There are a number of software platforms that have strong communities behind them. The likes of WordPress, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon (and countless others) all have extremely large local communities that pay the bills for many, many talented individuals all over the globe.
But there are smaller, up and coming communities emerging all the time around various platforms. Every software product is a community, in a sense. Ghost, an open source blogging platform, is one of them. We recently got the first member of the Ghost community (which I blogged about a couple weeks ago), in Patrick Schumann, who is currently in Stuttgart (his website).
Another open source platform, which I expect will develop quite an active developer ecosystem, is discourse.org. Discourse is the 100% open source, next-generation discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. I first heard about it from my friend Arjun, and have seen it discussed several times by people in the Dynamite Circle forums.
It’s brought to you by the team at StackExchange, so there is no reason it’s not going to remain a supported discussion platform for quite some time.
I’m a curious fellow when it comes to learning how like minded people are finding each other now. I see that there was a Discourse meetup in San Francisco earlier this year, and they have a meetup group in NYC. But where else are early adopters located? Wow many different countries are accounted for in terms of users? Is there anyone in Bangkok? Ho Chi Minh City? Chile? Seattle (where I am)?
Enter the location aware Discourse community directory. Since I literally just created it, it is, of course, empty. Which is where you come in!
If you are using the platform already – please, join the community page and express your love for Discourse — assuming you like the product, of course! We’ll eventually give you the ability to receive email notifications when others join the community nearby, but that’s not implemented yet.
“Ready for a new discussion platform?” – Discourse
Note: To use the community page, you’ll have to sign into Oh Hey World, check-in to a city, and THEN visit the Discourse community page. We’re in the middle of pivoting our product offering, and currently working through the UI/UX/Design – we’ll end up with an intuitive flow focused on communities and not the check-in…but we’re not there yet.
Drew Meyers
Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.
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