[Meta] Decide on discussion forum

[juliaferraioli]

Do we stay within our current slack? Set up a new one? Use other platforms entirely?

Other options include:

• discord
• discourse
• matrix
• linen

[DuaneOBrien]

Another option: fossfunders.slack.com, which I registered several years back but has been idle for some time.

[DuaneOBrien]

Some background on this issue:

We had a little discussion on the call today about where to send folks - to the existing private FOSS Funders channel on the TODO Slack, versus another medium.

One benefit of hosting on the TODO Slack is that there are a lot of folks already there who care about this issue.

One downside of hosting on the TODO Slack is that it gives the impression that this is a Linux Foundation initiative, which it isn't.

Since we're opening up the discussion more broadly, I think we should move it off of the TODO Slack. My loose preference is for Slack, but my bias is for a quick consensus over a prolonged discussion of the perfect tool and closed vs open source solutions.

[juliaferraioli]

Absolutely Slack is still an option. My preference is to move off the TODO Slack, but I'm pretty agnostic as to where to land.

[ShaneCurcuru]

Have you considered asking OpenCollective or Sustain OSS folks to join their slack? That's where the other perspective of getting funding from corporations people hang out, and has a lot of different channels/groups already on their Slack.

[chadwhitacre]

My preference is to move off the TODO Slack

Is this still something you want to advocate for @juliaferraioli? If so, can you unpack your reasoning?

One advantage of TODO Group Slack is that a lot of people we might want to invite are already there, so it's easy to bring them into the room. This happened for example with the three people we added last week.

the other perspective

I think it's valuable to have all three spaces:

• for maintainers (producers of Open Source, receiving money)
• for companies (consumers of Open Source, paying money)
• shared (where maintainers and companies can meet in the middle)

[DuaneOBrien]

The downside to staying on the TODO slack is it leaves the impression that it's a TODO effort, which it's not. If we're successful, it's likely to become an issue, as the LF's clear preference would be for this effort to leverage LFX as the platform.

The upside to staying on the TODO slack is most people are already there.

[chadwhitacre]

Rereading this thread I see I'm making you repeat yourself @DuaneOBrien. Sorry about that!

Point taken re: LF.

OpenCollective or Sustain OSS folks to join their slack

I interpreted this as two possibilities but it's one: Sustain uses OC's. If Sustain had their own I think that could make sense but I don't think we should use OC's for the same reason we don't want to use LF's.

[jdorfman]

Discord