Availability of the new “GitHub Discussions” feature

[sMorrone]

We are happy to announce the availability of the “Discussions” GitHub feature, that we will use as a collaborative Communication Forum for the community of the INSPIRE Helpdesk.

GitHub Discussions

• allow for additional community interactions by providing a more centralized area to connect and look for/find information
• are meant for conversations that need to be transparent and accessible but that, unlike the GitHub Issues, do not refer to problems with INSPIRE implementations and as such, do not need to be tracked on a project board.

As specified in the helpdesk landing page, discussions, questions or feedback request to the INSPIRE community related to a generic INSPIRE matter should now be created as New Discussions.
Be aware that all discussions must be assigned a category, to be selected from the drop-down menu available in the new discussion template (default GitHub categories in the image below).

In the coming days, we will be converting some existing issues into discussions to allow for greater visibility and more community feedback. For example, questions that might be of general interest for the community, will be moved to the Discussions tab and categorised as “Q&A”.
Likewise, issues labelled as “community input wanted”, “enhancement” and “discussion” will be converted into Discussions and categorised using default categories or new ones we might decide to create (please feel free to provide feedback on how we can make the best use of the new Discussions tab).

From now on, please note that all communications will be delivered through the “Announcements” discussion category, hence please make sure you have notifications for the discussions turned on.

If you are “watching” the repository using the “All Activity” option, you will also automatically receive notifications for the discussions.

If you are “watching” the repository using the “Custom” option, please make sure you have the “Discussions” option checked.

For more information about GitHub Discussions, please visit the following page: https://resources.github.com/devops/process/planning/discussions/

[sMorrone]

The "Implementation Examples" category is now available for helpdesk discussions. It will be used to share encoding examples and solutions for specific implementation issues.