I'm looking for ways we can capture the essence of the new chat flow as a demonstration of how chat can be the seeds of bigger discussion
Has anyone got any ideas on how we can do that from where we are now with the chat-testing here on Meta?
oshyan
This is 100% my interest and use-case for chat. But can you clarify exactly what you mean by an example of this. Are you interested in, say, samples of a chat (regardless of whether it happened in Discourse chat) that could/should/would have (obviously) led to deeper discussion and/or did lead to deeper discussion but in an arguably less ideal medium for it (chat vs. forum)? If that's the case I may need a little to find some, but I absolutely have good examples from my productivity community. If you're looking for examples in Discourse chat, specifically, that's going to be harder to find. But I absolutely think this is a big value of chat in Discourse, and depending on the community, it will play a bigger or smaller role.
Jonathan_Poyer
I think showcase a discussion around a new feature is actually a nice way to demo it at least during the first moment of that idea. For some people, this spark of discussion is during the time of development or about to begin. There are always more things to discuss about and referring to a topic (or multiple) makes sense.
oshyan
As a perhaps more conceptual example of a situation where chat can (and should) quickly turn into a topic, even mid-way through a discussion, this is something that often happens in software dev management communities I'm part of, as well as my productivity community:
New person joins chat and asks a seemingly simple or innocuous question
Responses from highly informed and/or impassioned regulars quickly grow to 10s of lines of text, paragraph breaks start happening, and that chat channel becomes saturated only with discussion on this one question (topic)
Everything becomes difficult to respond to as each "message" includes lots of points and ideas and no select-to-quote/reply feature makes parsing and responding to each thing difficult
These conversations are also often valuable debates that would quickly disappear in the subsequent flow of a chat, so even retroactively moving them to a Topic is potentially very valuable
JammyDodger
I think I was initially looking for something we could provide as an example topic/chat here on Meta to demonstrate to people new to Discourse Chat of how it could gel nicely with pre-existing ideas of the 'long-form paragraph' view of Discourse
So even something that we created to neatly demonstrate the principle
Though it sounds like you have lots of examples that would make a great discussion topic
I think anything that can help people easily visualise where in their forum structure chat can slot into would be useful. I am open to all ideas
Seems the link is wrong. It’s https://meta.discourse.org/chat/chat_channels/the%20chat%20feedback%20topic
While the url of the chat is https://meta.discourse.org/chat/channel/129/The%20Chat%20Feedback%20topic
I’ve swopped it out for a working one, though it doesn’t look quite as pretty. I’ve also added in more of the original discussion so we can continue from where we left off, rather than reset to the initial question.
Though this whole exercise has been really useful already to get a sense of how this flow would work in a dynamic environment.
not sure why tho