For context, staff and some community members of Public Lab are in a long term conversation about phasing out our GoogleGroups -- all 32 of 'em. Phew, shocking, isn't it?

The GoogleGroups platform is reaching its end of life

As fall as we can tell, Google began letting this platform die about a year and a half or two years ago; at this point, there are zero (0) Google staff working on the GoogleGroups platform. Last summer two of our GoogleGroups were marked "spam" by two different individuals, and there was a very indirect and nerve-wracking process to get those archives reinstated and have people able to send email again. With Gmail's compartmentalized inbox, forum messages are routed _out_ of people primary incoming email feed. For all these reasons we have to reconsider the place of GoogleGroups in our ecosytem.

Let's develop a long term plan how email fits into the public lab ecosystem

The vision is that topic-specific conversations can be handled through https://publiclab.org/subscriptions, and if you are looking for more topics to subscribe to, explore via the new sorting features on https://publiclab.org/tags.

There are some ideas about showing trending topics on the dashboard rather than all recent activity, see https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/2076. Forums are also organized by topic. What features of forums do you love? Which of these do you feel are lacking in the Public Lab ecosystem?

We need to develop a long term plan -- who's interested in contributing?