How to organize top-level topics in Discourse

As we start to add more parts of the Jupyter ecosystem onto Discourse, we might run into a forking paths problem that fractures the top-level channels too much to be helpful. I’m curious if folks have ideas for how we can avoid this.

For example, right now we are organized around technical tools (e.g., JupyterHub, Binder, JupyterLab). This is straightforward when the number of categories is low, but we can’t create a new top-level category for every new thing (e.g. see @parente’s comments about Docker Stacks)

I can imagine many tools fitting under a single category (e.g. Cloud Deployment, User Interfaces, Widgets) and then using sub-categories if we want a place to discuss a specific tool. This might be a bit more flexible (e.g. if people wanted to ask questions about jupyter lab or a different interface, there’d just be the one “user interfaces” section. It might also keep the Discourse more future-proof, since the tech will always change but the use-cases may not.

What do folks think about this? This is just one idea, I’d love to hear yours!

I’m open to have a relatively flat structure. IIUC you can tag things with multiple categories. I don’t believe we can find the correct categories ahead of time. I think that most question; it will actually unclear where they should be, and maybe we just want to have a “general” where things should land first before bing categorized.

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