Discourse
Discourse is an open-source, modern community forum platform. Fawkes uses Discourse (or a compatible forum tool) to support the communities of practice (CoPs) that form around platform topics — GitOps, observability, security, and developer experience.
Role in Fawkes
Platform teams use Discourse for:
- Communities of Practice — Each practice area (security, CI/CD, observability) has a dedicated category where members share learnings, ask questions, and link to relevant runbooks.
- Knowledge base — Resolved discussions are tagged and searchable, forming a living FAQ that complements the formal docs.
- Dojo Q&A — Developers working through the dojo learning modules post questions and receive answers from belt-holders.
- RFCs and proposals — Architecture decision records (ADRs) are drafted in Discourse
for community feedback before being committed to
docs/adr/.
Key Features
- Categories and tags — Organise discussions by topic and searchability.
- SSO integration — Single sign-on via the platform identity provider means users log in once across Backstage, Grafana, and Discourse.
- Solved threads — Mark one reply as the accepted answer; builds an automatically curated Q&A archive.
- Webhooks — Post notifications to Mattermost channels when new topics are created in watched categories.
Best Practices
- Post runbook links in the relevant category when you solve an incident.
- Before opening a support ticket, search Discourse — the answer is often already there.
- Dojo belt-holders should actively monitor the dojo category and respond within 48 hours.