Organizing this forum: Categories

[ion-oset]

There are two ways to organize Discussions by topic on GitHub: categories and labels. Categories are high-level and are visible whenever one uses Discussions. All discussions (threads) have precisely one category. A discussion may have any number of labels. Labels can get more complex to manage but they are much easier to change. Categories need to stay very broad and change rarely, because they have fundamental limits (likely for UI reasons): Discussions caps the total and it does not have sub-categories.

The forum currently has the following categories. They should be viewed as subject to change, but that change is best done on the early side.

• Announcements are announcements by the maintainers. This is the place to update participants on all significant changes. Only maintainers can post here, but anyone can respond. This is one straightforward.
• Design & Development is for all major technical design discussion: architecture, APIs, engineering and client-side constraints. The bulk of the discussions will probably happen here. This will be a very large category but breaking it down more fine-grained is hard to do, and is best be done with labels not categories. In particular particular subsystems and projects should be identified by labels not by their own categories.
• Infrastructure is for the implementation side: tools, libraries, performance, security. Specific technology tradeoffs and best practices. It may have a better name. (Possible the previous category should just be Design and this Development but that seemed very hand-wavy...)
• RFCs is for collecting ideas and proposals. The notion is that a proposal can start out as a brainstorming sessions and become increasingly formal as it turns into an adoptable policy. The name isn't meant to say RFCs live here, or are formally voted on here. This is more akin to the mailing lists where RFCs get discussed. This process bears more elaboration.
• Q&A is for asking for help. It's where to send someone who is just starting out and needs orienting as well as for specific questions. It's OK to ask questions elsewhere, but Q&A is meant for either quick questions that have a clear answer or for just getting oriented on a topic one is new to. "What is X anyway?" is a good Q&A topic.
• Meta is for managing this forum and how it is organized. You are reading an example of a topic that goes here now.

None of these are set in stone yet. Feedback encouraged.