Welcome to the C-SCALE community

About the C-SCALE community

The C-SCALE community is a place for researchers, end-users, institutions and initiatives: in short anyone with an interest in Copernicus data, tools, resources and services.

Join the discussions to mingle with your peers, discuss technical issues, ask questions, collaborate, share ideas.

This community is supported by the C-SCALE project and operated by the C-SCALE partners, for you, in the Commons. Treat it as your own, and help cultivate a healthy, diverse ecosystem.

Using the C-SCALE community forum

The C-SCALE community forum serves many purposes and connects many services. It can enable better communication, and should feel like a comfortable home for you. The primary purposes it serves are:

• Discussion
• Questions and answers
• Community engagement

The forum augments, but does not replace:

• Existing support channels in the EOSC and Copernicus landscape. For support, helpdesk and issue tracking, the existing support channels should be used. The support channels are not always great at stimulating discussion, collective problem solving and feature requests. This forum is created in order to keep these discussions for posterity, or when it is clear that the issue has no unique solution, but discussion is nevertheless beneficial to the community.
• Project-specific documentation pages: such as Confluence. These are often expected to be authoritative sources of information. While the forum can function as such, the decision of where to send people searching for authoritative documentation is left to the community in question. There will often be a cross-pollination of these sources.

Discussion

The primary use of this forum is for discussion. Discussions can be open-ended, and is best when there is a sincere exchange of opinions. Our community guidelines describe what is considered good practice and encourage positive behaviour. Topics will be moderated by our moderators, and may be edited for style and clarity. Please engage with them, and perhaps become a moderator yourself.

Public, private and protected

Discussion is best held in the open – you never know where your best idea will come from, and diverse opinions and viewpoints are good for a healthy community. The default setting of all topics is therefore for all community members to be able to post and contribute to discussions. However, there are several cases where protected or private discussion are more desirable:

1. Internal discussions for sub-groups: Some things work better with a smaller audience and confidentiality. We can create teams of people, working on specific topics faciliate discussions only visible to members of those groups.
2. Authoritiative topics: Certain categories can be made such that only members of privileged groups can post there, making the topics authoritative.

Please contact our moderators at community@c-scale.eu if you would like set up protected or private discussions.

Bear in mind that the forum staff will still be able to see all private topics and categories. We choose our staff to be people of the highest integrity, so who can be trusted to be unbiased, dutiful and fair in moderating and managing the community.

Questions and answers

We encourage questions. We value being welcoming and courteous.

To ask questions, please go to the discussions tab and click on New discussion. Under Select Category, select Q&A, provide a human readable title and ask your question and click Start discussion.

We ask that you adhere to our community guidelines.

Community engagement

The forum serves the purpose of community engagement in several ways. In particular:

1. replace existing mailing lists: if your community is currently running mailing lists to stay in touch with each other, these can correspond to categories on the forum. Creating topics is then done in the same way you now do it – by writing a mail – and continuing the discussion can be done either by visiting the topic on the web, or continuing the discussion via email thread.
2. online engagement at events: If you’re running an event use the forum as a place to collect commentary, questions, notes, and other forms of feedback. Typically this involves creating a topic for your event, which can have a date, agenda, etc.
3. community support for thematic service: If your community is organised around a thematic service or platform like Atmosphere, Marine, Land, Climate Change, Security or Emergency, the forum can act as a place to get community support for it, whilst remaining in close contact with the C-SCALE infrastructure providers.