We're excited to announce the beta testing launch of our shiny new user forum! Existing DrivenData users who are logged in on the main site should be able to sign in directly to the forum. We'd love for you to check it out and let us know if there are any bugs or issues along the way.
So what's it for?¶
A core part of our mission is to help people learn. The forum is a way for users to discuss ongoing competitions and share knowledge, experiences, and ideas. To that end, we've created a discussion category for each competition.
There's also a General Discussion category for discussing #data4good, ML, working in data science — or really any other relevant topics. We're looking forward to seeing how users make the forum their own!
If you build it, they will come.
Under the hood¶
Our forum is built with the best-in-class Discourse discussion platform, a 100% open source project which bills itself as the "Civilized Discourse Construction Kit."
Here's a blurb from the Discourse site describing what it's all about:
Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to reimagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be today – both from a technology standpoint and a sociology standpoint.
In fact, the whole Discourse FAQ page is worth a read. Among other founders of Discourse is Jeff Atwood, of Codinghorror and StackOverflow fame. He has written a little about what they're trying to do here.
One nice thing about using shiny new software is all the shiny new features that are baked in: syntax highlighting, emoji, and all that jazz.
In closing¶
We're getting excitingly close to the end of our first for-prize competition, Box Plots for Education, and the results so far have been fantastic. Thanks to all of the competitors for their work so far!
Happy holidays,
The DrivenData Team
