Where can I find the current technology stack (data layer and application layer, any capture or communication tools used in field other than this talk platform) this community is using. I looked in wiki and could not see.
Also is there a history of the name ‘restarters’. Being a curious newbie.
Thankyou
Hi Suz,
I believe you should be able to find most of that over on our Github repository:
The Github repository also contains a development wiki (the Wiki in the menu above is a repair wiki to help people hone their fixing skills 
)
As for the name ‘Restarters’… This site has been built and is managed by us at The Restart Project. We developed the early versions specifically for our community in London, where we coordinate a network of community repair groups who run Restart Parties. We generally call volunteers at these events ‘Restarters’, so we named this site after them (because it was for them).
The site is very much still for our London community, but we’ve since opened it up to others who are involved in repair events around the UK and the world. It’s possible we may change the name to reflect this at some point, though we haven’t decided whether or not to do that yet.
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Thankyou James. Perfect
name ‘restarters’ – I really love. I hope it doesnt get changed. It is better than what I had been using for repair pods. It has much more energy than ‘repairers’. I would like to start using it in my activity.
Thankyou for opening up to the wider world. Big help encouragement for little people like me. It is incredible and I have only just started to look around.
Thankyou for link to the GitHub. Dev wiki - Incredible resource. The decisions taken in building the tech solution e.g. application choice of discourse, mediawiki. Were these style of choices, ‘just a no-brainer’ for somewhere here in the community or did you guys do a more structure feature comparison? In the wiki, I could not see any gap-fit analysis and so without. knowing these 2 platforms, I was wondering have we taken them both as-is (off the shelf), then wrapped stuff around them. Last question. Github Ive interacted for issues and so forth. But not been on dev side. So is there a separate feature request section for any of our community utilised apps?
(side bar: was thinking about the other app related question from the member re; Inventory – Functional inventory web or mobile app - #6 by Suz. In my experience we would be putting all tech solutions together. Tech solutions be segmented in some way. For example: community organisation - the hub (central knowledge store, restarter parties tech tools etc), and members / field operators – the spokes (branch contributors or individual contributors). I am just sensing my way thru, to get big picture first.
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Hi Suz, glad you found that helpful
Regarding the choice of MediaWiki and Discourse…
The MediaWiki instance was set up before my time here, but I believe we set it up long before we built Restarters and decided to integrate it. @philip (our star Wiki coordinator) or @neil (tech lead here at Restart) may know more.
We chose Discourse because a community survey told us that people really wanted a social space to communicate. We compared a number of possible communication platforms that were popular at the time (Slack, Discourse, Loomio, Mobilize, Flarum, NodeBB, Vanilla, Hubzilla, Action Network & Hylo) and determined that Discourse fit our needs best, scoring 117 points in our feature comparison matrix (out of a possible 135).
Both are fairly off-the-shelf with custom themes and integrations that we’ve added.
Because Github is like an alien planet for most people (myself included!), we’ve created a category here on Discourse for Feature requests that anyone can use
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Hi Suz! Appreciate the questions.
That’s correct. It was also set up before my time, too. From looking at the revision history of the homepage it has been around since at least 2014. I’m not aware of any documents analysing solutions to an identified gap at the time. If I was to guess, I would imagine that: we wanted a place to share knowledge within the London community; Mediawiki (what Wikipedia is built with) was one of the better known wiki platforms in 2014; back then we were hosted with a standard cPanel-based hosting service, and Mediawiki was available as a one-click install.
In 2018 we integrated the platforms together with a common(ish) theme and single sign on across the Laravel app, MediaWiki, and the newly introduced Discourse forum (Talk). Prior to Discourse we had a London-only Google Group for discussion.
And to add to that, the actual tracking of development behind-the-scenes takes place in Jira, hence why you don’t see (m)any issues in Github.
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