Perhaps @jlhudd, @sidneymbell, @trs or others could take a pass at content that needs to exist before it’s advertised? I’m not sure about the best initial category tags. Perhaps augur , auspice and SARS-CoV-2 ?
suggestions/approaches for creating ncov workflows (conceptual flow of data independent from the specific workflow manager used; e.g., a conversation with us, BioHub folks, Michigan State folks, etc.)
troubleshooting Nextstrain workflows (more specific to our current snakemake bioinformatics, getting pipelines running on clusters vs. cloud, etc.)
I imagine some categories could be more generally front-end, command line tools (cli), workflows (bioinformatics/pipelines).
My 2¢ offered is not to split things up by software component or position in the stack, but instead by larger, cross-cutting themes. I think initially a single very broad category or maybe two is all we need right now to see if this thing has legs. Maybe General and Help and Getting Started (or Troubleshooting)? Folks can easily follow or mute individuals topics/posts as their interest is piqued or wanes, so the categories don’t need to be too focused.
Starting with just a couple categories seems like a great idea. We can always add more categories later as they emerge from the topics people create. Help and Getting Started might be clearer than Troubleshooting.
I think on the “welcome” page it could make sense to have the following (a lot of which has been mentioned already here, just putting it all in one place):
“welcome” and description of what the point of this forum is
some community guidelines for how to use this platform
general
help & getting started
I’m not sure how familiar this platform is going to be to most users, so I think it would be good for us to clearly outline from the beginning the purpose and how we expect people to interact / engage on it.
A fun page to have could be “about us” or something where we give little intros to our team members, or at least the members who will be active on this forum. Kind of like what we see at https://bedford.io/team/ but more about what role we play w/in Nextstrain. I see a lot of humorous ones that I think are pretty engaging and make the team feel more approachable.
Customizing the very brief description of each category via their initial system-created topics: General and Help and Getting Started. The content of these posts appears in several places where categories are listed (for example) and should be very short. I’ve “unlisted” these special adminstrative topics to reduce clutter in the topic list.
All of this is great Tom. Thanks for kicking things off. I just updated the hello@nextstrain.org auto-reply. I thought about updating the splash page to read:
But then I thought might be better to direct casual users to hello@nextstrain.org and more legitimate users to discussion.nextstrain.org. Ie I want people asking if mutations matter to email us and I want public health bioinformaticians to use this forum.
