Hello, and welcome to the Hive13 Discourse! We’re happy to have you.
Let’s talk about a few things…
First, please check out this wiki page. This post is merely a distillation of that page! 
What is Discourse?
Discourse is an open-source message forum software. It behaves like most “traditional” forums: people post messages in topics, and replies to a topic form message threads. Users can also configure it to behave like a mailing list.
Why was this done?
There are a few reasons:
- The ecosystem of products and companies changed considerably since we chose Google Groups in 2009. Google has had Google Groups merely on life-support for many years now. We’d rather move everything now while we have the time to do it at our own pace. Some nice integrations that we had in the past - such as integrating the mailing list with Slack - are now gone because Google removed the support.
- We’ve received a regular stream of complaints about Google Groups being very annoying to interact with on phones.
- Moving to a self-hosted Discourse instance means that we have full control of our own data.
- Because Discourse is quite a nice piece of software, and we have plans of using its integrations with our Wiki, our Slack instance, and possibly our GitHub.
Does this replace Slack? Does this replace the Wiki?
No - it just replaces the Google Groups.
What kind of stuff goes here?
Discourse is closer to a traditional online forum than anything. So, it’s perfect for asynchronous communication. It’s a place to have slower moving conversations than the ones in Slack, and have them easier to find and reference in the future.
It’s also a general replacement for Google Groups. This means we’ll discuss things like member votes and meeting announcements.
Where do I ask questions about Discourse?
If you can post, then you should post them here
If you cannot post on Discourse, then reach out to @heath on Slack