Netdata started with a commit back in 2013, although it was open-sourced much later, around 2016. Everything started on GitHub, with Netdata gathering many followers and reaching close to 50K stars.
Now, almost 4 years since the original launch and 2 years since the incorporation of Netdata Inc., it is time to reassess the way we use GitHub and how we structure our wonderful community.
You see, GitHub is an amazing place to gather a highly technical community around the development of a particular project, with GitHub Issues offering a great way to do issue tracking and have discussions at the same time. It’s not unusual to see feature requests or general Q&A in GitHub issues, something that works great, until a certain point.
With Netdata gather a growingly more diverse community, with varying levels of technical capabilities and engagement levels, GitHub started to show it’s limited. Not everything is related to a technical issue, and “issues” are not a term that people want to use when they just want to have a discussion around best practices or around a question they have about the product.
On top of that, from a community management perspective, Discourse is a much better place to serve as the heart of our community, offering a wealth of tools and options on how we can structure the community with discussions at the core of the community. This enables us to be even more inclusive to both our awesome contributors but also our netdata users, who may or may not be contributors or even technical.
With this in mind, we took the decision to change the “rules of engagement”, with Discourse and GitHub having very distinct, but equally important, roles.
GitHub - Issue Tracker
GitHub will serve as our Issue Tracker and the place to discuss specific code. Use GitHub if you want:
- Submit a bug:
- To the netdata/netdata repository for the Netdata Agent
- To the netdata/netdata-cloud repository for Netdata Cloud
- Do not ask general questions or make feature requests, use the Forums for that.
- Make a PR (or a draft PR) and discuss the changes that you are implementing
- Discuss on a specific commit or PR, in the respective comment sections.
Discourse - Community Forums
Discourse will serve for all other intents and purposes:
- Do not submit bugs
- Discuss on the Agent Development, collectors, exporters and the like
- Ask for help or submit questions regarding both Netdata Agent and Netdata Cloud.
- Please note that this is a free product. Support is centered around community participation and is provided on a best-effort basis.
- Make Feature Requests
- Discuss on the content that we create (e.g blog posts), the product announcements, and our public roadmaps.
- Connect with fellow industry professionals, help one another and create value for both your company and the community as a whole
- Ask questions on how to better use Netdata, how to debug a problem using Netdata or share best practices based on your experience.
- Share guides on how to install, configure, and integrate the Netdata Agent with a technology stack, other products, a specific OS, etc.