Decide on community communication channels

[cornelius]

We need to decide which communication channels we want to use in the various parts of the community, especially when it includes people not part of the core team.

Part of that is deciding on if we want to prefer open source software over services which we couldn't run ourselves.

Consequences of the decision such as what needs to be setup need to be documented and follow up actions created.

A starting point could be to keep as much communication as possible on GitHub so that it's in one place and can be managed without moving between channels, and use Slack for chat for the beginning as it's the most advanced tool, it's used by a number of high-profile open source communities such as Kubernetes, and we already use it.

[scravy]

Personally I would be a huge fan of having a dedicated mailing list, one where also people like @gfanti and @amiller would be on.

Edit: Any anyone who subscribes obviously ;-)

[Gnappuraz]

Anything but please no IRC as main channel XD that thing should be dead!

[scravy]

Sometimes, just sometimes, I would prefer IRC over Slack; or any other open protocol over that proprietary-hipster-startup-sometimes-not-even-working-Slack.

Edit: Also I really like email.

[kostyantyn]

Opinion about real-time vs asynchronous conversions https://dave.cheney.net/2017/04/11/why-slack-is-inappropriate-for-open-source-communications

[kostyantyn]

Opinion about real-time vs asynchronous conversion channels https://dave.cheney.net/2017/04/11/why-slack-is-inappropriate-for-open-source-communications

[scravy]

@kostyantyn I agree with that so much. It is okay for internal communications, but that's it. Also the fact that it's proprietary and you have to pay to unlock your history is quite unfortunate for the purpose of open source.

[Gnappuraz]

@kostyantyn totally agree, I would not use Slack if not for internal communication. I don't think we necessarily need a synched communication channel, I think we can simply use some asynch one. It could be a forum like bitcointalk that is very organized and easily accessible by anybody, linkable and persistent (what I don't like of forums is that they give mods and admins full power to censor and ban users). Mailing lists are also good I think, but they require a bit of experience to be used and not mess up, so we could keep them for more technical topics. I don't like IRC simply because you have to rely on bots to have the history and there is no way to keep the conversation organized, if you check the bitcoin's one is all over the place, they discuss a bunch of different stuff, and you have ppl asking for completely different things in the same place... Is a bit of a mess imho.

[scravy]

matrix.org and riot.im?

[Gnappuraz]

matrix.org and riot.im?

Nice but I would stay away from any IM system. At the end is pretty much asynch anyway unless some of us really wants to be interrupted so often, and the fact ppl know they have to wait to get an answer make them think more before writing while with IM this would not be the case.

[scravy]

http://asyncmanifesto.org/

Mailing list, good enough :-P

[kostyantyn]

WDYS about Reddit? Do we actually want to create and manage the subreddit?

[scravy]

I for one am no huge fan of reddit. Never posted there. I would have liked to have clicked THE BUTTON, but I didn't.

[Gnappuraz]

I think reddit is mostly used nowadays for community management not real discussions... also looking at the reddit of other coins is quite a mess... Is more about coin value and shilling/investments than tech discussions...

[kostyantyn]

maybe this is with coins but I see that Redis subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/redis/ is managed by the core team and they have constructive discussions. and it might be interesting to read their reson to move from mailing list to reddit http://antirez.com/news/95

[cornelius]

An interesting data point from Fedora which moved from mailing lists to Discourse and increased participation significantly by that: https://theforeman.org/2018/07/discourse-6-months-on-impact-assesment.html

[kostyantyn]

I see bitcoin has a bot to post their mailing list discussion to Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_devlist/

I think we can have a subreddit /r/unite_tech where we keep technical discussion. And I think the advantage of being on Reddit (than on another forum website) is that we will be close to other possible unit-e subreddits which might be managed by the community

[kostyantyn]

Another option that might be interesting to review is Google Groups https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview

[cornelius]

Another project using Discourse as community forum: https://travis-ci.community/

[cornelius]

And a very interesting talk by the founder of Discourse how to facilitate civilized discussions: https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/civilized-discourse-but-how/

[scravy]

maybe this is with coins but I see that Redis subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/redis/ is managed by the core team and they have constructive discussions. and it might be interesting to read their reson to move from mailing list to reddit http://antirez.com/news/95

But that's the redis team, right? So what they do is dog-fooding their own software, right? It's not like the bitcoin-core team is having their discussions there. In fact bitcoin-core has a mailing list and that is even the place where you propose BIPs in the first place.

[scravy]

• https://bitcointalk.org/ (powered by http://www.simplemachines.org/)
• https://www.phpbb.com/ :D

[thothd]

@cornelius I think it's important to distinguish between chat / IRC and forum / thread based system. I don't see something like Discourse or Slack relevant for us from day one, it'll require a lot of attention, I also know it from people working on Parity, it's usually required when you got a large community you need to support.

Having a forum or thread based communication looks essential from day one. I think the major difference is between using an existing platform (e.g Reddit) vs. hosting. I tend to the hosting our own forum direction, then it's already a more specific question regarding which specific platform to use

[cornelius]

Discourse is a forum and quite some projects have replaced mailing lists by it. So I think this is a good candidate for our forum, thread-based, asynchronous communication. It's open source but there also is a hosted version, so we have the choice of hosting ourselves or using it as a service. What I really like about Discourse is that they have a focus on the quality of discussions and have implemented quite some things to help with that.

[castarco]

I agree with Cornelius on the fact that Discourse is more close to mailing lists & forums than to real-time chats. It has a quite clean interface and usually facilitates participation. More examples of people using Discourse are for example the Rust community ( https://users.rust-lang.org/ ).

Having said that: creating a community is much more than talking about highly technical stuff, sometimes people need some space to discuss about user related problems, and to express their opinion in a less organized fashion. And I'm not sure if the following could apply to us... but this kind of discussions could be useful as well for the engineering crew, so they can obtain more feedback.

I know that the proper channels for feedback are usually the "issues" sections, or bugtrackers, but not everything is so easy to classify.

[scravy]

So these are for the hosted version -> https://payments.discourse.org/pricing ?

[thothd]

Sure, I have nothing for/against Discourse, I personally was invited few times to a private Discourse server and it was mostly group chats or private chats, if we want/can use it for forums it's great.

I don't mind so much about the specific system for me it's first about the purpose (e.g not for chat / messaging). Then maybe we can have overview and compare the different options ? migration is a bit chaotic since so we wanna find something good.

[cornelius]

Another reference for a project using Discourse as forum: https://litecointalk.io/

[thothd]

Looks solid, so let's say we gonna try Discourse?

[scravy]

particl has the following: https://particl.wiki/socialmedia-channels

[cornelius]

particl has the following: https://particl.wiki/socialmedia-channels

It's not mentioned as socialmedia, but Particl also has a Discourse-based forum: https://particl.community/ (see announcement for some context.

For chat they have moved from Telegram to Discord (see announcement while they keep Riot, especially for developer discussions.

[cornelius]

For the start of the testnet we will go without a forum and just use GitHub as communication channel. We'll add the forum later, when there is more interaction with external people and we see what the needs are there.