Gitcoin Forum Improvement Project

🤖 DAO Governance and Vision
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Vision and categorization

A forum is an organized, easy-to-navigate active community space where people post their well-thought ideas to get feedback and build a consensus that lasts over time.

Based on your responses, this is a vision statement, and our whole project will be heading to accomplish that vision.

As the most significant problem, we have defined the categorization of the Gitcoin forum; therefore, the first step in our Forum improvement project is to focus on that.

Categorization approach

There are a few possible approaches to it. Discourse enables the creation of categories, subcategories, and tags. But that doesn’t mean that we need to use all those options. Many forums do not heavily use subcategories. And I think the reason is that there are not that many categories where you need to break them down and create a structure around them. In other words, if I have 100 categories, it will be hard to find something; therefore, it would make sense to create 10 top categories and 10 subcategories per each for more straightforward navigation. But If I have 10-20 categories overall, why I would make the system more complex.

That’s why I have excluded subcategories from the design considerations.

What about tags? I love tags, and as I saw on other forums, it’s a very nice and casual approach to flag something across categories to “notify specific stakeholders”.

One example of a stakeholder who needs to be notified across categories is the steward. But there is no such a thing as this is steward only topic. One example can be Partnerships. Stewards need to comment on those topics and eventually vote, but it doesn’t mean that those topics are Steward only.

Another use case where flags can be used rather than categories is to support cross-workstream collaboration. We currently have many workstream silos, which we have identified as one of the key issues during our all-team session in Denver. And if we create categories for each workstream, we would create another silo.

I propose to use Tags to identify the right stakeholder.

Identification of the stakeholder should be part of the post creation; the creator should be able to identify their audience, and they should be able to know who they are targeting and who they want feedback from.

Here are some examples of tags:

  1. Gitcoin Community
  2. Stewards
  3. Holdings
  4. Newbies
  5. MMM
  6. Moonshot
  7. Technical
  8. Product

The full list can be found here, please review.

Why are we tagging the potential reader?

By tagging the reader, we introduce a new easy way to keep track of all the items the reader should be involved in, which will introduce three new behaviors:

  1. The reader will be able to target better the post they need to be involved in; therefore, those topics get more attention.
  2. The readers will be more willing to participate in the forum as it will be a better experience and require less time to find stuff.
  3. The readers might ignore topics that they are not tagged in, but previously they have randomly visited those and contributed.

Those are predominantly positive behaviors, but it’s important to be aware of those negatives and closely monitor them.

If you are following closely, you know how we will be using tags and that we are not going to use subcategories.

In terms of categories, let’s be rather unrestrictive and let the community decide. When you look at another popular forum such as Reddit, the most popular categories are at the top and then the less popular. In the same way, we should manage our forum:

  • Step n.1 - Suggest categories - open to everyone; put any category you have in mind on the list here and help to prioritize it.

  • Step n. 2 - Poll - Let’s run a quick poll of what categories people want and pick the top 15-20.

  • Step n. 3 - based on the n. of votes, create categories at Discourse.

  • Step n. 4 - actively manage the hierarchy of the categories based on the importance and activity.

And by that, we should be able to solve a most important issue - categorization.

In the next iteration, we will explore the self-hosting of the platform, sign-in with the wallet, and how to attract people from different communities to provide insight.

Please, if you have any questions or feedback, leave your comment below.

Also please review our current set of categories and tags and help me finalize it.

CC: @Pop ; @Fred ; @krrisis ; @Hammad ; @Fishbiscuit ; @0xRachael

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