A (Better) Forum at Life Itself

[rufuspollock]

Let's make a choice about the forum for Life Itself. I propose that choice be:

• We have a forum: in the sense of a place to have online discussions (more substantive than can be had on whatsapp chat)
• That forum be based on discourse for now

In terms of implementation, we simply repurpose the unused second renaissance instance to become the life itself forum. Bonus would be to re-import the material from the old discourse forum we ran from ~2016-2019 if we deem it worth it.

Acceptance

• Shaping for this 🚧2025-01-12 below and we have a lot of existing material
• Implementation of that ... 🚧2025-01-12 have a working https://forum.lifeitself.org/

Tasks

Implement

Try-out

• Convert forum.secondrenaissance.net to forum.lifeitself.org ✅2025-01-12 done today and now working see https://forum.lifeitself.org/

Roll-out

• Test with alpha users

Share about thius

Shaping

Summary

• Situation
• Complication/Problem
• Hypothesis

Situation

• As https://github.com/orgs/life-itself/discussions/992 sets out in a perfect world we would like a forum/playground integrated with a wiki/knowledgebase. However, we have found no software or existing system that really addresses this perfect world case ... and it seems likely from the substantially different UX of the two systems that there may not be anything that perfectly addresses that.
• Current have a quasi-forum in form of github discussions at https://github.com/orgs/life-itself/discussions
• There seems a clear need for forum/playground type functionality e.g. we have growing threads in research group which would benefit from something better than whatsapp and which aren't suitable for a wiki/knowledgebase (they are too informal etc).
  • a place to introduce oneself (more substantively than on the channel) Forum sounds right for this
  • a place to share links to interesting articles and events and discuss them Forum or whatsapp sounds good
  • a place to share ideas for projects Could be github issues/discussions?
  • a place to easily create informal landing pages for events like hackathons or meetups Could be forum or a substack or similar if part of a group that does that
  • a place to share early stage writings or thinking (or even more mature work) Good fit for forum
  • a place to have discussions about an idea/topic/proposal Good fit for forum

Complication

• Our current solution of github discussions does not seem fit for purpose: it is geeky and locked to the github domain. Geeky point matters as much of our potential community are not geeks or from software.
• A wiki/knowledgebase seems to have crucially different affordances from a forum ... most crucially that a forum has an informality and a commenting feature that encourages threaded discussions

Hypothesis 🚧

• We are looking for a forum-type solution vs a knowledgebase one (as per Forum / Wiki for Life Itself: combine github discussions with a markdown-based git approach #992 we can have a flow from forum/playground to KB)

Desiderata

• Publicly viewable without login on the internet 👍👍👍 (b/c we want people to be able to view/engage without signing in or using some special tool)
• Easy to use
• Supports markdown (we use markdown a lot elsewhere)
• Not too expensive We can probably spend up to $20/month to start with
• Open source 👍 desirable but not a deal-breaker

Options

• Use discourse
• Use substack and its chat/forum feature Bit left-field but possible. Now sure how you can permit/restrict posting/commenting.
• Use discord ❌ want something publicly accessible

Notes

• Recent discussion "How to use the discussion forum?" https://github.com/orgs/life-itself/discussions/1140

Rufus comment there-in re job stories etc

I did quite a bit of analysis in this earlier thread about our general needs and ways we could address them

https://github.com/orgs/life-itself/discussions/992

I also think that, to start, we can focus on the needs of the existing g research group and maybe the broader life itself WhatsApp community.

My sense, and speaking partly for myself, is that some needs are

• a place to introduce oneself (more substantively than on the channel)
• a place to share links to interesting articles and events and discuss them
• a place to share ideas for projects
• a place to easily create informal landing pages for events like hackathons or meetups
• a place to share early stage writings or thinking (or even more mature work)

[JonahWilberg]

Great. Having spent a bit of time looking into other low-cost forum options (simplemachines, flarum) i can see that discourse is a pretty good choice.

However I would strongly recommend not simply resurrecting the previous forum, but thinking carefully about the design and intended function first.

In particular some things that seem unclear at the moment are

• whether this is a life itself research forum, a second renaissance forum or a life itself forum, or all three. The current incarnation seems to be a life itself forum, though there has been discussion of the significant benefits of having a life itself research forum, or at least focused on research along the lines of 'lesswrong'
• is this designed to replace both the life itself whatsapp channels, github discussions and the 2R discord, and how quickly would we aim to move people over. This would impact the initial design and choice of categories. Note that people joining this forum directly from the 2R site might be confused as to why 2R is not really mentioned.
• is this designed to replace any of the functions of the github issue resolution. I would expect not but some of the existing posts seem to come close to this kind of content, and would be good to draw a clear distinction between the two.

I recommend we consider either

a) keeping the whatsapp channels for general life itself community chat (they seem to work fairly well to me) and making the discourse more about life itself research+2R (the lesswrong model)

b) having two separate discourse forum, one for general
community and one more life itself research+2R designed more for long-form posts (an exemplar for the two-forum model would be the relation between lesswrong and the alignment forum)

Finally i would like to express my interest in helping to run a more research focused forum. I'd be happy to mock one up.

[rufuspollock]

@JonahWilberg great comments. Some reflections.

whether this is a life itself research forum, a second renaissance forum or a life itself forum, or all three. The current incarnation seems to be a life itself forum, though there has been discussion of the significant benefits of having a life itself research forum, or at least focused on research along the lines of 'lesswrong'

I would incarnate as Life Itself forum as general context and there are specific sub categories (in discourse speak) for e.g. research or second renaissance.

Overall i would do simplest thing possible and iterate from that.

is this designed to replace both the life itself whatsapp channels, github discussions and the 2R discord, and how quickly would we aim to move people over. This would impact the initial design and choice of categories. Note that people joining this forum directly from the 2R site might be confused as to why 2R is not really mentioned.

• Life Itself whatsapp: I don't think it (fully) replaces whatsapp but complements it as longer-form discussion especially for research. What you state in (a) below in fact.
• 2R: IMO (and this is MO) I would deprecate the 2R discord and replace it with whatsapp as easy engagement and forum for longer stuff.
• Github discussions: yes we deprecate and migrate to discourse forum
• Notes.lifeitself.org (adding this one): I think we migrate this either to the forum or the wiki.2r.net

a) keeping the whatsapp channels for general life itself community chat (they seem to work fairly well to me) and making the discourse more about life itself research+2R (the lesswrong model)

Exactly what I had in mind.

b) having two separate discourse forum, one for general community and one more life itself research+2R designed more for long-form posts (an exemplar for the two-forum model would be the relation between lesswrong and the alignment forum)

My sense is this is a bit of "premature optimization" and that initially we have just one and fork later as appropriate when there is enough bandwidth. I think we could have this separation for now by having specific categories (this is how we used discourse back in the day with open knowledge forum https://discuss.okfn.org/).

If i really had to choose i would focus the forum on the research-y stuff and leave life itself very specific stuff to notes.lifeitself.org ...

Finally i would like to express my interest in helping to run a more research focused forum. I'd be happy to mock one up.

That would be great and would still apply to the subsection i think.

[JonahWilberg]

Ok that makes sense. Happy with that approach. Is it possible to change the order of the categories so that 'Narrative' shows up at the top? If so I would make the order

• narrative (change the phrase in brackets to second renaissance)
• ecosystem (second renaissance)
• wiki
• general

and remove ideas, questions and show and tell. The idea being that ideas and questions can go in 'general' and for show and tell we could explicitly encourage people to crosspost or linkpost from other blogs like substack into 'narrative'. This would help distinguish 'show and tell' posts that are contributions to research from those that aren't. We could use subcategories for crossposts vs sharing of other creators etc.

We could possiy also remove 'ecosystem' and instead direct people to other ways of suggesting map entries (i believe there is a form) and rename narrative to just 'second renaissance'.

We could also remove 'Wiki' (will there be many questions? Why not simply direct to the Wiki and Wiki club meetings) and tighten the focus on research further.

Just some initial thoughts that i think would help make this more research focused.

Not sure if I can be made an admin, which would allow me to do some of this myself if agreed. Is there a moderator role as distinct from an admin?