During the Asia Regional Nodes Meeting, it was flagged that we need a way to communicate to individuals in the region and maintain the sense of regional community. Consider:
The regional mailing list hosted by GBIFS is for node managers and a bit of “official” business channel
Creating a mailing list for the group could be a bit isolating because it’s not the mainstream method for open discussions online
Does it make sense to create categories specific for each region?
However, we wouldn’t like this initiates “category exploding” on the platform, But consider this as a light-weight option for attendees to focus on regional priorities while still open to global views and possibly contribution from other region.
Not sure that I see the need unless and until there are so many posts that finding ones of regional significance is difficult. Adding more categories with the current number of posts seems more a solution in search of a problem.
Unless the current structure is somehow limiting to discussions I would also prefer not to create more categories. If the number of posts with regional content increases, we can always re-categorize retrospectively.
Nope—categories are more like groups or groupings, and are the means by which we can create private discussions e.g. Nodes. However, they’re not mandatory, and for fear of having the effect of burying things in categories, we now tend to post information for general consumption as uncategorized.
Not completely intuitive, but it’s the Discourse model.