How viable is a lightweight desktop app for Discourse, and could it improve engagement and/or notification awareness?

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Happy to discuss here too :slight_smile:

There’s been some experiments with an electron app for Discourse (especially the chat part). So it’s feasible to do something like that, but nothing has been attempted that fully considers what it means to maintain something like that for a wide user base.

I think your hunch about notifications is a good one, but I’m not sure it’s really the main issue here.

In this scenario, I think chat is the likely thing people are going to reach for. We use chat at Discourse for the same thing. You’re busy, you’re in between things, you have a question and want a quick answer. Much easier to type in a box that’s waiting for you into a space where you can see that “many people are typing” and available to answer.

I might focus on other scenarios instead. You mentioned these other tools in the mix:

Outlook man. Someone sends an email. They forgot to cc that one person, someone replies to add them. That happens a few more times. Oh, too many people on this thread. Someone replies and drops half the cc list. The next person replies doesn’t realize not everyone is listening anymore.

Ugh, let’s just take this to Team instead.

“Hey, so in the email thread…”
“Which email thread?”
“The one about X”
“I’m not sure I’m on it”
“Search for subject ‘the thing about x’”
“Oh yeah, I see that”
“OK, so in the message to so and so…”
“Hmm… yeah, I must have been dropped from the thread at that point”
“I’ll just forward it to you”

Bam, yet another fork in the discussion.

What if you could just drop a link to that discussion in chat instead?

I think that’s the angle here. Move discussions from email to Discourse. Then MS teams is even better because you can easily link to those conversations without all that other nonsense.

There’s certainly conversations in chat that’d be better in Discourse too, but that’s a harder push, as you’re describing. But I’m sure you’ve already seen that with other tools too.

“Hey, this thread’s getting a bit long. Can we summarize this in a doc for starters?”

OK, that’s a good step. It’s a signal people are willing to go async when it’s needed.

Then what happens?

How long are those comment threads in the docs that get shared? How do you find the right one?

OK, yeah, some those docs might be better discussed on Discourse too. That’s a harder move though in my experience. One thing that helps is that copy/paste from docs to Discourse is pretty good. Let people do their drafting in docs, but if they expectation is that the doc needs to be discussed, copy/paste it into Discourse and discuss a snapshot of it there.

This is the way I’d try to approach this problem. Look for the scenarios where people will see more value and try to develop a kind of “playbook” around them.

I love working at Discourse where we pretty much just use Discourse for everything that in the past I’ve used a combination of tools for. But existing companies are not blank slates and the tools they already use won’t easily be displaced. New tools need to be able to exist along existing ones.

Defining some guidelines for what tools to use when is likely necessary.

Here are a couple examples I’ve come across in the past where folks have attempted to map this kind of thing out in the open (neither of these include Discourse in the mix, but I think the idea still holds pretty well)

I’m tempted to retitle this to be all about the why and move it to Community Building, but will let you chew on that idea first.

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