Upcoming Changes to Rebus Community software

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Changes will be taking place to the Rebus Community software from September 1-10 2022. Keep reading to learn more.

We are writing to inform you of changes to Rebus Community’s forum in the coming weeks. If you’ve followed our work closely, you’ll know that Rebus hosts and offers a free tool to promote the work on your OER projects and discussion space on all things OER. 

We will be retiring the “project homepages,” “project team tags,” and custom “open textbook directory” sections of the Rebus Community forum starting 1 September 2022. We’ll also be moving over the forum to a new URL — forum.rebus.community!

Going forward, we are excited to maintain and grow the forum as a site for more conversation, networking, and community building!

We want to share our plan with you, and keep you informed of how your data and work to date will be archived. 

What’s changing?

The project homepage, project team tags (eg: @OERStarterKit-team), and custom directory section of our forum will be retired as of September 1st, 2022. The project homepage offered a quick snapshot of an OER project — its status, team, needs, and goals. The team tags enabled easy notifications to project teams including followers. The directory facilitated search of projects in progress — by subject, needs, or stage. Going forward, no new project homepages will be created.

Information from each project homepage will be preserved in the corresponding project discussion space in our forum. Keep reading to see how information will be archived.

The URL of the forum will also be changing from www.rebus.community to forum.rebus.community — so it’s clearer to all that this is a discussion and conversation space of our website!

Following this change, you may want to update any URLs pointing to the project homepage. You can instead redirect users to the archived thread in the Rebus Community forum.

Where will the information be archived?

All details from the project homepage will be preserved in the Rebus Community forum in the corresponding project discussion space. A new thread will be created with a snapshot of the information as of August 31st. 

In these spaces, as well as in other sections of the forum, team members can be tagged by their individual username. 

Please note that any edits made to your project homepage after September 1st will not be preserved.

Why is this change taking place?

Since 2019, Rebus Community has been more focused on community building rather than technology building. While we didn’t have the resources to make this change back then, we want to pause and commit to tying up loose ends before we take bigger leaps to keep serving this community.

To put it simply: the project homepage and open textbook directory sections of the forum had poor usage, a steep learning curve, and required high maintenance. Teams have preferred to use other tools to share information about their OER projects. Internally, we haven’t had the resources we needed to maintain these sections of the forum or improve it to better suit users’ needs. For these reasons, we also opted away from reaching out to the community to maintain this custom section of the forum. We think our collective time and skills could be invested in other projects.

We’ve seen the real value of our forum to be the discussion space — where people can have conversations and more easily collaborate with one another. We want to facilitate easier interaction and exchanges amongst all our users, and removing this bulky section of the software will help us achieve just this. 

What do you need to do?

  • If you are an administrator on a project homepage, you can check back to your project discussion space on September 10th to see the archived information. 
  • If you are a follower on a project, head over to the project discussion space and click on the bell notification button from Normal to Watching to make sure you get notified of activity and conversation.
4 item drop-down menu to adjust notification settings. Options include: Watching, Tracking, Normal, Muted.
  • If you have an existing account on the Rebus Community forum, you can log back in and start/join new conversations.

Still have questions? Please contact us!

Please write to us via email at contact@rebus.community if you have questions about this change. We’ve kept the details brief in this announcement, but as it goes with any (software) project, there’s more to the story under the hood. We want to be as transparent as possible, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any comments or questions.

Stay up to date!