse internally (both paid and non-paid staff).
Some people from engagement team are willing to help but we need to first have a clear document and elevator pitch. We are currently working on this pad:
@comzeradd - thanks for picking this back up (oops, saw the email from Nuke first). We were thinking we should create a pilot document for Discourse as community forum. Even though we feel it’s ready to move out of the pilot stage, creating this doc will show that, and present the info in a familiar format.
Pilot checklist - A pilot can be successful even if not all of the criteria are met:
Functional team need: There is a clear need from a Product or Functional team for this to happen, and they can’t do this on their
own, i.e. there is a real incentive to punch above our weight
Measurable impact: The outcome/results are measurable so we’ll be able to tell whether this was a success or not
Volunteer incentive: There is real volunteer incentives (can be a combo of recognition, learning, impacting mission, swag, financial, or all of the above)
Asynchronousity: Most of the real work can be done asynchronously and at scale.
To get access to some of the Mozillians API stuff, we may need a security review anyway, but there’s some other things we need to consider first (like the Discourse team). We’re also talking to Marshall Erwin about data compliance which could help ease that.
A security review is never a bad idea anyway, especially on any site that lets users log in and will have their email address (and possible other profile data) on file.