Each month we'll be sharing a little bit more about a Forem community, the creator and/or team behind it, and give y'all the opportunity to ask so...
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Thank you so much for spending time to share your story with me, @rayan!
I would love to know
I'm glad you liked it Ella :) thanks
One of my favorite code for good projects is an old one that's had it's time and a huge positive impact. It's FrontlineSMS, a free, open-source messaging platform that's been used to monitor elections and the work of many NGOs in the field :)
Check it out here frontlinesms.com/, it was built by Ken Banks, twitter.com/kiwanja
I think climate change adaptation is becoming a big thing and I'd like to think of ways of leveraging technology to help. For example, we're seeing wildfires everywhere and we know they're getting worse. But for some reason everybody's acting as if it's not going to happen again and we're all scrambling around when it inevitably comes. Turns out that people have worked out predictive models to figure out how wildfires come and evolve, but they lack a lot of the input data to use it for specific situations. Maybe an interesting solution here would be to hack away at community data input solutions, and those could be replicated in lots of places around the globe. You'd give it to a local municipality and they would ask their citizens to input climate change related data for rewards. This is still just a thought, I just find it fascinating that nobody's working on tech for climate change adaptation even though there's already demand and funding for it !
Bonus points because it matters a lot :)
Wow! Loved reading your answers above and am really inspired by your mission at Development Hackers.
I got a couple questions for ya:
If there was one feature (skys the limit!) that you could add to Forem to improve Development Hackers what would it be?
What do you like most about coding?
Thanks Michael :)
Glad to hear that the Forem features are serving ya well. 🙂
I really wanna hear how it goes on the automation front. I just checked out make.com and as a non-developer, the no-code side of the platform was super attractive... glad to hear that you're a fan of this kind of stuff.
I watched a quick video on make.com and honestly I'm pretty inspired. I wanna think of something interesting that I could automate so that I can try out the platform.
I'm thinking maybe it'd be cool to have a system for vetting folks who want to be trusted users or tag mods in the community. You could create a form for folks who want to be mods to fill out and perhaps when you sign off on their application, it would give them trusted user/tag moderator status and trigger a variety of emails to be sent to them or set up an interview with them through Calendly... haha, getting side-tracked, but there are some seriously cool possibilities here!
Anyway, I hope to hear more about what you come up with. If I follow through with creating something myself, I'll be sure to share.
Yes good idea. These tools do make everything simple and easy to evolve. The first step could be to have a forem instance send some data to a webhook on make.com (for example) and then you do the rest from there.
At a later stage it would be great to have a Forem integration so that there are triggers and actions related to a forem instance.
For example the automation is triggered when someone makes a post in tag X, and the action that follows is awarding a certain badge and sending a specific email.
If you want to check out other automation platforms, there is zapier.com which is simpler and n8n.io which is opensource. My personal preference goes to make.com (formerly called integromat) because it strikes a great balance of ease of use and flexibility + the free tier was 1000 automations/month ;)
That's a great read. What programming languages did you start with? What do you use mostly today and why?
Thanks Lee ! I started with the basics: HTML, CSS, JS and a bit of Python. But if I'm honest I've always been more of a Product guy and I'm barely average coding in all of this, I didn't even learn JS frameworks. What's always gotten me ahead was reusing the work of others and tweaking it to my needs. I'm a big fan of open-source, low-code and no-code tools (as long as you can access the code), it's gotten me to places where I can launch extremely quickly and test products on users.
Once user needs are validated and you need to custom code the solution in another way, well it's never been my side of the job !
For example when I need to set up a landing page or quickly build a CMS I almost always use webflow.com + some quick JS scripts.
Nice, I like that. I remember Jack Dorsey saying something similar, has a hacker type mentality - use cool tools to get it going, if it works and is valuable let someone else who is a way better Dev get to work on it.
Exactly !
And it's never been easier to hack away at problems by leveraging cool tech. In a way, it's also that philosophy I'd like to transplant into the social impact sector.
Really tremendous read
Thanks a lot Ben, I really appreciate the showcase and all the work everybody's been putting into Forem
Another awesome spotlight + ama 💚
A few questions from me:
Apart from HN and IH (love these communities as well btw!) what are some websites you can’t live without?
Any dev YouTube channels you are particularly fond of?
What do you think of Forem badges? Are you using them on Development Hackers? Would love to get your opinion or ideas on ways to reward/incentivize community members.
Thanks Ildi !
I also love PH although I find myself visiting the website a lot less compared to a few years before. Reddit has also played an important role when I was looking to have a question answered. But ironically I still use Google to search for things on Reddit 😂
Just subscribed to the Fireship YT channel. Looking forward to checking out their content. Thanks for sharing!
Rewarding people for actions/achievements inside and outside a Forem community is a great idea! I'd also be interested in organizing a Zoom or Discord call on the subject of rewards and incentives for communities. It might be fun to do it as a monthly meetup where anyone can share ideas and talk about what is/isnt working for them. I am tagging @ellativity and @michaeltharrington to see what they think would be the best way to go about this. I am more than happy to take the lead in organizing this.
Oh wow! I love this idea. 😀
We should meet up and discuss how to go about this for sure.
I'll be in touch!
Count me in!
Always love your enthusiasm @ildi!
I really hope that everyone using Forem will feel empowered to organize skill shares or meetups - it's open-source software so we can't expect that we're gonna be the only people hosting these conversations. Please feel free to share news and invites here on forem.dev (we can talk about setting up the forem.dev/workshop page to host your sign ups as well if you want!)