People,
I just got the email re AweSIM but of course that is not available in Australia yet. I am new to Purism and this forum but I find I am constantly having to work out if some comment is relevant to me or not because I am in Australia - quite frequently the comment is NOT. Would it be possible to set up new Forum Categories here that are specific to regions? - I am particularly interested in the Australian region of course . .
Thanks,
Phil.
You just ask your question and put Australia in the title. There isn’t much reason to create a new forum category for just Australia.
These links may help you:
https://forums.puri.sm/search?q=australia
That is a clumsy way to allow Australians to interact in the one place - other Discourse sites have regional categories . .
If you put Australia in the title, than any Ozzie who follows this forum will read/respond, so you are reaching the people who you want to reach.
The bigger question is whether it makes sense to organize the Purism forum according to regions, and I don’t think that it does. There have been 10 threads out of a total of 3199 threads with “Australia” in the title, so there isn’t that much need for the new category.
For the majority of topics discussed on this forum, they are not regional in focus. Occasionally there are questions about power plugs, taxes, shipping or cellular networks in a particular region, but most questions are worldwide in nature. For most people reading this forum, they want info on a product category (Librem laptops, Librem 5, Librem Mini). For example, if a question gets asked about the Mini in the “Australia” category, people who are interested in the Mini, are less likely to bother reading the topic, because they will assume that it only deals with Australian issues, so you are probably not going to get as good of responses because you get fewer readers.
Another problem is that you are basically asking Purism to double the number of available categories (there are currently 11), and then everyone will be wondering which category to use when creating a new thread. For example, if you have questions about the Librem 5 and cellular networks in a region. Some people are going to file the question under “Librem 5” and others are going to file under the regional category, and there will be no consistency.
If Discourse used a label system rather than categories, your proposal would make more sense, because people can select both an “Librem 5” and an “Australia” label, but if we have to decide between either filing under a product category or region, product category makes more sense to me.
I like the idea of regional categories, it might get more useful in the future, when Evergreen is released.
This seems like a regional tag would be more appropriate than an entire category: https://blog.discourse.org/2017/10/its-time-we-talked-about-tags/
That’s correct but that’s not what I am thinking of for an Australian category of some sort - I am thinking more of Aussies self-organising / supporting (real-time Jitsi etc) for promotional reasons, bulk-purchasing - anything that is specifically Australian local. I did see one comment about an Australian distributor as well but if that wasn’t viable for some reason, maybe a group of us could set up a DAO or something for distribution?
The Australian version will be called the OzMATE. 
I think that, because a topic can only appear in one category, this proposed use of “category” is not viable. There are too many reasonable and possible ways of categorizing topics and “location” is only one of them - and not the one that Purism has already chosen to use (“product”).
Undoubtedly this will be an ongoing problem in respect of the Librem 5, since so much about mobile services is specific to a region. What carrier works? What modem should I get? What features work? What bands work?
I would say that this information may be better presented in a Wiki.
Good idea. I think if you make a new thread to discuss this, you will find out if there are people willing to join you.
I like the idea of regional tags. Purism would have to enable the option for tags to be used in Discourse.