User Base Engagement

[sgpearse]

What tools has the community been using to organize their knowledge base?

More specifically,

• What web-forum systems are being used?
• Are there any success or failure stories regarding community engagement?
• What code review techniques can be recommended for in-house code contributions? Is the procedure different for external pull-requests?

[aterrel]

For web-forums:

• Discourse is used by many of NumFOCUS projects, but is not always embraced. Slack seems to drive much more engagement for us.

For code review, I know Mozilla Science Lab did quite a bit of work on this:

• https://mozillascience.github.io/codeReview/intro.html

[Dr-G]

Many NumFOCUS projects have multiple forums, e.g. Discourse and Slack and a Facebook group. Typically they're used for different functions. See, e.g. https://julialang.org/community/

Plenty also still use good ol' email lists (e.g. Google Groups).

[dgasmith]

There also seems to be a resurgence in Gitter for some projects. See DeepChem Gitter and PyBind11 Gitter for examples.