Discourse only allows two levels of categorization — and also, the hierarchy is cumulative, so posts in a sub-category are also seen in the higher-level category. Right now, we have a "Desktop" category with sub-categories from Sliverblue, Kinoite, Gaming, Apps, and Audio Production. Adding "Workstation" seems like an obvious thing there.

It's possible to use tags for further categorization, and it's possible to make posts in a (sub-)category require one of a given set of tags, so that could be used. But I'm not sure that gives the desired result.

Another possibility would be to have a Workstation WG sub-category under the top-level Project Conversations (next to Magazine and Council). That makes the user/contributor distinction a bit more clear. However, I think it might be best to just start with one general Workstation category under Desktop and see how that goes.

Thanks for the information, @mattdm .

There are possibly three separate discussions here:

1. Where to host working group discussions?
2. How to grow a sense of the workstation user community on discourse?
3. How to grow the workstation contributor base on discourse?

Regarding 1, when the working group last discussed this, I got the impression that the group wasn't all that keen to switch from fedora-desktop to Discourse. I can somewhat understand that - there is an argument for having separate communication channels for the WG on the one hand and users on the other. Perhaps that needs more discussion, though - it might be worth separating out the question of "a separate channel for the WG" from "mailing list or Discourse?"

For 2, I think that it's important to have a place where workstation users can discuss workstation - at the moment the "desktop" category feels somewhat ambiguous in that regard. I also feel that having that as a sub-category of "desktop" dilutes the message regarding the status of that user community and the role of workstation as our primary desktop offering.

With regards to 3, I don't think we're ready yet to have a dedicated space for workstation contributors. It's something to consider for the future, but in my opinion we need to get our workstation contribution story in better shape first.

What's the dividing line between a Workstation question and a general Fedora desktop question? Do we have the second option at all?

I think users will reliably tag posts as "Silverblue" "KDE" "XFCE" if they are starting topics that obviously relate to a particular non-Workstation variant of desktop Fedora.

But I (without data) don't think that Workstation users strongly think about themselves as using "Fedora Workstation" - many of them probably couldn't even explain that Workstation == "headline edition of Fedora based on GNOME".

So if we want users to tag Workstation topics as Workstation, we need to strongly lead them down that path - like having topics arranged as:

Workstation
General/Development/Apps/Games
Other Desktops
KDE/Silverblue/XFCE

And accepting that in pursuit of unambigious Workstation branding, that users that KDE users won't be very sure where to post their questions about playing games.

Apologies for dropping off this conversation.

I agree with @otaylor that people would likely be uncertain how to use a workstation subcategory under desktop.

Part of the issue at the moment is that there are alternative desktops as subcategories, under the top level desktop category. This results in all the other desktop discussions being mixed in with workstation, and there not being a place where you can go just to see workstation discussions.

I'm not super familiar with Discourse, but I'm guessing that the only way to resolve the issue is to have a dedicated top level category for workstation (essentially, changing the name and description of the existing desktop category). Then we'd need to move Kinoite somewhere else.

Looks like everything has been reorganized and there is no longer a Desktop category. @aday @mattdm any thoughts on the current state of this ticket? Where to go from here?

We have a #workstation tag instead - see https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/about-the-workstation-tag/35552 and https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tag/workstation

I'm not very happy about the latest reorganisation. Making workstation into a tag went in the opposite direction to what we were wanting.

It's still desirable to do more outreach on Discourse, but the current situation makes it less attractive, and I'm not sure how much energy there is for it amongst the working group at present.

@aday what do you want to do with this ticket?

@catanzaro I don't think we can address the issue within the current Discourse organisation. If that changes, we should come back to it. Until then, let's close.