culture

A collection of 19 posts

community management

Dealing with Toxicity in Online Communities

Online communities are places where people should be able to come together to share ideas and learn from each other in an environment that is safe and enjoyable to participate in. In healthy communities, members follow established guidelines and norms to create a culture of collaboration and mutual support. Occasionally

The Home Office Desks of Discourse

A few of our teammates have (graciously) agreed to share a glimpse into their home workspaces, including the gear and elements of the space itself they love.

Building an Emotionally Sustainable Company

In many ways, our company seemed well-positioned for the COVID-19 pandemic. We'd already been a 100% remote company, spread across many time zones and countries. We'd learned to use tools (like Discourse!) asynchronously to communicate and work effectively. When push came to shove, though, it didn't help much. Our employees

Launching a Successful Discourse Community

While we've offered general tips for building a Discourse community [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2014/08/building-a-discourse-community/] , we also get a lot of questions about what specifically you can do to help launch a successful Discourse community. What is the "elevator pitch" for your community? The very first thing people

Understanding Discourse Trust Levels

The user trust system is a fundamental cornerstone of Discourse. Trust levels are a way of… * Sandboxing new users in your community so that they cannot accidentally hurt themselves, or other users while they are learning what to do. * Granting experienced users more rights over time, so that they can

Discourse in Outreachy Summer 2018

tl;dr: Discourse will be participating in Outreachy Summer. If you are eligible to participate in this internship, please consider applying [https://www.outreachy.org/2018-may-august/communities/discourse/#testing]! About Outreachy Participants of Outreachy work with an open source organization (in our case Discourse) on a 3 month programming project.

The Discourse Encouragement Fund

For almost a year now, we’ve been doing something that’s considered quite risky [http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2013/the-perils-of-mixing-open-source-and-money.html] for an open source project: Paying contributors. Communities like ours are fundamentally built on intrinsic motivation [https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-vast-and-endless-sea/]. Getting money involved can jeopardize the whole

Discourse New User Tips and Tricks

Getting going in an online community can be overwhelming, especially if you've never used the platform before. If you're new to Discourse, here are a few quick tips and tricks to get you started: Reading Selecting a title from the topic list will always take you to your last read

The ideal GSoC applicant

This is our first year participating in Google Summer of Code. In short, if you're a student with some Rails & Ember skills, you should check out our GSoC profile [https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5787017325576192/] and consider applying for a chance to do paid work on Discourse under the mentorship

A Year in Discourse - Recap of 2015

Discourse is a large open source project [https://github.com/discourse/discourse] buzzing with activity, so a lot of cool things happen over the course of a year. Let's look back at 2015 and pick out some highlights. Our Most Popular Topic of 2015 The most viewed topic of the

How Coinbase Uses Discourse to Educate Customers and Improve SEO

As part of our ongoing series of interviews with customers [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/tag/culture/], our latest is with John Mardlin [https://twitter.com/JohnMardlin] who helps traders, devs and humans use bitcoin at Coinbase — partly through their Discourse-powered community.coinbase.com [https://community.coinbase.com/]. What is Coinbase?

Choice of Games and Discourse

We don't consider Discourse successful unless the communities using Discourse are thriving and growing. And no community we host has thrived quite like Choice of Games [https://www.choiceofgames.com]. Their Discourse has absolutely exploded over the last year, to the point that they are now the 22nd largest Discourse

OpenROV and Discourse

We measure Discourse's success as an open source project by one simple metric: are Discourse communities working? Is your community working? We recently interviewed Brian Adams [http://badevguru.ghost.io/] of OpenROV to discuss how they use Discourse and get some specifics about what is – and isn't – working for their

Building a Discourse Community

Sure, anyone can set up their very own Discourse in 30 minutes or less [https://civilized-discourse-construction-kit-inc.ghost.io/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under-30-minutes/]. But how do you get people to go there? I often describe Discourse as an interesting dinner party. Think of categories as rooms, topics as tables, replies as conversations.

Forums Are Dead, Long Live Forums

Here's my ForumCon [http://www.forumcon.com/] 2013 keynote, Forums Are Dead, Long Live Forums [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k02ev0qzP4] -- you'll have to juxtapose the video with the slides manually, unfortunately, but here they are side by side. Update March 2022: Unfortunately the video in this post

Your Online Clubhouse

I've gotten in the habit of explaining Discourse to people as a clubhouse. A place on the Internet that belongs exclusively to you and your friends -- whether you have 10 friends or a few hundred thousand. There's a big difference between a Facebook Group and having your own clubhouse.

Forums, As Seen On TV

This brief clip from the season 7 finale of the television show 30 Rock skewers stereotypically snarky Internet forum culture. Any recs for the best place to buy a girl's bike [on the upper west side of New York City]? (She's 8) I'm sorry, what's a "girl's" bike? Is that

The Importance of Meta on Forums

If I learned anything at Stack Overflow, it is the importance of meta to any healthy community [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/listen-to-your-community-but-dont-let-them-tell-you-what-to-do.html] . Meta is the one dedicated area every single forum needs, no matter its size, no matter how obscure it is, regardless how many posts

The Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse

With Discourse, it was clear that we needed to totally reboot the software to create next-generation forum software. But code is only part of the story. Any reasonable attempt at delivering a Civilized Discourse Construction Kit has to provide a safe, simple default set of guidelines for civilized discourse. Today's