Welcome to the openmod discussion forum!

system · 2 January 2017 19:50

The Open Energy Modelling (openmod) Initiative promotes open energy modelling across the world. Energy models are widely used for policy advice and research. They serve to help answer questions on energy policy, decarbonization, and transitions towards renewable energy sources. Currently, most energy models are black boxes – even to fellow researchers. “Open” refers to model source code that can be studied, changed and improved as well as freely available energy system data. We believe that more openness in energy modelling increases transparency and credibility, reduces wasteful double-work and improves overall quality. This allows the community to advance the research frontier and gain the highest benefit from energy modelling for society. We, energy modelers from various institutions, want to promote the idea and practice of open energy modeling among fellow modelers, research institutions, funding bodies, and recipients of our work.

Editing on this platform

This posting makes some comments about editing on this platform.

Orientation

An overview of the discourse software that runs this platform can be found on this blog by one of the originators.

Unlike most discourse forums, this site does not utilize trust levels to slowly integrate new participants and allow them to acquire scope as they contribute. Rather than start at the default of TL0 (trust level zero), new users on this site are assigned TL2 from the outset. To compensate, applicants are instead screened as appropriate (as some will have experienced).

Markdown

The platform uses a flavor of markdown to allow simple typesetting — that flavor is called CommonMark. Things to note:

some help on the CommonMark syntax
single and double linebreaks are significant: to flow your text in a paragraph, make sure no linebreaks are present
wikiposts are postings that can be edited by any registered user
if you edit a wikipost, please leave a commit message if appropriate

Advanced topics

Here are some advanced markup options:

to add a contents listing to the top posting, utilize the following (requires the DiscoTOC component):

<div data-theme-toc="true"> </div>

to add a link to an HTML header, you need to abandon markdown and resort to HTML markup. For example, to link to this H2 section, use the following, while noting the heading-- with two dashes prefix is mandatory:
https://forum.openmod.org/t/welcome-to-the-openmod-discussion-forum/8/3#heading--advanced-topics

<h2 id="heading--advanced-topics">Advanced topics</h2>

to add a status line (officially an insert), add the following, with a rendered example below:

<ins>**Status**: state</ins>

Status: state

Referring to other users

If you wish to refer to another registered user, could you please use their @username handle — which offers the following advantages:

the user will be notified by email by default (although this behavior can be overridden)
other users can click on the handle to reveal some background
if the user asks to be erased, then discourse can automatically replace all mentions with a random string

Editing grace period

During the first 5 minutes after posting, editing will not create a new version in the post history. This is the default value and will probably apply on other discourse platforms too.

Experimentation

You can experiment using a sandboxed version of discourse offered by the development team and reset each day. You will need to sign up first using a valid email address. This discourse instance has no extra components installed (like discoTOC) and lacks the customizations found on this site. Your edits are also public for a while.

https://try.discourse.org

Emojis

Custom emojis include :open_access: and :closed_access: Also sometimes useful is :arrow_heading_down: .

Language

Suit yourself whether you edit in British english, American english, or some other language. If you edit in a non‑english language, could you add the appropriate tag to the topic.