It was discussed quite a bit about why we would want a contributor section of the forum. This is not a mandate for people to move from mailing list to forum, actually it's almost the complete opposite. What this would do is allow people who traditionally have only used forums (this would have included myself until just a few months back), to get involved. This is a way to become more open to users who don't qualify as "power users" yet have a means to contribute. Minimal moderation would be needed in this section as we would expect that this is where "the real business" gets done, yet what I imagine is that if there is a discussion between two users in the contributor section (that rightly belongs in the contributor section) and we think that other devs might like reading it, we could then ask the new users to start a mailing list thread. This would be a duplication of work BUT it would also encourage and support a new group of contributors.
As of now LibO is WAY under "staffed" (meaning we could probably double our developer numbers and 5x our QA numbers, let alone our UX, website, etc... teams) and still have room to have more people involved. A forum is a perfect way to encourage this.
In terms of moderating these, the one thing that we would do is help users get comfortable with gerrit & the mailing list when submitting patches. We could also have users themselves who have programming experience but aren't developing help new devs out in the forum.
My vote is to maintain the list of sections as is. It's up to our team (moderation and co-coordinators) to make sure that the mailing list and forum work in unison, and I personally don't see this being a problem at all.
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