Why forums, and some history.

[forumAdmin]

We've all been through it - peer group communications, larger group communications, collaborator communications... whatever you do, it always seems to get messy and repetitious at some point! Speaking for myself, I realised we have been missing a general, but open, forum for the local group plus larger research community: we use a range of tools, but none have covered all bases here, e.g.

• Email, of course, including one-to-many group comms.

• Slack for local group + project collaborators. Nice, but not archival (on the free tier at least), so generally best for operational chat and file sharing, and many people still use this for private comms only (i.e. a direct email replacement, rather than as an open forum). We now have a companion Slack workspace for this forum, for IM/real-time discussion duties (non-archival!) - to sign-up, use the link in the members section.

• OSF for project-specific work, data sharing and archival stuff (project versioning + DOIs). It's very good at what it does, but limited for general comms and (many-to-many) open discussion duties.

• Figshare for media/data sharing (one-to-many).

• Website + blog for group-to-many sharing & announcements (one/few-to-many).

• Github for code (inherently collaborative, but code focussed).

All excellent tools (see the Open Science Tools thread for further discussion)... but missing is a general, community-wide, open discussion forum. And, furthermore, there doesn't really seem to be much in existence at all on the web (although please post below if you know otherwise). So, we're having a go here, albeit with an initial focus on topics of interest to us. And there might be a wiki too, if there is interest - TBD.

[forumAdmin]

For some more comments on general physics forums, see What are the best physics forums on Quora.

Short answer: as far as I know, there's a few big, general forums, but they are more Q+A based, and mostly aimed at a very wide/general audience. (Arguably for researchers/academics there are also more "social media" style sites such as Research Gate - but these are not really traditional forums, and not suitable for all uses and useres.) The forums at igdore.org look to be more in-line with our efforts here, but also rather general in scope. Some other venues for specific use-cases also exist, e.g. Publons for literature discussion (see the Open Science Tools thread for more discussion and to suggest other tools).

The aim here is for open discussion, in the spirit of open science, but aimed specifically at students/researchers/groups within the AMO community, and archival content (e.g. how-tos, guides, reading lists etc.).