What about medium tech?

[bloomexperiment (Tracey)]

Administrative technical barriers

@bloomexperiment

@simon

How can non-technical people be made aware that there are viable alternatives to Facebook and Twitter?

I think it’s a good way of framing it. I would say that there are two main technical barriers to Discourse:

• administration
• installation/hosting

There are various other topics & posts discussing the administration barriers.

On this topic of administrative experience, i think what you mentioned here would be good

@simon

This could be done on a per-problem basis:

• Identify the problem your trying to solve. For example discussions, with a possible emphasis on contentious discussions.
• Identify the target audience. For example, academics, NGOs, government organizations, neighborhood organizations, large Twitter accounts and Facebook groups, etc.

and having the templates etc. because the examples on Discourse Discover really lean towards tech communities.

Maybe diving into ‘complaint-driven development’ again (ala codinghorror) for this might also improve the experience for non-technical people looking to set up communities.

Complaint-Driven Development

And there are other topics on this here e.g.

The Evil Bouncy Castle of Settings and Customize

Let me tell you a story… It was about a year ago, and I was in the process of setting up my very first Discourse forum, finally migrating my phpBB database from 2007 towards something more appropriate to the current decade, thanks to @awesomerobot’s recommendation. The sysadmin just handed over the keys after having done the first half of the wizard (before it tells you to “jump in!”) and now it was my turn to actually set it up for good. I went to the admin panel and opened the settings. The f…

The key is:

If the technical barriers are improved, I think it would make it more likely that non-technical people who are running communities will recommend Discourse to others who are looking to run communities.