Community has no boundary: Discourse-as-a-Fabric - ideation & brainstorm

community
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I just decided to sign up to yet one more Discourse forum, just to help them and provide (copy/paste) some useful pointers to topics on other forums. Yet one more Discourse user account to manage.

The forum is Fedeproxy, for a new ActivityPub project that aims to synchronise code forges (Github, Gitlab, Gitea, etc. repositories) with one another. It might become an implementation of the Forgefed protocol, and is interesting to mention here for 2 reasons:

  1. This is yet another example of a completely different business domain that can benefit greatly from ActivityPub federation.
  2. If Discourse had federation support this forum’s #development category could be 2-way synched with SocialHub #software subcategory, without need to work on 2 forums and duplicate discussions.

Update:

On Fedeproxy forum one user (who btw didn’t want to sign up here, just for the sake of leaving just one post) pointed me to an interesting Linked Data ontology for communities, the SIOC Core Ontology Specification, where SIOC project stands for “Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities”. The ontology defines the following semantics in Linked Data:


semantically-interlinked-online-community-ontology

Mentioning here, because it highlights thinking in business domain / vocabularies and can be an inspiration to the brainstorm :slight_smile:

(PS. Don’t let yourself be led astray by the term “Semantic Web” in the SIOC specs. That’s not what this is about - way too complex - but rather seeking closed Linked Data vocabularies to define a particular domain.)

Update 2:

I found a great project today, also in a similar domain as Discourse, and started a “Community has no boundary” discussion there:

https://github.com/pubpub/pubpub/discussions/1249

PubPub is part of Knowledge Futures Group, who are also working on the Open Distributed Knowledge Graph project Underlay (which comes close to an idea I have for knowledge aggregation from Discourse forums).

Update 3:

I realized that the discussion about Community is much broader than Discourse alone, as community concepts are so universal throughout our society. For the Fediverse I started a discussion about standardization of a Community domain and modeling an ActivityPub extension after it:

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