What is GitHub Discussion?

GitHub is the largest community for developers, contributors, educators, and students and the community plays an essential role for everyone. The community helps you grow, learn, and collaborate with other developers. There are people behind the community who work very hard to build and scale the community but there are various platforms available to make these tasks easy. GitHub supports different tools and features that help to make communities more interactive. 

Creating an active community of people, developers, and students is not an easy task but GitHub helps you to create an engaging community with scale. The open source community needs instruction and well-written documents and guides to contribute to the community and the maintainer of the project or community provides all the materials but to communicate with the community needs a specific platform, and Github Discussion is one of the future of GitHub. 

What is GitHub Discussion?

The Github Discussion was launched in 2020 to bring community forums to open-source projects. The idea behind bringing GitHub discussion into open-source communities is to improve the communication between project owners and contributors. Open source projects are not limited to the source code only with the help of active developers community can occupy so many different things such as project roadmaps, projects blogs, and other things. 

The Github Discussion helps project owners and maintainers to directly communicate with the community but the main agenda is to build a strong and engaging community for all from beginners to project maintainers. GitHub discussion provides different options to communicate with the community can Q&A, community polls, announcements, and so many different things are there. It makes it easy to share new ideas, collaborations, network, and solve project issues, it’s like a complete community forum. 

How to Get Started with GitHub Discussion?

GitHub Discussion is built for any developers’ community to work together, solve issues, and share ideas. It provides open discussion for the community with all records and everything you need to build a community. Below are the steps to enable Githu Discussion for the project.

Step by Step Implementation

Step 1: Navigate to the main page of the repository and go to the setting tab.

Step 2: Visit and Click enable on the Discussion tab and go to set up a discussion.

Step 3: The default Discussion template will open you can customize it if required.

Step 4: Now the discussion is ready to set up click on the Start Discussion button.

Step 5: Now the discussion is set up successfully.

Step 6: The discussion is set up and now you can communicate with your community in a more collaborative way.

After setting up a discussion multiple features are enabled for the community such as announcements, community polls, Q&A, and other features. 

How to Optimize GitHub Discussion for your Community?

Once you are done with setting up Github discussion the Discussion tab will open in your project shown in the below image

Now you can customize all the guidelines and community insights with discussion. You can ask for Q&A, create polls, and share ideas. 

You can edit or add labels to issues and create more engaging ways to communicate with the community. 

GitHub Discussion also provides filters for solving community issues and keeps a record of all community discussions for future use and is a convenient way to interact with your community.

Conclusion

We discussed the Github Discussion and its use and how we can create and optimize it for community use. GitHub Discussion assists your community in growing and as well as to communicate directly with individuals with specific problems. The  Github Discussion is more essential in terms of opensource community and projects.