On Ideas: an Idea

Ideas pop up, get posted on Discord or mentioned offhandedly in a meeting, people get excited about them, and they eventually fade away. Discord is great at a lot of things, but it really sucks as a historical archive. Roam Notes are great for taking meeting notes and keeping track of action items and future agenda items week to week, but they’re editable by everyone and organized chaotically for anything that isn’t something like a meeting note. We have docs all over the place, doing their functions pretty well, whatever they may be. What we don’t have is a good central repository for ideas to coexist in their own little threads long-term, maintain integrity (not be fully editable), get discussed, and eventually maybe even be concretely worked on.

Just kidding! We have this Discourse! It’s incredibly under-utilized and I think it’s a shame. There’s a precedent that has been set that a Discourse post is a Serious Thing. They’re often mini-Medium posts (or, just Medium posts maybe??)! That’s cool, but a historical record isn’t just for announcements and big, important proposals.

Let’s change this up. Let’s put up ideas, musings, what ifs, thought experiments, feature proposals, whatever, even if they’re messy. Let’s talk about them! Let’s make categories for them, so if someone does want to use this forum as a bit of an announcement board, they can filter for that. Let’s get weird with it, y’all.

So anyway, that’s my messy meta-idea. What do you think?

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I’m very into this! I wish there were a little more incentive for people to keep an eye on the Discourse. Since Discord is our main hub right now, maybe having a channel that goes “ping” every time a new post is made could be nice?

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Folks have been dropping them in general to signal new posts to people or so I have noticed as well as dropping them in the #did-a-thing channel.

If there was a new channel it could be #discourse and have its own weight. Someone could just drop the link and let people react.

I really want to calibrate our discord/discourse/github processes to be easier on us to engage with on a pshycological level. I hate translating why something I did was important.

To me that has more to do with a lack of responsibility as a value system on the other end. Take the time to see what your team is up to, this behavior benefits everyone’s collective awareness. I typically have no spoons by the time I complete something that when its time to share I’m too spent to jump through the prompts of posting it.

I’ve held a whole bunch of 1:1’s and never reported them. Our processes don’t make it easy on someone who has to account for thier energy on a moment to moments basis.

I like using the forums and agree that things get lost in the sauce in discord, dug this post @Magey !