[Bldg-sim] Should onebuilding.org mailing lists transition to Discourse?

Jason Glazer jglazer at gard.com
Thu Dec 3 10:44:42 PST 2020


BLDG-SIM and eQUEST-users

Sorry for the cross posting but this is a "meta" issue that 
I would like feedback on.

As you may know, I've been running the BLDG-SIM for over 20 
years and eQUEST-users for 12 years as well as other mailing 
lists on onebuilding.org <http://onebuilding.org>. While the 
number of modelers has greatly increased over the years, the 
community that participates in these mailing lists has not. 
I believe part of that reason is that mailing lists are not 
very attractive to younger modelers. I would like to 
revitalize the sense of community that I have always seen in 
modelers by changing BLDG-SIM and eQUEST-users as well as 
some of the other onebuilding.org mailing lists to a web and 
phone enabled forum called Discourse:

https://www.discourse.org/ <https://www.discourse.org/>

One nice thing about this type of forum is that for those 
used to a mailing list, they can continue interacting just 
like a mailing list but those more comfortable using a 
web-based or phone-based forum can participate also.

Example of the web/phone interface can be seen at:

https://meta.discourse.org/ <https://meta.discourse.org/>

https://forum.golangbridge.org/ 
<https://forum.golangbridge.org/>

https://discourse.julialang.org/ 
<https://discourse.julialang.org/>

https://discuss.atom.io/ <https://discuss.atom.io/>

I'm thinking it would be a single Discourse forum but with 
categories that correspond to the existing mailing lists and 
perhaps some other categories. It would probably live at:

     forum.onebuilding.org

or something like that.

The reason I'm bringing this up today is that I also help 
manage the energyplus_support list hosted on Yahoo and on 
December 15, Yahoo is going to shut down all of its mailing 
lists and one of the transition options would be the same 
Discourse forum.

I know that unmethours.com has become a valuable resource to 
the community for questions and answers but I believe that a 
forum for discussion and announcements will continue to be 
important. Announcements for jobs, training, events, etc.. 
as well as discussion that does not fit in the question and 
answer format continue to occur.

Please let me know what you think and if you think that 
BLDG-SIM and eQUEST-users as well as the other public 
mailing lists on onebuilding.org should transition to a 
Discourse forum.

Thanks

Jason


-- 
Jason Glazer, P.E., BEMP, GARD Analytics, 90.1 ECB chair
Admin for onebuilding.org building performance mailing lists

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.onebuilding.org/pipermail/bldg-sim-onebuilding.org/attachments/20201203/68ea3748/attachment.html>


More information about the Bldg-sim mailing list