Email to PhD students on Apr 9, 2019:
Hi everyone
Your Minister of Infrastructure here or in more seriousness, your representative.
Today I would like to invite you to CS Discuss: https://discuss.cs.uchicago.edu, a discussion forum for our CS community. I hinted about this system in the last town hall and after another 6 or so months of effort, I believe it is finally ready for a wider launch.
Here’s just a sampling of what you can do on the forum:
- have long-form discussion gradually and asynchronously
- move an important conversation from Slack (see a demo) and continue it here
- keep updated on what’s happening in the department
I have worked with the ever helpful and supportive TechStaff to ensure that anybody with a CS account can log in to the forum using their CNetID credentials and especially that only CS PhD students get access to the private #phd category. After the formation of the CS Ministry back in last May, there has been a consistent need for sharing information in a uniform way with all PhD students and also to have a way to reach out to both the ministry and other PhD students for any department-wide concerns or questions that we may have. This is a solution to that problem. Further, it can ensure transparency in what we are doing as ministers, democratize access to department-wide information and empower all the PhD students at an equal level.
You may be asking that we already have CS Slack for that and why to introduce another tool in the mix. Apart from an annoying limitation that we cannot search past 10K messages on Slack and that its pricing model doesn’t scale to our department’s needs, there are some fundamental differences between the two forms of communication. Rest assured, CS Slack is not going anywhere and with the chat integration (and other plugins), they can happily co-exist together.
Here are a few links that you may find useful and/or interesting:
- Discourse, the open-source modern discussion software behind CS Discuss
- Discourse features | Discourse - Civilized Discussion
- Discourse New User Guide - faq - Discourse Meta
- Our community guidelines: FAQ - CS Discuss
- #phd, the private category for PhD students.
- Topics tagged ministry, all topics on the forum related to what we have been doing as the ministry
- Search results for 'tags:student-seminar order:latest_topic' - CS Discuss, an archive of our student seminar (formerly #pizza) talks
- Good places to get a hair cut in Hyde Park/Chicago? (because it’s the perfect place to discuss such fun topics!)
Some of the above links will only work if you are logged in. I understand that it may seem like a lot of information, but one doesn’t need to look at all the links above to start using the forum. These links are primarily there for future reference and some serve as examples of what we can do on the forum. The forum software is designed in a way that it progressively introduces more features to the users but without using any black box unexplainable algorithms.
If you have any questions, I have posted this announcement on the forum itself, please feel free to reply there so we can all see both the questions and the answers, here’s the link: [Announcement] Introducing CS Discuss Forum
Finally, I would like to thank all the current and past CS ministers, TechStaff (special shout outs to Colin and Bob!) and many of the current PhD students for their time and input in helping make this community forum a reality and a useful place for open and sustained conversation.
–
@kartik