Forum update and stats

I’ve upgraded both the forum and the server it’s hosted on tonight as part of some overdue maintenance. Check out the Discourse 2.6 release notes to see some cool new features. I’m particularly excited about the dark mode :wink:

Here are some stats for you; we on average have about 17 K page views per month here, with a clear spike in activity during the COVID-19 lockdown:

Recently we have had some discussions on moving to more open and resilient infrastructure over at opendata.ch. While we are not planning to re-open the School of Data, there are also some great data literacy initiatives in the works for 2021. For inspiration, before this server (originally forum.schoolofdata.ch) existed, we were posting comments on this since-abandoned Trello board:

I really hope we get some interest in making more use / restructuring of this and the upstream OKFN.org Discourse server, adding a bit more flow and involving more of our team and community in its maintenance. Having more voices and languages and projects here would be great! Or maybe we will do something completely different, invest our limited energies where the impact is greatest.

Anyway, always happy to hear thoughts and wishes here and on all the other channels. By the way - if you haven’t already tried our open access Mattermost chat server, go to https://team.opendata.ch and say hello! Or bonjour, or grüezi, or whatever!