The original (Confluence-based) ECMWF forums, such as the Copernicus and OpenIFS forums and the Forecast User Forum, have been a useful resource as a first step on the road to building a self-supporting user community. However, as ECMWF has rapidly evolved over recent years, we now need to support the wider range of data and services made available by the organisation in the best way possible. Creating a forum to support 'One ECMWF' is a way to achieve this, providing an effective, valuable and essential resource for all ECMWF users.
Four phases
An in-depth analysis of the original forums identified the changes necessary to meet this requirement. These changes included:
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identifying a more suitable forum platform
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extending the scope of the Forum and merging all existing forums
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re-designing and re-styling the interface
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the addition of new categories and subcategories.
From November 2023, the new Forum went through four different improvement phases. The first phase was focused on three main goals. Firstly, to choose a new, more suitable platform and do an initial test migration of one of the Confluence-based forums. Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/) was chosen as the forum platform, and the Copernicus User Forum content was migrated from Confluence to it, with the help of our contractor. The second goal was to widen the scope from the original target audience by reviewing the structure of the forum to make it more general for all ECMWF users. The third goal was to assess how the new Discourse platform worked both technically and in terms of usability for our users. This also allowed us to learn how to monitor and moderate the user content in this new context.
The new Forum was launched on schedule in February 2024, and it was immediately clear that the migration to Discourse was a major success both in terms of platform choice and user uptake. The 'Announcements' category has been particularly popular as a way for users to be informed of the latest developments (see the image).
Motivated by the very good results of the first phase, the second phase was implemented later in 2024. Crucially, the existing contents of the OpenIFS Forum and the Forecast User Forum were reviewed to identify what content was still relevant, and they were migrated with the support of our contractor. New categories and subcategories were created, with the main additions focused on the Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS), the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), and OpenIFS. These are intended for discussions about ECMWF systems, model settings, and upgrades.
Existing moderators for the Copernicus User Forum content were migrated to the new environment, and new moderators were added to the Forum to cover other areas more focused on other ECMWF products and services. As the scope of the Forum is now significantly wider, the moderation of the user content will be handled by a larger group of people. To support this, a new Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) was created to provide guidance to moderators. As a public-facing tool, the Forum plays an increasingly important role in the area of information exchange with users and management of user expectations.
The third phase included the addition of DestinE-relevant tags and subcategories, and re-styling of the forum theme to comply with the ECMWF official styling. The Forum was also migrated from virtual machines to Kubernetes clusters, to make it easier to manage as an ECMWF application.
The fourth and final phase included the advertising of the outcomes from the previous phases in different channels both internally in ECMWF and externally, such as on the ECMWF LinkedIn channel in May 2025.
The result
The Forum is now accessible at https://forum.ecmwf.int. Here, users can engage in discussions and share information (when logged in using their ECMWF account) and access the latest news about many exciting ECMWF products and services. Looking to the future, we will continuously improve and evolve the Forum to make it an invaluable resource for all our users.