Discourse Article
Draft article on Discourse for The News Co-op.
Discourse — reinventing online discussion forums
One of the key things that society uses computers for is communication, discussion and debate and these are some of the fundamental building blocks of communities, campaigns and co-operatives.
In the early days, before there was a universal Internet, there were bulletin boards (BBS), these were discussion sites, run by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as CompuServ. These declined as the Internet became more widespread and decentralised and Usenet (Newsgroups) took over the leading position as the place to have discussions online. Then with the rise of email and the web, email lists and web based discussion forums became popular. Web based discussion boards then remained mostly unchanged for a decade or more, and for years the leading free software forum was phpBB. Some looked nicer than others, some were commercial, but there were no qualitative changes in their nature, just quantitative incremental improvements and spam. Quite a lot of sites were destroyed through spamming.
Then came the seemingly inexorable rise of the corporate dominated Internet where your time online, interacting with friends, family and colleagues, is sold to businesses in order that they can to target you with their adverts. It's been hard to compete against when the alternatives have been ugly and hard to use — without offering a great user experience, non-corporate online discussion forums are not able to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
Discourse changes the balance of power — it has reinvented web based discussion forums and made online communication and conversations easy, and a joy. Discourse has a superb mobile interface and is ideal for building communities and providing a platform for peer-to-peer support. Spam doesn't get a look in, and it has a mailing list mode which allows it to replace the role of email lists. It can also be used for private forums and messages. There is an active community of developers supporting Discourse with things such as tools to migrate from other discussion boards and plugins to enable integration with other applications such as WordPress. Among the key features of Discourse is the fact that it is Free software and this means that although you can buy a a hosted 'instance' of Discourse from the company developing it, you can also host it yourself or buy a Discourse site as a service from a co-op such as Webarchitects.
A year ago Outlandish convened a gathering of UK based tech co-ops at Wortley Hall which led to the founding of Co-operative Technologists (CoTech), a network of 28 co-ops comprising over 260 workers. The network started using Loomio, co-operatively designed as a decision-making tool and discussion forum but it was found that it didn't function well for both. So it was decided to continue using Loomio for decisions, and something else for discussions. Webarchitects Co-operative had come across Discourse as several Free software projects were using it, and proposed that a Co-operative Technologists Community Forum be set up, open to anyone, not just CoTech members, to promote and encourage co-operators to discuss technology related issues, news and jobs. Discourse isn't trivial to install. It uses a new technology called Docker, which needs its own virtual server, but Webarchitects wrote Ansible 'playbooks', facilitating the installation and upgrade of Discourse, and made these publicly available. The CoTech Community site has now been up and running for seven months. It has 100 users, 700 posts, 80k page views, and has sent out 40k emails — take a look and feel free to join our community.
Chris Croome, Webarchitects Co-operative, 8th November 2017