While exploring the OpenProject Community instance, I noticed that there are now many well-structured projects dedicated to specific topics or development streams: Agile, ITSM, AI, Project Portfolio Management, Resource Management, Meetings, integrations, and so on.

However, as far as I can see, only the main OpenProject project has the Forums module enabled, so discussions about all these different topics ultimately take place there.

This surprised me a little from a user's perspective.

When I am looking at, for example, the Stream Agile project, my natural expectation would be to find discussions related to Agile directly within that project. The same would apply to ITSM, AI, PPM, Resource Management, etc.

So my first question is simply:

Is there a historical or functional reason why the forums are centralized in the OpenProject project rather than enabled within the individual stream projects?

I can imagine that having a separate forum in every project might fragment the community too much, create mostly empty forums, or make moderation and discovery more difficult. So perhaps the current structure is very intentional.

But this made me think about a slightly different possibility.

Would it make sense to have something like a shared module across several projects?

For example, the forum itself could remain centralized, while selected projects would still display Forums in their project menu. Following that link could lead to the shared forum, potentially already filtered or contextualized for the project from which the user came.

Conceptually:

Stream Agile → Forums → shared forum, filtered/contextualized on Agile

This would preserve a central discussion space while making the project itself a more natural entry point for users looking for discussions around that topic.

Perhaps there is already a way to achieve this, or perhaps there are architectural reasons why this would not be desirable.

And finally, would this be worth a Feature Request?

If the idea makes sense, do you think it would be appropriate for me to formulate it as a Feature Request / work package?

And if so, in which project or stream would you recommend creating it?

Looking at the current project portfolio, I am not quite sure whether this would belong to the main OpenProject project, Stream workspace foundations, or somewhere else.

I'd rather ask first than create a feature request in the wrong place. 🙂