The OpenHIE community has expressed an interest in using a more collaborative platform to share knowledge and network. After looking at different tools we’ve chosen Discourse and been working to stand up a customized version of the platform to meet our community’s needs.
Some of you may be aware (or already be using Discourse – https://discourse.ohie.org) but for those who are not familiar with the platform here is a little taste of what it can do for our community.
The six big features that Discourse offers over Google Groups are…
- Ability to build sub-forums to enable more focused discussions.(e.g., architecture questions, releases, implementation help) where interested parties
can talk in detail without the entire community being notified. - Ability to reduce duplicate posts by showing related questions, stickied posts, etc.
- Ability to add features like FAQ, voting for right answers, @mentioning relevant parties, analytics on activity.
- Ability to keep engaging the community by sending out weekly emails with most active discussions.
- Ability to highlight contributors (e.g., badges for most answers to questions, profiles with links to business) so we can recognize individuals.>who have been major participants in conversations and helped others along the way.
- Ability for folks to keep using Discourse as a plain old mailing list.
To see another instance of Discourse in action, check out https://talk.openmrs.org/categories and see how OpenMRS is using it to bring developers, implementers, and users together.
To see how OpenHIE’s new community site is set up, check out https://discourse.ohie.org and start testing out the new categories. We want to hear your feedback on how you think the site looks so far so under the “Site Feedback” category please post questions about the site, its organization, how it’s working for you and how it could be improved.
The plan is to put the current OpenHIE mailing lists in read-only mode over the next few weeks and as you will see old posts from the various mailing lists have already been moved to a “Legacy” category so you can claim/own your old posts and we can start recognizing major contributors immediately!
The aim is to migrate to https://discourse.ohie.org completely by mid December, with the official closing of mailing lists and launch of the new site on December 13th.
As mentioned above any feedback or questions can be posted on Discourse under the “Site Feedback” category. If there are any concerns or issues with your log in please email support@ohie.org.