Include discourse in monolith for `experiments`

[oscgonfer]

A crazy idea, but to discuss?

I see experiments as a way for users to share their stories through data. I wonder if we could leverage discourse API gem to integrate with the forum into a section of "experiments", and have a way for a more complete, descriptive, way of sharing those narratives.

For instance:

• Experiments page could contain a "Markdown field" which constitutes the first post on a topic in the forum
• Data could be presented as it is now, maybe in the future with more custom made insights
• Discussion in the forum (2nd post onward) could be included in the bottom part of the experiment

I imagine this feature based on former's public lab integration with both "narrative" content and comments: https://github.com/publiclab/PublicLab.Editor

[oscgonfer]

@timcowlishaw @pral2a

[pral2a]

Sounds like an interesting idea. Definitely aligned with the kind of experiments we’ve been encouraging, and from a tech point of view I like the “don’t remake everything from scratch” approach.

That said, we actually tried something very similar in the past for Fablabs.io, where each new lab registration would auto-generate a thread in Discourse (plus some other sync features). I’ll need to dig into the details, but if I recall correctly, we ran into some challenges mainly around keeping things consistent between the Rails app and Discourse.

That might have been more of an implementation issue than a fundamental limitation, so I’m optimistic it could be solved differently now. Will do a bit of research and follow up.

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Afablabbcn%2Ffablabs.io%20discourse&type=code