Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
I’ve seen this in many other communities, companies, online and off. Some way to look up common terms, acronyms, and words that have little to no meaning outside (1) those that have been “around” (2) those that are specifically trained in certain roles or have specific experience (3) those that are new to the community
Such a reference (it should be term-linkable and topic-linkable with hierarchical taxonomic capability) would be able to be used to answer posters in such a way as: “thats a good question, please refer to item/linked/term/topic where there are explanations that might be useful” or similar friendly guidance.
Bit size nuggets of knowledge in a community channel will help to “smooth the grade” for the on-ramp to meaningful contribution and broad, engaged participation. This helps expand the types of folks that are able to quickly share perspective as well. It might even be worthy as a 9th Category for the Scouting Forums list, to start.
Brainstorming names and I realized one area that this type of information commonly occurs is “tribal knowledge” … which has application in other ways and is not exclusive to the problem I’m suggesting we solve here… it is easy to lose sight of information that might not be “commonly known” and having a place to gather that information could prove beneficial in addition to the other problems this potentially solves.
I was thinking hierarchical taxonomic categorization where topics contain terms that can be related and linked… content organization and categorization as models for the language, and group dynamics and experience as context for the need.
Expanding on “group dynamics” to start, the language we use in Scouting can create a barrier. I think this can be more significant in online communities where participation is measured in a sentence or two, or less… a click of a “like” button.
Expanding on “content organization” it could be easily misunderstood based on users of the platform we have here (Discourse.org) that “taxonomy” is just a list of terms like the example. It is deeper, and multi-layered. Contextual. And not always “official” like that reference. A reference that was inclusive of these things would be useful in my humble opinion.
