Ruby Users Forum :heart: Open Source, we want to make it easier for Rubyists and Open Source projects to connect.

Today, each project has to build and maintain its own discussion space, which takes away focus and time that you could use to work on your project. That’s why we’re creating a shared place where Ruby users can ask questions, share ideas, report experiences, and stay up to date with the whole ecosystem.

How it works

  1. We create a dedicated tag for your project.
  2. You add a link from your website. For example: phlex.fun (support) → #plex
  3. We coordinate to make a joint announcement.
  4. Everyone can use the forum to share project updates, resources, and answer community questions.

This is just the starting point, we’ll be working continuously to encourage and support discussions around your project.

If this sounds interesting, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reply below, send an email or schedule a call.

Hey. :wave:

I would ask that you please don’t do this as different projects have different ways of keeping folks informed (i.e. syndicated feeds, newsletters, social media, etc.) So if you follow individual projects and content is duplicated in this forum as well, you’ll get notified multiple times of the same information which leads to a lot of spam and information fatigue.

Even if information isn’t duplicated, this would centralize all information related to open source to this forum which would make it a single point of failure should it go down or disappear. Having a decentralized approach would be better in the long run.

Hey @bkuhlmann !

Thanks for your feedback, the idea is not for the forum to become the only medium of communication for open source projects, as you mention every project will use different channels.

But right now there it’s a lot of fragmentation in the ecosystem and we believe the forum can provide a better experience than every project having it’s own forum, using “GitHub discussions” or have a private channel where important discussions get lost.

Reducing the number of spaces to watch can also be beneficial and can result in more collaboration and cross-pollination between projects.

I totally agree with the decentralized approach, we’re inviting everyone, but it will work for some maintainers and others will prefer other alternatives, and that’s okay.

Finally, we’re committed to keeping this forum a public space with a long-term vision and we’ll always provide easy ways for projects to move their discussion in or out of the forum.