Sorry for the downtime and extra notifications: I had an error in my setup that provoked a complete wreak during upgrade, at a time where connectivity was not available, of course. Fortunately it happened during the Easter week-end, so hopefully, nobody missed the board too much!
I restored everything from backup with a known setup, and will experiment the original one elsewhere so we can be confident this board is stable.
We now have 127 registered users! Welcome to all of you. Activity remains low in public since most of it happens in dedicated work groups.
New User Fields
I added two user fields you can fill in your profile preferences:
GPG Key Fingerprint because you should have one
Mastodon to show some federated micro-blogging love
Would you like to share more information?
A Mastodon Instance for BXL
I am setting up an instance of Mastodon for people on this board, and more generally for people in and around Brussels. It will start on invitation so that we can stress-test the configuration, then we’ll open it up to the public.
If you’re @trust_level_2 you can now access #engagement:drafts and help edit them. Only @Sing members can actually edit the draft and publish it, but you may reply to the topic for comments.
Upcoming Reorganization of Discourse Instances
As we’re now running a dozen Discourse instances, it’s time to think about splitting them according to their complementarity, community location, SSO availability, and other factors. By the end of the year some updates should happen, and may occur some down time on some or all instances. But this will help clarify opportunities for community engagement across the board.
Opt-in by Default
As time passes, the home page of the forums become daunting for newcomers. So we decided to experiment with an opt-in model. This will start with IN COMMON and soon after will come to . The idea is to provide a softer and smoother entry to the forum and allow participants to choose their level of engagement at their own pace.
Public.cat in Catalan
You may have noticed that https://public.cat pages now support Catalan, thanks to benevolent contributions by our friend @rita from https://fedi.cat/ (moltes gracies!).