Welcome to the kikuchipy forum!

[hakonanes]

Hello everyone, and welcome to the kikuchipy forum 👋 !

We want to use this forum as a place to connect with other members of the electron backscatter diffraction community, and the greater computational electron microscopy community. We hope that you:

• Ask questions you’re wondering about.
• Share ideas.
• Engage with other community members.
• Welcome others and are open-minded. Remember that this is a community we build together 💪.

The motivation for this forum came from a comment from GitHub user @din14970 in this issue pyxem/orix#122:

do you have (or would you consider opening) a Gitter channel for pyxem/orix/diffsims? I feel like I have questions that are more discussion type, not really feature requests or bug reports. [...] I see a lot of growth potential for these tools. At some point you will get users asking the same questions over and over again (which I try to avoid but it happens), and then I think you may want to de-clutter your issues and relegate "tech support" discussions to elsewhere.

Which was a nice and informative comment, thanks @din14970! So why not Gitter, Google Groups, or some other platform? Well, we want to reduce the time from a user requesting a feature, to the implementation of that feature. And we think the simplest way to achieve that is to keep the discussion going on the same platform that the code base is developed. Also, there is this blog post from Matthew Rocklin (core developer of dask etc.):

I avoid interacting on Slack, especially for technical conversations around open source software. Instead, I encourage colleagues to have technical and design conversations on GitHub, or some other system that is public, permanent, searchable, and cross-referenceable.

Let's hope for some good discussions!

[pc494]

This is very interesting @hakonanes and I'm excited to see how it works :)

[hakonanes]

Agreed, I am to! The MTEX forum moved from a Google group to discussions about two months ago, https://github.com/mtex-toolbox/mtex/discussions, and it seems to work rather well.

[hakonanes]

In order to lower the bar for engagement, I've created a Gitter channel: https://gitter.im/pyxem/kikuchipy. Will close the discussions if there is some activity on Gitter, and vice verca.