Use case: 1000 people having a discussion right after an online conference

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Hi all,

I’m the founder of a community (of sorts) called Sugarmaples. We’ve been using Slack for the last year or so. It’s a great tool. But it’s not so great when there are a thousand people talking about something at one time. :smiley: We are going to start holding some really interesting video-conference-based online ‘meets’ with about 1000 people per meet. And afterward, I want people to be able to continue the discussion somewhere. Discourse is an obvious option. So is Facebook Groups.

My main need is to be able to silo folks. In the use case above, I need to isolate the thousand participants for each meet into their own space. They need to be prevented from entering or seeing the titles of other spaces.

Thoughts on whether Discourse is usable for this and how it would be set up?

Much obliged.

Ted Pearlman
http://ahsugarmaples.com

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Not sure what the feature request here is :slight_smile: however we already have rich group support, you could use the API to generate the groups you need on demand and even invite all the participants to a conversation via email.

Or even have multiple conversations for that group.

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Thanks, Sam, for the lightning-bolt response speed. Is there someone in the official (or unofficial) Discourse community you can recommend that I could hire to figure this out and do the configuration?

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This all depends on your budget / expectations, we could host you and all hosted sites have API access. You just need to carefully specify what it is you are after with an explanation of where data flows to and from. Some sort of concrete budget helps a lot in figuring out who can do this.

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I really need someone who can work on a fluid basis. Meaning: I pay for a bunch of hours of help, then use 'em up. Then pay for another bunch and use them up.

I think most clearly through conversation, so specifying things on my own and handing it off is not going to work. I need someone who’s fairly casual, can read-between-the-lines, and doesn’t mind scope-creep (with the assumption that they are being paid for any extra stuff I come up with that needs doing).

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I probably need to pay someone, first, to just talk through this for an hour or two.

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I think you can do most of what you need out of the box:

  • Create a group for each ‘meet’
  • Create a category for each ‘meet’
    • set permissions so that category is only visible to the group
  • Create an intro topic in the category to invite folks to
  • Use the bulk invite system to invite users to the group
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Hi David. Appreciate the do-it-yourself instructions, but this numnut needs someone to do it for me. :smiley:

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I was mainly trying to answer this question.

My point is that I don’t think you need to hire a developer. You might just need someone who knows or is willing to learn how to administer and moderate a discourse forum.

You’ll also need someone able to install and maintain the server, but you could just use a hosted service for that, like what the core team offers.

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Thanks, David. That makes sense.

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Hello Ted, I’ll send you a personal message with my email address. I can do a quick skype call to figure out what you need and if I can help.

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Thanks, Etewiah.

You can email at ted@ahsugarmaples.com