Options for sharing announcements/RFCs/etc.

[calebcartwright]

On more than one occasion we've found ourselves trying to figure out how we could best solicit feedback, communicate information, etc. with our users during certain events. We've leveraged a mix of options in the past, including Twitter, Discord, and pinned issues on GitHub, however, I'll posit that it's still an area with opportunity for improvements and suspect some/most will agree.

Part of the challenge is that we have no way to proactively send/push information to our users, and at the same time there's not a great way for our users to subscribe/pull information from us (at least not in an easy, ubiquitous manner).

I've been pondering two options and would be curious to hear what others think:

• Create a new Announcements (or RFC) repo under the badges org
  • Using a separate repo will make it more feasible for users to leverage GitHub's native subscribe/notify features without having to plugin to the full set of shields notifications
  • If we extended that to be more of an RFC style repo then we could also use it to request feedback/allow users the chance to weigh in
• Create a dedicated issue/discussion in badges/shields that's locked to collaborators, so that we can limit discussion to maintainers posting a message with a link to an issue or PR that has more details/dialog
  • This would similarly help with the notification challenge that exists today, as users could subscribe to just the one issue/discussion instead of the entire repository
  • proposing such a hypothetical issue/discussion be locked to avoid cross noise and spam since there'd (hopefully) be a lot of our users subscribed to it.

cc @badges/shields-maintainers

[chris48s]

I feel like for our size of project/community the announcements thread/issue is about the right scale. A full RFC process is a bit heavy-weight. I have seen this sort of thing done elsewhere too. I don't have an example from a super high-profile project but here's a link to one that I know of: qcif/data-curator#15

Creating an issue, locking it and pinning it also feels like a pretty low bar to get to something better than what we have now. Formalising an RFC process feels like a bigger ask.

[calebcartwright]

Yeah that makes sense to me 👍

[Andre601]

I would've recommended creating a discussion category for news and updates (GitHub supports a news-type category where only people with write access can post new discussions), but due to GitHub's notification system would this not work that well, because people would need to opt-in to a system where they get notified about any new discussion created here.

That's really something GitHub has to improve, which is why I now suggested it to them: community/community#20316

[Daniel15]

Create a new Announcements (or RFC) repo under the badges org

For what it's worth, Microsoft uses a separate repo for ASP.NET announcements (https://github.com/aspnet/announcements) and it seems to work well. That project is much much larger than this one though.