Communication with users

[chenlica]

Several existing Texera users have questions about the system and improvement suggestions. We want to have a platform to support this type of communication. There are a few options:

• GitHub discussion here;
• User email list

Any thoughts?

[sshiv012]

I believe we can integrate Github discussions with mailing list and apache pony mail (Can be used for searchable mailing list). The idea would be to make GitHub Discussions canonical. Mailing-list notifications should instruct readers to follow the link and reply on GitHub. Discussion activity goes to the mailing list, while independent mailing-list messages do not become GitHub comments.

GitHub Discussion event -> GitHub webhook -> ASF infrastructure ??? ->Email generated from the even ->users@texera.apache.org ->ASF public archive / Pony Mail

Other idea is treat both as independent entry points. Maintainers manually summarize important mailing-list conversations into GitHub Discussions, and vice versa.

From one of the calls earlier, I believe we decided to go with google forms based feedback approach, this should be the simplest option for not-so-git-friendly users.

[parshimers]

Having a link in the WebUI that goes to the issue form can be good. This was helpful in AsterixDB, especially early on and when it was used in classes and things.

In terms of other user discussions, I peeked around a bit to see what other Apache projects have done over the years. Interestingly both Airflow and Flink seem to have separate Slacks they advertise to users with a join link. It isn't like the official ASF Slack where non-committers have to be invited one at a time. Certainly if this is compliant with ASF policy, it's a good option. I also saw a smattering of other chat services, like gitter and so on.

[chenlica]

I wonder whether Slack messages may go too fast and can quickly be forgotten and hard to locate.

I like an online forum, similar to GitHub Discussions. I support the idea of @sshiv012 to "integrate Github discussions with mailing list."