I belong to an educational community that operates how I expect many do: the school hosts a few mailing lists and a calendar online, and parents, faculty, school board, and volunteer members kinda sorta make it work.
I went through a whole year of that, and I’m personally over it!
So here I am configuring a new Discourse instance for my educational community… and it is not as forthcoming as I would have expected.
Public schools are such interesting communities, capable of that magic mix of alignment (we want our kids to thrive) and friction (we are blessed with sufficiently diverse backgrounds) that cook something really interesting!
It also means I’ll be hosting an online platform where folks are definitely going to share personal details with each other, even photos of their kids, and a lot of my go-to advice for setting up a private group site is no longer as valid.
However, I really want to figure this out! Imagine a world where we are not settling for coordinating field trips in a mailing list thread. I want to live in that world!
So I’m bringing this to your folks to help me figure it out.
Let me share what I’m thinking and doing with this instance, and let’s construct a Discourse for this use case.
The plan so far:
Simple categories: community (general anything talk), people (free form profile topic/user wall and linked from profile), knowledge (wiki topics for gathering evergreen info), todo (actionable tasks with topics that can be closed)
Horizon theme: simple and works for this community, emphasis on ease to find info rather than shiny gimmicks
Chat rooms: starting out with two, a “townhall” type and a help channel (no reason to make it difficult to get help for any thing, ya know?)
Groups for mentioning/messaging: I plan to test this with a small core group of power volunteers to find if this will be useful
End of year plan: I plan to study and document how we should garden the community content, including turning content into PMs or deleting
Keeping it simple works here, which means we can defer most plugins until a feature is requested.
I’ll reply with updates as I invite the first core group and subsequent community members. In the meantime, what are challenges or ideas do you have for this use case? Have you hosted a Discourse for your educational community? Let me know.
I’m really interested in this idea, as I’m trying to set up a public learning community as well, related to my work in training for emotional combat.
This quote hits hard:
Because I think one of the biggest challenges/worries I face is how people may put hyper-personal information on the platform and not knowing how to manage that technically/socially/legally.
What was your previous go-to advice for setting up a private group and why do you think it’s no longer valid, either in general or for this case?
I run a few sites for various projects and peer groups, and I configure Discourse with the following ideas in mind:
Reduce distraction
Keep it simple
Content is ephemeral
With that in mind…
…I leave chat channel retention days at the default 90 days or shorter.
Since my personal/private communities are semi-intentional (meaning everyone knows someone, not random connections from the net), I worry less about moderation in chat, and am more concerned about hosting the personal chat logs of my friends, and hence I want them to disappear fastest of all content on the site!
In this use case, chat might replace SMS… but I am not counting on it! However, today a tree fell over one of two roads leading to the school, and we got multiple email messages about it. I read them after I returned from school drop-off. Maybe there is a role for chat in there, somewhere.
It did not occur to me to break down this use case in this manner, but I will give it a try!
To have this conversation, let’s focus on one at a time: technical/social/legal, in order of how much I think I am an expert.
The Technical
When I composed this list…
…I was surprised by how easy it was to describe what I was building. It is because I actually turned off a lot of Discourse features to get the site how I wanted it.
For discussion, I have two challenges for you:
What is a great format to capture the technical aspects of a Discourse?
Ask me anything about how the site is technically configured!
