I think it could be useful to organize channels not by topics, but based on whether the content is transient, or of lasting value.
Like, if somebody've slept through the last 15 hours, would it make sense for them to reread the history?
There is no need for discipline in the transient channels, but the timeless channels should stay extremely low noise (it does not matter if the stuff there is important if you can't afford to keep up with it).
general, #strategy brainstorming, or #ops are obviously transient channels.
The suggested new functionality announcements channel #28 is of course timeless.
I have another idea for a timeless channel: strategy summaries. Brainstorm all you want in the transient channels, but it would be nice to see digestible takeaways. Examples that fit there:
"We will keep all the solutions by each solver for each problem in the DB, and pick the best trace in each case. Therefore diversity is more important than robustness. It's ok for the solver to not handle all the cases, or even to produce invalid traces sometimes." If we had something like that it would probably help with https://github.com/Vlad-Shcherbina/icfpc2018-tbd/issues/21#issuecomment-407700305.
"Points for the problem scale as log(R), but the verification time is R**3 or even worse, and we are limited by the verifier. So it's more important to solve small problems well than the large problems at all." (don't know if it's true, just an example; it only belongs here if it was discussed and sounds reasonable)
Things that go into this channel don't have to be unanimously agreed upon, but they should be maybe one level above merely throwing the shit at the wall.
Maybe we could use something in between: a small number of well-defined channels and a guide to them.
I feel like I don't have the culture to use threading functionality in Slack. Do I need to reply in thread or in channel or both? Can I be sure that those who need to see my reply will see it, and not only the current thread participants? Do we have a thread for that already or should I post a new message?
It appears transient/timeless distinction completely dissolves this. It does not matter how threads are used in the transient channels because no discipline is required there, and there will be no threads in the timeless channels because there will be no discussions.
I think it could be useful to organize channels not by topics, but based on whether the content is transient, or of lasting value.
Like, if somebody've slept through the last 15 hours, would it make sense for them to reread the history?
There is no need for discipline in the transient channels, but the timeless channels should stay extremely low noise (it does not matter if the stuff there is important if you can't afford to keep up with it).
general, #strategy brainstorming, or #ops are obviously transient channels.
The suggested new functionality announcements channel #28 is of course timeless.
I have another idea for a timeless channel: strategy summaries. Brainstorm all you want in the transient channels, but it would be nice to see digestible takeaways. Examples that fit there:
Things that go into this channel don't have to be unanimously agreed upon, but they should be maybe one level above merely throwing the shit at the wall.
At one extreme we can have exactly two channels: one transient and one timeless. At the other it's the mess we had, where the channels are not even discoverable (https://github.com/Vlad-Shcherbina/icfpc2018-tbd/issues/30#issuecomment-408299633).
Maybe we could use something in between: a small number of well-defined channels and a guide to them.
I feel like I don't have the culture to use threading functionality in Slack. Do I need to reply in thread or in channel or both? Can I be sure that those who need to see my reply will see it, and not only the current thread participants? Do we have a thread for that already or should I post a new message?
It appears transient/timeless distinction completely dissolves this. It does not matter how threads are used in the transient channels because no discipline is required there, and there will be no threads in the timeless channels because there will be no discussions.