Pursue SLACK for DESC

[richardxdubois]

Three steps discussed with @connolly and @tony-johnson - 1) contact Frossie re DM's use of 503C to set up free SLACK (RXD - mail sent). 2) contact LSSTC re use of 503C - Andy; 3) look at how to populate a DESC community from our contacts database.

[connolly]

We have the LSSTC approval and the non-profit status for Slack (assuming a team of <500 people). Lets put down the next steps for deploying Slack

• [ ] @tony-johnson Specify on how we will manage the user names (@frossie wanted us to use github usernames) and how will we populate the initial invites (we need to do this for all of the SCs and project in one go)
• [ ] @brianv0 Define the teams we will start with for the initial deployment and the initial set of channels and naming convention for the channels (I think this needs to be done with @frossie)
• [x] @connolly sort out who will be responsible for billing

Feel free to edit and add more. Would be good to get this deployed as quickly as we can

[brianv0]

@connolly Do we still want to see what kind of an arrangement for further discount with Slack through some marketing means? Or should we just focus on moving ahead and getting launched first?

[brianv0]

Also @connolly you are going to want to enable IRC and XMPP gateways (with SSL only)

[drphilmarshall]

I strongly support using the same username in both GitHub and Slack, but isn't this up to the individual user? I mean, don't we all have to (get to!) sign up as individuals? But other than this concern, I think it would help people communicate with each other on GitHub if they recognize the same username that they saw on Slack, and vice versa.

On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 4:33 PM, Brian Van Klaveren < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Also @connolly https://github.com/connolly you are going to want to enable IRC and XMPP gateways (with SSL only)

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[brianv0]

DM people should use their GitHub names unless there's a good reason not to. This is for convenience so you can @brianv0, for example, if a Jenkins build fails.

DESC people may use their GitHub names for convenience, but it's probably less important. It's still a good practice regardless, especially if we continue to primarily use applications that integrate with GitHub, as it provides clarity and continuity. In our new Slack, for example, we will have at least 3 Andys from the get go. Of course, there can only be one @andy, but that @andy might get called mentioned on things he doesn't care about. There may be close to 500 people from the start, so name collisions are probable.

Note that users can change their name at any time, and admins can change them as well.

[connolly]

@brianv0 I think we just want to push on with the roll out. We can think of the marketing aspects after we have things rolling. I dont have an opinion on IRC and XMPP but bet @richardxdubois does!

@drphilmarshall I agree it will be up to the user but we can strongly encourage it (pointing out the connection to github and community.lsst.org) and see what happens.

[richardxdubois]

I have hoped that access via clients like adium would reduce the need for yet another chat client on my desktop. So yes about IRC. I think Tony et al have worked out how that looks.

I'm finding github names are often hard to figure out who the person is - but Brian's argument for connections to builds etc make sense.

[tony-johnson]

We should enable XMPP since it allows access to SLACK from existing chat clients like pidgin, empathy, adium etc. Personally I do not want to use a separate client for each chat application, which is one thing which has inhibited my use of HipChat.

I would like to automatically generate invites (for at least an initial subset) of DESC members this week. If this really needs to be done at the same time as the other SC's and DM it will need considerable coordination. I think when we discussed this in Tucson @frossie had suggested rolling out invites in waves, which sounds more doable.

[tony-johnson]

At Tucson we also agreed to add name-spaces to anything which would otherwise be confusing if it had global scope (e.g. channels and groups), something like DESC::Strong-Lensing for example.

[drphilmarshall]

Here's 2c from me:

I teach pretty much every new user I interact with that their GitHub username should be very close to their real name, so that their projects are easy to find and contribute to - and I encourage this and the placing of their full names on their profiles because this is an increasingly important part of their professional web presence.

I guess another thing we could do is keep re-introducing people when we mention them, and then using peoples real names whenever we can - as in "Phil Marshall (@drphilmarshall) was working on this - what do you think, Phil?" I find myself doing this on GitHub where I know that if they are already participating in an issue discussion they will get an email notification. This discussion is making me wonder whether using the @mention function as a shortcut for someone's name seems like it could be unhelpful - but I can see that it might be too quick and easy to give up...

[drphilmarshall]

Now, with my Collaboration Council hat on: the CC is excited about Slack, as we think it should help us communicate better about all our issues (so to speak).

Questions arising at the last CC meeting (embellished and paraphrased):

1) My understanding is that "LSST" will appear in my Slack app as another "team", that I can switch to and from (I am in a number of Slack teams, like Risa's "gfc@kipac" team, and Michael Schneider's "MagicBeans" team). Then, there will be some DESC channels, and also channels for the project and other science collaborations. Is this correct?

2) Will we run out of channels?

3) I think all team members will then all be able to create channels and control their privacy (right?) - this may need to be done with care, and awareness Perhaps the CT should make a "Getting Started with Slack" confluence page ASAP, and circulate it to the collaboration with the announcement?

4) How will we invite all Members of DESC to a private channel? Or will we need to just make a "public" channel for that kind of discussion?

[brianv0]

1) Yes. DESC channels should be prefixed with a DESC:: or DESC|, for example. DM channels will be prefixed with a DM:: or DM|. Channels that are not prefixed may be subject to garbage collection (deleted or archived, https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201563847-Archiving-a-channel) after a period of inactivity.

2) I don't think so. I've never heard of people running out of channels, and I know having hundreds of channels is a regular occurrence on larger installations. The policy from (1) is meant to keep some sort of housekeeping in order

3) Yes. I don't believe we need to worry too much about policy on creating channels. Again, users should know that channels that aren't prefixed may be subject to garbage collection in the future.

4) We think we can leverage User Groups in slack to help out with this some. I can't seem to manage these right now, so I'm not sure if lsstc.slack.com actually has been upgraded yet or not. I think a team owner has to figure this out. (https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/212906697-User-Groups)

Regarding @richardxdubois and the github id obscurity issue, Slack has a team directory which is useful, and can be enabled on the sidebar: https://lsstc.slack.com/team

...By the way, Slack has a ton of capability and great documentation on the platform, which I've linked to. I'd encourage anyone with questions on it's capabilities or best practices to browse through it!

[connolly]

@brianv0 To move forward I think we need an agreed namespace convention. "::" and "|" dont work as they are special characters and not allowed. The channel needs to be max 21 characters and lowercase (this is quite limiting). Can you touch base with Frossie (on Slack :) ?) and agree on something and agree the initial channels we should set up (e.g. desc-wl, dm-software). I think if DESC and DM are ok with the names we should be in good shape.

@tony-johnson We can't just roll this out for DESC and DM as there will be a lot of pushback from the other SCs. I'll ask Iain for the list of SCs member emails and pass them on so we can send the invites out as a whole.

Lucianne previously agreed to put together a note on expected behavior and best practices for Slack (I just pinged her about it)

We should also decide on permissions for who can create public channels (I think this can be set at the group level). Was this discussed last week? We could give WG convenors the ability or have anyone have the ability to create a public channel.

The account hasnt been upgraded to non-profit status yet (just checked) and I need an account to bill from Pat.

[connolly]

Billing is all set up so we can add names. Iain is sending me the email lists for the SCs

[dkirkby]

The flat channel namespace seems like a potential showstopper since it will lead to a un-manageable sidebar list and either requires cryptic names or a shallow hierarchy. For example, desc-wl-deblending (18 chars) would be recognizable to experts, but does not allow an addition sub-level with -sims, -data, etc.

[brianv0]

So there are two use cases here.

If you don't know which channel to join, you'll probably be browsing for a channel. In that case, you are presented with a description of what a channel's purpose is.

If you see a channel on the left side of your UI, you are already in that channel and you know the name association in any case. (The exception to this right now is that we don't have that many channels and Slack shows you all the channels in that case)

Below is an image of what browsing for a channel looks like.

[connolly]

and the search looks like it is progressive (so "desc" would return all desc channels "desc-wl" the desc WL ones etc. @brianv0 did you manage to get a list of channels from frossie. Does she just want a replication of what is on hipchat (with lsst appended)?

[cwwalter]

Is it obvious the namespaces are really needed?

Let's say I am only part of DESC and not the project. Will I ever even see the rooms I don't have access to?

If I see them and just can't join them it is an issue. But, if they are hidden to me and the system doesn't actually let you make duplicates maybe that is good enough.

Remember at least on the project side there are already some hierarchies:

Bot: Meetings::

could get unwieldy / problematic if the channel length is limited.

[richardxdubois]

Long done!