A few of us from GOSH, IoPA, and OSHWA are exploring ways to bring our communities together in conversation and collaboration, moving toward the shared ecosystem that we all envision for the global open hardware community.
One part of this (among many other ideas) is to find a way for our currently separate community forums to cross-link with one another, providing the capability for community members to have a new channel on each forum that shares a combined listing of events, opportunities, and/or announcements.
Technologically speaking, there is a fairly straight-forward way to do this using the Discourse RSS plugin to create a shared cross-community stream that each forum could display on their sites. However, as we are seeking to do this work to better support our communities - we are keen to hear your thoughts on how we can shape this sharing of information to better support your needs.
We invite you to join the conversation on an open pad, where we unpack more about our intent and goals for creating a shared feed between our Discourse forums. In that pad, there are a few questions we have for you all that will help us to frame a direction. We’ll be getting back together in Janurary to review, discuss, and communicate out what our communities have shared with us, and a pathway forward.
Until that time, please feel empowered to respond to this post thread, and/or reach out to any once of us individually. @briannaljohns @schutton
A new channel is being created on each of the 4 community forum sites:
Channel Name: Consolidated Community Announcements
Channel Description (to be configured in Discourse admin panel/plugin): Events and opportunities of interest across the Open Source Hardware (OSH) ecosystem.
Channel Content Guidelines:
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Scope: related directly or indirectly to open source hardware (OSH); if indirectly related, a brief explanation of the connection, the “why should I care” will be included with the post
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Included: anything that could be participated in on a global scale, either online, or of a scale/open for broader community participation regardless of location
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Not included: smaller local/regional hackathons/meetups/council or governance meeting
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Examples: community calls, conferences (OSHWA Summit), online events/programmes
For users concerned about too much information: Noise reduction can be accomplished via the application of filters (focus on own org tags) or, you can mute the channel.
Who Can Post: Any community member, so long as the aforementioned channel content guidelines are followed. If you have any questions, please contact the community manager for your organization.
Assessment: Community managers and leads will continue to monitor this new channel, and will meet regularly to discuss how to gauge impact and benefit to the global OSH ecosystem. If you have any feedback or questions, please reply to this thread or get in touch directly with any of us.
@julianstirling @briannaljohns @OSHWA @schutton 
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