Workspace Views

Feature
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I stumble across the same pattern as an admin installing community Discourse instances. Sometimes I need to see what non-admins see: filtering out what’s not of my current concern. Being able to reduce the scope helps focus. Workspace Views enable custom views assembling categories, topics, bookmarked posts and other related elements into focused structured composite dashboard.

Objectives

  • Create a select-post-like functionality to capture selected elements (categories, topics, posts) into a trail (I’ve been reading As We May Think again)
  • Assign this trail to a private, editable, and shareable work space.

Applications

  • Focused work on specific issues
  • Preparation of structure contents (e.g., a game category similar to MUDs or IRC room story games, templates for research projects, organizational design, collective book or play writing)
  • Storytelling and Storyboards
  • Course/Curriculum Management
  • Event Planning
  • Communication Campaign
  • Etc.

What it looks like

An uncluttered traversal subset of your too large community that you can turn about a useful perspective from one or more users. You can have many of them accessible like bookmarks.

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Things have changed since this proposal was made. Most notably, we can now have all categories muted by default, which makes opt-in even more valuable.

Yet, there’s still something lacking that could be used to come closer to this trail and workspace behaviors: using groups as a dedicated portal towards yet-to-be-discovered content.

Let’s say we have all categories muted by default, and only a bunch of topics are available when you first arrive at the forum. It’s very easy then, to join the flow of conversation. But how do you end up discovering the opt-in categories? If categories are linked to a dedicated group, then reading the group’s description may convince you to hit that join button, and suddenly you have a whole new bunch of topics made available to you!

But for now there’s no easy way to make this happen since groups (and tags) are kind of second-rate citizens in Discourse. It would be awesome to be able to quote from group descriptions like you can do from any topics: maybe group descriptions could be topics themselves, like for categories.

I have no clue what it entails in terms of development, but I can definitely foresee some very strong usage pattern for such a feature.

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All categories muted by default is something we want to add to the setup wizard within a year or so.

I think it makes sense, if you know you will be hosting categories of WILDLY different content, for all the categories to be muted to start, and users explicitly opt-in to the categories they wish to see. cc @sam @eviltrout

For example, a “mobile phones” forum where there are Android and Apple categories – it’s unlikely you’d want to see both, very few people own and use both kinds of phones simultaneously.

4 Likes
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Re-reading the description of a Workspace, I see how the Discourse Docs (Documentation Management) can be useful.

I also think it would become doable with Category, Group, Tag Description as Topics.