TL;DR: From answering questions about a new release to fielding feature requests, here’s how five open source communities are using GitHub Discussions.
Whether you’re using or contributing to an open source project, there comes a time when you have a question to ask, a bug to report, a roadmap to plan, or just about any other number of things.
That’s why we built GitHub Discussions, a collaborative community forum feature native to any public or private repository that features Q&A, community announcements, pinned conversations, and a whole lot more (like the ability to create an issue from a discussion).
Since its launch in 2020, we’ve seen open source communities go beyond what we imagined when we built this feature. Need proof? Here are five open source communities using GitHub Discussions to do everything from field feature requests to building flight systems.
1. Answering questions about a major React 18 release
With any new release of a popular, depended-upon open source project, there are bound to be questions—from users, contributors, and software teams, among others.
This wasn’t a one-off announcement either. The React Team has been active in opening up its Discussions board as a place for collaborators and users alike to ask questions, propose changes, engage in deep dive discussions, and announce new feature improvements, as well as beta and GA releases.
Yup, we’re talking about Dogecoin. With a community and fan base active across Reddit, Twitter, and countless other places, Dogecoin is a unique open source project that gets a lot of attention. Much of that attention isn’t from developers, but Dogecoin investors and crypto enthusiasts.
Yet the Dogecoin open source community caught our eye when they started using GitHub Discussions to get Dogecoin developers in one place to talk shop, ask questions, and propose new features.
Perhaps one of the most otherworldly uses we’ve seen of GitHub Discussions comes from none other than NASA, the United States government agency tasked with sending astronauts to space, conducting research, and a lot of other important things.
The ongoing work on these flight systems is critically important too. NASA is actively using this software in its spacecraft today.
Beyond being just incredibly cool (rockets, space, and flight systems!), the way NASA is using discussions underscores one of its central reasons for being: to give developer and open source communities a centralized place to discuss things (while reserving issues for concrete, actionable work).
To infinity and beyond? Okay, maybe not quite to infinity, but Pixar started using GitHub Discussions in early 2020 to engage with the open source community responsible for building OpenTimelineIO, its editorial API for creating ordered timelines for media.
Its goal? To answer community questions and share ideas—and venture beyond the confines of chat apps and its repository on GitHub.
A screenshot of OpenTimelineIO being used in media editing. Image credit: Pixar Animation Studios
Discussions also gives the OpenTimelineIO community a place to talk over its work and separate out questions and conversations from its active work that’s documented in its GitHub Issues.
When it comes to having an active community of developers, users, and contributors, the Next.JS project stands apart (and has been our partner in launching GitHub Discussions from the start), especially when it comes to the number of GitHub Discussions conversations they’re having.
Yet the biggest thing is (and I’ve said this before) that discussions gives the Next.JS community a place to discuss roadmap features, engage with and build up its community, and talk over issues, among other things. Need an example? Try this one.
And here’s a fun call out: Since Next.JS has partnered with us from the beginning as we developed GitHub Discussions, we’ve actively built out new features and capabilities alongside the community, taking feature requests and turning them into, well, features. (Thanks Next.JS community for helping out!)
GitHub’s Digital Public Goods Open Source Community Manager Program just wrapped up a second successful year, helping Community Managers gain experience in using open source for good.
Show your appreciation to the open source projects you love. You can help provide much-needed support to the critical but often underfunded projects that keep your infrastructure running smoothly. And remember—every day is a perfect day to support open source! 💖
